Duality as the Dance of ONE

Perhaps it is our perception of duality that has us seeing things as separate… but our experience of the dualistic nature is one of Oneness… so to see things as dualistic we can get a sense of what it is like to be One with everything by consciously experiencing the separate nature of the parts. So if it weren’t for contrast and comparisons, opposites and juxtapositions our cognition of one thing for the other couldn’t exist; and if we weren’t able to grow our ability to cognize the world around us then how would be capable of evolving at all. So to me, tonight, it is feeling like duality plays the role of helping us bring everything together… the separate form teaches us about the whole as the whole breaks down to show us the parts and how they work so we can build them back together with a greater intelligence and function than before… acknowledging the potential in the parts to grow as they get put back together, in the same way the fibres of the muscle knit back stronger after being broken down through exertion.

Our challenge as a civilization is that the collective has forgotten that we aren’t in fact separate… that by introspection and self inquiry, through the inner universe we potentially come back to Oneness of the whole. We created duality so we could dance as many, love, sense and feel through all levels from personal to Universal. The intricate web of duality weaving its way back to the whole, a cog in a the wheel of Samsara and Nirvana, love and fear, arising, passing, learning and remembering, renewing and improving.

So my intellectual mind is wondering about duality and the experience of oneness and how they are connected… and how that might correlate to the pre personal thru the trans personal process as we embark upon and continue along the path of meditation… how sit by sit, retreat by retreat, we break the conditioned mind down, sift through its parts, and restructure in a more spacious, stable and balanced, or less volatile, way…. Bit by bit… retreat by retreat… sit by sit… gradually becoming more and more aware that it really isn’t personal at all.

The heart space, post retreat, is openness and quietness, it’s soft and empty. There is no land upon which to walk, not heights to fly, no rivers to cross… it just is. But personally it might be perceived as strangely quiet and deeply new and raw. Here there is no opinion, no judgement and no fear… on the outset, from the personal perspective, looking back in, there doesn’t even feel to be love. But as I sit a little deeper and open a little more I sense and feel a love here that is deeper and more open and more enveloping than any love I’ve ever before experienced – it’s so intense and huge in capacity that the physical heart feels as if it could burst. Here there is no fear… just wide awake, vast, open emptiness… and at the same time it is deeply and completely, over-flowingly full.

But the conditioned mind, both collectively and personally, has piled over top of this spaciousness that has never ever entered the stream of time, this placeless place that never comes and goes and is always here and available, layer upon layer of indoctrinated programming and self destructive conditioned patterns that are constrictive in nature… as if the goal were in fact self-imposed destruction of the spirit… and not the ego… so that we could never experience this, or know this, at all. The pre-retreat, pre-sitting mind could only become more contracted… could only become more shackled and contained within all those rules and regulations, beliefs and rigidity… perceiving success as being able to consume more as opposed to being free from needing to consume at all.

When did it happen that the parasitic nature of the ego took us over and went on a rampage of limits, rules, regulations, principles, beliefs and rigidity with such blind focus and uneducated determination?!? A completely unconscious drive toward bondage and restriction, turmoil and drama?! Why would we do this?!

Who made up all these limits, rules, regulations, principles and beliefs? And then how did they become so rigidly and unquestionably enforced? When did the majority stop asking questions? Oh yeah, sometime around the time that the consequences for stepping out started to cost lives and the powerful took rule and we had to really look within to discern what was real. And as we grow and develop, what is real tends to change and evolve too… a continually shifting marker for growth and development.... something that shows our stage of consciousness by what we put our energy, awareness and attention to.

Yes, ego is a beautiful and delicious thing, it just needs a little training so that to which it puts its energy, awareness and attention is that which carries the higher good of all… and once it can experience duality as Oneness, the dance of receptivity and creation can take on a more conscious marker so that our collective perception of what’s real and what’s not can shift again too.

If we could clear away the layers of unenlightened conditioning to permanently uncover, and reside within, the vast, open, expansiveness within each of us, then the authentic self could express this cognition through the vessel of ego, but not from it. In this way ego can give consciousness its arms and legs and let it express and create a new world fuelled by love and peace, creativity and receptivity... A world in which we could experience duality as the Dance of ONE. Yes, I’m putting my next sit in for that… and the next sit… and the next.

Am I living in a fantasy land?? And if I am, is there anyone else here too?!

Until next time

Sat nam