The mind’s duality is not innocent
Photo: Geoffrey Dunn
Many of us know that one of the mind’s foundational paradigms is duality. This is the way in which the mind separates and categorises Reality into good and evil, light and dark, I and not-I, and other similar polarities. This duality gives rise to thought, word and language.
Language has been the central achievement of human beings and one that we uphold as the development that increasingly differentiated us as the superior life form. We have since “discovered” other animal languages, albeit by looking at them largely with our own definition of language.
By all these measures, the mind’s duality appears to be beneficial to us. It helps us organize Reality, and define who we are in relation to everything else. However I invite you to consider if the separation paradigm of the mind is innocent, especially in the times we live in.
Today we are separated perhaps more than ever before, at the very least in our own lifetimes. We have been splintered into divided tribes on multiple levels. You may think you are signed up to one tribe only to find they have beliefs that do not align with your own. And then you have to find another tribe for that set of beliefs. And another, and another, and so it goes.
The spaces between the divisions are chasms which cannot be crossed. And these chasms resound with the most vitriolic of human sentiments—mockery and hatred. These sentiments of course are not in those to whom they are directed, we hold them in our consciousness.
Interestingly, mockery and hatred do not have a place in the Rasa architecture of this dance tradition. They are entirely stories of the mental consciousness in the throes of duality. The invitation here is to pay attention to what happens in the body when we express these sentiments. Is the body feeling nauseous with aversion (jugupsa)? Is it angry (krodha)? Or is it intoxicated with the vitriol (mada)?
Non duality is an embodied sensation and cannot be “created” in the mental consciousness. Ancient embodied traditions held the space of the experience of non-duality which provided a context for the mind’s operation through duality. The greatest gift of a practice of non-duality is that it offers spaces of embodied inquiry into our own responses to Reality.
Non-duality implies that sentiments are not good or evil, but they have consequences for our own consciousness and the consciousness of the world. They are not benign—they are in the same instant directed equally at ourselves as much as those we seek to malign. And the more we divide outside the more we splinter within. The more we analyse, the more we fragment. The invitation is not to move beyond the need to use the lens of duality for approaching everything in Reality.
One of the enduring symbols of non-duality is the iconic dance Karana of Siva where the raised foot stands for the space beyond the masculine (mental consciousness) and feminine (Nature/Body consciousness) through dance. This signals the unstable nature of non-duality. It cannot be fixed, labeled or narrated. It is always a transient instant and has to be committed to in each moment with vitality and energy.
Non duality is living with presence and not through somebody else’s stories of separation.