1.3 – The purpose of duality and how it affects knowledge
33. The human perception of life is dualistic. We separate good and evil, male and female, youth and maturity, black and white, color and absence of color, sound and silence, life and death, fullness and emptiness, poverty and wealth, illness and health, among others. Educational systems reinforce this dualistic perception, not to a fault. For example, separating sound and silence prevents confusion. Separating childhood and adulthood helps us manage our expectations, understanding that babies don’t immediately speak or graduate to earn a living.
34. So what would be the purpose of non-duality in existence? How and why does it benefit us? As discussed earlier, duality is how our senses translate our physical experience and surroundings. Duality helps us organize physical knowledge, respond to immediate physical situations, and understand our surroundings.
35. In other words, duality allows us to navigate, to move through the physical world safely. Imagine you’re jogging in a park and you encounter large stones or trees much heavier than you. Duality acts as your guide, helping you maneuver around these obstacles to avoid injury or harm while you run. Without this ability to distinguish between yourself and external objects, you might collide, run into these obstacles, unaware of their solidity or immovability. In essence, duality provides us with crucial sensory information about our surroundings, ensuring our physical safety.
36. Up to a certain limit, duality safeguards our physical being. That limit is death, which is inevitable.
37. Indeed, when it comes to deeper or more subtle aspects of reality that transcend physical senses, duality proves inadequate. These questions revolve around fundamental aspects of existence: identity, the purpose of life, overcoming personal obstacles, and grappling with existential fears.
38. Here are some examples that will resonate with all, questions that us, poets, artists, and philosophers contemplate in our lives and creative practices without always reaching a definitive answer:
Who am I?
What am I supposed to do?
What is my purpose in life?
What is the purpose of existence?
How can I get over a painful experience in life?
Why do I fear death?
How can I live a peaceful or joyful life?
What is happiness?
Is there a life after death?
How not to fear death?
What is consciousness?
What is love?
Does God exist?
39. Trying to answer these questions through a dualistic lens is bound to be ineffective and cause great distress on individuals. As it has been established in paragraphs 33-35, duality is designed to address physical problems, problems that our five senses can figure out, not metaphysical ones, that go beyond, or transcend the senses.
40. The natural conflict and opposition found within duality will confuse our understanding and hinder clear answers to these subtle and vital existential questions.
41. Modern Western philosophy, rooted in dualism, exemplifies this fact. It faces challenges in making headway (progress) in providing satisfying, universal, and authoritative answers to these questions.
42. As a result, modern philosophy struggles not only to spark renewed interest among the general public but also among poets and artists, who often have a closer connection to the public than academic philosophers. We will explain this further in the next chapter.
43. So, when addressed with a dualistic mindset, subtle existential inquiry often leads to paradoxes that the intellect (the repository of all knowledge gathered through the senses) cannot solve. This irresolvable internal contradiction or logical failure causes perpetual doubt, ineffective thinking, and is called an aporia.
44. For instance, the question of God’s existence falls into this category, as God transcends physical perception and is often experienced through intuition or faith, which operates beyond the limitations of the senses. Since atheism is dualistic in essence and relies solely on the inability to prove the existence of God by the senses, atheists often draw the conclusion that God does not exist. This is not a criticism of atheism, rather an explanation of its mechanism.
45. When confronted with an aporia, the intellect tends to disregard the unsolvable issue. However, this doesn’t resolve the problem; instead, it lingers within the intellect, persisting as ignorance, doubt or failure. The intellect is essentially a problem-solving tool, and when it is unable to function effectively, it becomes weakened. A weakened intellect is susceptible to fragmented knowledge and erroneous reasoning. It tends to be involved in, or, to see relative knowledge only, which leads to gradual ignorance.
46. In the general context of human lives, aporias cause immense existential distress. For knowledge dispensers such as poets, artists, or philosophers, these irresolvable paradoxes endanger their intelligence, jeopardize their success, expose them to increasing failure, and pose a threat to the integrity of Culture. Given these challenges, cultivating a non-dualistic mindset becomes particularly valuable.
47. Having established the definition, mechanics, and effects of duality within this sub-chapter, it is evident that:
- Duality involves two entities.
- Duality implies perceiving life through the lens of distinctiveness, separation.
- Duality implies polarization, that is, a conflicting, hostile relationship between these entities, leading to irresolvable paradoxes known as aporias.
- Aporias fragmentize knowledge, weaken intelligence, and predispose individuals to ignorance, which is particularly problematic for knowledge dispensers such as poets, artists, and philosophers, threatening the integrity of culture.
- Ignorance exposes knowledge dispensers to failure, as their role is to safeguard cultural integrity.
With this understanding of duality, its purpose, mechanisms, and its effects on knowledge, let’s end Chapter 1 now, and shift our focus to the definition, nature, and historical significance (meaning) of non-duality across geographies, canons, and time periods.