Dualism

WRONG (Majo, Call Me Crazy, 2005)

How do you know when something is going wrong?
How do you know anything?
One can only “know” things that are real.
“Going wrong” is made up.


Dualism refers to breaking life into two’s – good and evil, God and the devil, right and wrong, better and worse, going right and going wrong, good guys and bad guys, you and me, me and God.

Our sensory apparatus is hopelessly, permanently hooked on seeing things as separate. Especially seeing. Sometimes sound can feel like an ocean washing over us. But even there our minds will construct what’s going on as something out there washing over us, here.

There we refer to the real culprit – our minds. Our analytical mind just doesn’t know how to function without dropping things into different buckets, categories.

Even calling the mind the culprit is dualistic. It comes from the belief that some things, e.g. categorizing, are better than other things. We may believe that a unitary view of things is more accurate, but categorizing (“dualizing”) is simply part of the evolution towards seeing the essential oneness of things.

So what exactly is non-dualism? Our language is never going to do a great job of capturing it, because our very language is, in its very structure, dualistic. Subject-verb-object. “I do x to you”.

But let’s hack away at it, knowing that we will inevitably fall short. Non-dualism is recognizing that, under the skin of life, under the appearance of separation, all truly is one. Lots of spiritual, maybe especially New Age folks, like to say that “All is one”, but they don’t really mean it, don’t actually get it.

They may in the next breath, refer to the “Hero’s Journey.” With all due respect to Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell, looking at the world in terms of heroes and non-heroes may be helpful for some people at certain points in their lives – but not for others at others.

First, if each person’s path is totally unique, then there is no basis for comparison. Perhaps everyone is always being heroic in his or her own way. If we are all different, then no one has a roadmap. We are all making it up all the time.

It may also not be true that we, ourselves, are more heroic at some times than others. If we could really walk not just a mile but a lifetime in someone else’s shoes, we would understand that what they are doing right now is exactly the only thing they could possibly do. If we trace back the roots of what we consider our most individual, creative, “heroic” acts, we may find that there are many factors in our past that directly explain our current actions.

There’s lots more to be said about non-dualism. A.H. Almaas wrote a series of four very dense, very brilliant books on the topic – and only scratched the surface. I could write here about non-dualism and depression, and God, and lots of things – and probably will in future posts. I’m likely to start from scratch another time and come at non-dualism from a different angle, with completely different and equally inadequate words.



PREFERENCES (Majo, Call Me Crazy, 2005)

When my preferences no longer matter
When my biases are all exposed
In their wild and glorious inaccuracy
When, beaten down,I lose the will to pick and choose
Ah, then, then I can begin