Updated June 15, 2023
A world of duality can be compared to what comes out of the box in the Augmented Hand Series. When you stick your hand into it, an app changes the hand on the screen, and the brain fools you into feeling it happens to you.
DUALITY IS A FANTASY
Even though a fairy tale has many elements that symbolise something from the physical world, it does not contain anything material. Everything is a fantasy, where the characters are bound to the writer’s script, which they can never leave because it is not real.
A world of duality can be compared to a fairy tale. It is not real and will never be, whether you believe in living in the now, coming from the heart or whatnot. The Augmented Hand Series Flong by Golan Levin and Collaborators illustrates this through interactive art.
In the Augmented Hand Series, you can watch your hand take on a life of its own. Here your fingers grow to varying lengths.
When you put your hand in a small box – the first animation – you see the hand moving on a screen beyond your control. Instead, it is controlled by a preprogrammed app to change the length of your fingers.
The small box and the screen on top create a disconnect between what the eye sees, the body feels and the brain processes. Some even look into the box to check if what they see on the screen happens to their hand because, even though the hand on the screen is not part of them, it feels as if it is.
These movements are not possible. Yet you feel it is happening to your hand – like you feel duality is happening, although it is impossible because non-duality is formless, thus endless, so there is nothing that requires more than one.
Likewise, in a world of duality, nothing happens in it. But it feels so because, metaphorically, you have put non-duality in a small box, where an app called the brain twists it into a world of duality. However, since it is an illusion, it is only the belief that it is real you need to undo, for example, by interpreting every experience of duality as a symbol of non-duality. That cancels out differences, thus separation, wherefore there is no duality to distract you from non-duality.
THERE IS NO SELF
The belief in being an individual in charge of life can be compared to a machine that thinks it has a self, deciding what to do. However, a machine has no ‘I’, self, or soul. It is all mechanics, and even though the device may have been built with AI (artificial intelligence), all the thought combinations it seems to make are preprogrammed associations. Nobody has made them and sees what the machine concludes from them.
If you are visual-minded, you may get an Aha! Moment seeing the below screen dumps from an article in Wired. They illustrate how a machine with AI ‘sees’ the world. It simply registers data or frequencies per its program. The captions are not from that article but are written by Alexius.
The machine has been programmed to perceive this point of frequency as cute, so it searches its database for an image to illustrate it.
Then the machine translates another point of frequency as eyes and concludes it sees the cute image it found in its database.
Based on past decisions, the machine reckons the cute image is a dog.
But it also seems to see a female. Thus it has to search its database to know if it is the female or the dog that is cute so it can fabricate the appropriate feeling.
NOTES:
- The animations are grabbed from the article Watch an Experiment That Turns People’s Hands Into Creepy Visuals in Wired. The image is taken from a website by Golan Levin – the artist who made the ‘Augmented Hand Series’ in collaboration with two others.
- This article is part of Duality Hack #3 Seeing duality as a symbol of non-duality.
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