"Duality" usually refers to having a contrast between two concepts, an opposite: dark and light, positive and negative, man and woman, death and rebirth, conscious and unconscious, stillness and movement, good and evil, peace and war, love and hate, up and down, mind and body, etc. On the physical level, it is easy to make this comparison because we can see the obvious.
In life, when we mention 'duality' we only focus on the obvious extreme sides of the comparison, the contrast, but what if instead of focusing only on these two sides, we take into account the in-between? The bridge that is connecting these two concepts?
The grey part, the link between these two:
Instead of two, it is actually three sides to look at:
- You know the moment that it is dark enough to know it is dark but lighted enough to know you can still see in this condition, like walking in the deep dark forest and the only source of light you have is the reflection from the moon. Not dark, not light, the in-between state.
- Characters that are morally grey, not purely evil, and not exactly on the good side either. They go beyond the evil vs. good traits and usually follow their own sense of justice and rules. When they do good, is it good? When they do evil things for the greater good, is it evil? Not picking on any sides, but in between.
- People who are not fully a man or a woman because they were created to have both female/male genitals or even born with none.
- How about being in a semi-conscious state, when you are not fully awake from sleep but experiencing a vivid dream-like phase, or during a meditation when you are fully focused that you feel like you merge with your surroundings and become one.
- People in a comatose state, when they seem unconscious to us, but they are able to feel and hear everything that is happening around them but not able to respond. Stuck in a semi-conscious state.
- Or like on a light switch, you turn it on and the light turns on and when you switch it off it turns off. But if you control the switch to be in the middle, when the light starts blinking on-off-on-off, that state, it is the bridge that connects both conditions.
What if when we talk about 'duality' we put the bridge that connects these two conditions into account, so instead of focusing only on these 2, it is actually in 3 states. Why the bridge is important? This is to let us know the importance of visualizing it as concepts that are connected to each other to reach its balanced state. We need to see it as a whole, instead of separated into two extreme sides.
It is about accepting that in order to understand darkness, we need to know the light, in order to know joy, we need to accept pain because they are connected with each other.
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But it isn't a completely new idea lah, I've just started to make sense of this concept for the past several years. For instance, when I was much younger when people asked me what I wanted, I would answer that I wanted 'happiness', so I aimed for that. But the older I get, I learned that in order to earn happiness, I need to embrace the sadness in my life. Being in a constant state of euphoria isn't sustainable, it is not even normal. I don't have to be constantly happy to live a good life, nor should I be unhappy all the time, but I would rather learn to be content with the current state I am in.
When people ask me, I want to be able to say that I am 'content', I'm not happy or sad, I'm just ok, I guess.
But I am not in that state yet, I'm still learning to think and feel, to accept and forgive, to let go and perhaps move on. Hermann Hesse likes to write his fiction about the concept of duality, but as I said, there is more to see other than these 2 extreme sides, there is the in-between and I think it is important to take that perspective into account because sometimes, there are hidden parts where most people don't usually see.
I know we only see the obvious, but what about the subtle things, the mostly hidden, the usually forgotten? As David Bohm said in Whole and the Implicate Order on the concept of the quantum realm: underlying physical appearances, the "explicate order", there is a deeper, hidden "implicate order".
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