Updated May 8, 2023
When feeling sad is perceived as ‘it is what it is,’ it is revealed to be paired with gladness. This revelation sets off the experience of other duality pairs, such as weakness and wellness, disappointment and contentment and tears and laughter. Going with the interaction of the opposing elements in a duality pair, you enter the duality flow. Thus you eventually feel so blown out that there is no more to ask for. Consequently, the need for duality fades out. Photo © Alexius Jørgensen.
Suppose you do not acknowledge the negativity in your psychological sphere but project it onto others. In that case, you also disconnect yourself from your positivity because your negativity is not there to define it. The same applies if you hide your negative thoughts and feelings from your awareness by projecting them onto vulnerable parts of your body. In short, when you do not ratify your negativity, the experience of being positive is fake. Read here about how you quickly bring back what you have projected onto others.
To formulate genuine positivity in yourself, you must restore the negativity you have cut off from your awareness. So when you see something bad in the world, you acknowledge it is your own negativity you experience because what you receive is what you have – like the sun’s colouration of your skin is determined by your pigmentation. However, that does not mean a beggar is in your psychological sphere if you see someone begging on the street. But you have negativity in your psychological zone if you judge what you see negatively. Read more about the psychological zone here.
In that case, like a quick look from above is sufficient to ratify if there is water in a well, a glance in your psychological sphere is enough to feel your negative response to the beggar, so your reaction can be perceived as ‘it is what it is.’ That reveals there is positivity inside negativity. Like two sides of a coin, they define each other. Hence you cannot feel positivity without negativity, and vice versa. Read more about that here. Since the experience of this duality pair, or any other, makes you feel complete, the belief in duality can be undone completely.
In Duality Hack #6 Happiness is to be in touch with the brain, you can read about how the perception ‘it is what it is‘ reveals that your singular opinion of something is twofold, wherefore, you get the togetherness of duality instead of the loneliness of singularity.
The acknowledgement of hell does not make it go away but exposes heaven inside it, and that they interact to define each other.
Any experience perceived as positive is bound to be complemented by another deemed negative because everything comes in pairs of opposing elements in a world of duality. A foreground, for example, is paired with a background so they can define each other, negative thinking confirms positivity, hate verifies love, sadness substantiates gladness, and so on. Photo © Alexius Jørgensen.
FALLING INTO HELL, YOU SEE HEAVEN
That was the short version. The longer one is that when you begin recognising your negativity, its interplay with positivity in the psychological zone may not get your attention immediately. Instead, seeing your negativity probably feels like going to hell because you are overwhelmed by forgotten and unpleasant emotions coming out of the dark.
Perhaps this starts slowly with a familiar sense of depression that you a long time ago hid from your awareness by imagining dumping it behind the pain in a vulnerable part of the body. See more about that in Duality Hack #7 Physical & non-physical issues do not mix.
But since depression often is repressed anger, sooner or later, it flares out in brutal hellfire. Maybe it is like acid-like splashes coming out of the body part where you initially imagined hiding your anger. Or perhaps it feels like a ruthless and evil force tortures you.
When something in your psychological zone, interpreted specifically as evil, is perceived as ‘it is what it is,‘ you feel evil contains goodness. Likewise, there is success in failure and an angel in a monster. However, none of these opposing elements are important in themselves. It is their constant interaction that makes you feel at home, whereas standing explicitly by one of them you feel lost.
In a world of duality, there is nothing better than the duality flow. But most want to be in control and establish that via single-minded postulates, so they avoid twofoldness. Although that gives them a sense of superiority, the overall feeling is despair because you never seem to get it right. That is, until you stop upholding your singular opinions as facts but go with the duality flow. By doing that, any point of view is exposed twofold. Thus you feel nonsectarian, which is necessary to feel completed by the constant interaction of opposites in a world of duality. Photo © Alexius Jørgensen.
Not avoiding but acknowledging that exposing your negativity feels like hell, your single-minded response can be perceived as ‘it is what it is. That reveals hell is twofold. It is side by side with heaven, and they constantly interact, not balanced and harmoniously but adventurously. You rapidly go up and down between heaven’s pleasure and hell’s displeasure. It is like ocean waves: sometimes they are big and fast, and at other times, they are small and slow or hardly there. Amazed by the polarity, you realise there is no heaven without hell in a world of duality – just like there is no breathing in without breathing out. You cannot have one without the other.
Since duality is about twofoldness, and you believe in a world of duality, joining the interaction of hell and heaven makes you feel complete. And since this automatically leads to the experience of other duality pairs, the feeling of completeness eventually becomes so intense that you forget to define yourself. Consequently, you do not appear to hide non-duality. However, the process leading up to this may seem more comfortable if the problematic area in the body, where you once attempted to conceal singular feelings separated from their complementary parts, is fixed.
If you acknowledge every emotion that pops up in your psychological zone, there are no psychological unpleasantness to project onto the body. Consequently, there is nothing mysterious to fear in the body.
In a world of duality, everything comes in pairs. So if you do not try to split them to hold onto a singular perspective of love, for example, you are aligned with duality. That does not mean things work better but do not bother you because you feel complete in the duality flow. Photo © Alexius Jørgensen.
LIVING PER DUALITY IS EFFORTLESS
When dualism is accepted, you enjoy the constant interaction of love and hate. Therefore, since you do not hide hatred in the body, you have no need to imagine special tensions to block the communication between the body and the brain. Hence the brain, which has the blueprint of the body’s composition, can restore the body through its anatomy with the help of nature. In other words, the brain, not you, knows how to handle the body. Still, you may help call a healthcare professional if needed. But the brain does not need your help connecting with nature. It is already hooked up to the cosmos. That is why you do not fall off the planet and feel connected with everything when you do not try to integrate the body with your ideas of perfection.
That does not mean you must abandon your ideas but that you perceive your opinions as ‘it is what it is.’ That reveals your reasoning is not singular but dual. Therefore, since you are in a world of duality, you feel aligned with it. Being that, you do not wonder about the future because you are in the duality flow. Read more about that here. Hence your next step comes effortlessly – like breathing out follows breathing in. However, the duality flow is not physical, thus not something in the body but in the psychological sphere.
You get a preview of non-duality by taking a break from duality. It feels like walking on clouds, even though you may be walking on a busy street. However, it calls for more than one to feel something, so the preview of non-duality is a simulation. Photo © Alexius Jørgensen.
TAKING A BREAK FROM DUALITY
If your descent into hell* seems so distressing that you overlook its counterpart, heaven, a break from duality may be the way to go. That does not happen by pacifying yourself via meditation, praying or soothing music but by not withholding your anxiety, so its full speed ignites a take-off into the empty breath (read more about that in Duality hack #9 In the bliss of nothing with the empty breath).
The empty breath immediately brings you into a state of not-knowing. Here experiences go on as usual. But since nobody responds to them, there are no reactions to establish them as different. Therefore, although you are in the brain’s game, you are not of it, so after 20 minutes, 45 at most, the brain feels so abandoned that it falls into a coma. Hence, you should not remain in a state of not knowing for too long unless you want to undo the belief in duality permanently. Read more about that here.
Fortunately, not much time is needed in a state of not-knowing to have the slate wiped clean, so you return to a world of duality as the basic self ((read more about that here). Since it perceives its response to an experience as ‘it is what it is,’ the reaction is not sensed as singular but twofold. Hence, as you probably already know, descending to hell is complemented by ascending to heaven.
That does not mean non-duality is a fusion of heaven and hell or the union of all contrasts. On the contrary, non-duality is neither something nor nothing because it takes more than one to be anything. Yet it is everything because non-duality is formless, thus endless.
However, the topic of Duality Hack #8 The duality flow goes to non-duality is not non-duality but living per duality. You need to be fully anchored in the belief that you are someone in a world of duality to undo that belief – just like you need to play a game to finish it. Hence we continue in the context of duality in the following article, ‘What if…?’ versus ‘it is what it is’.
*) You may find the book Descent to the Goddess interesting regarding falling into hell, even though it is not in line with Alexius’ Enlightened Non-Teachings and is supposedly only for women.
NOTE: This article is part of Duality Hack #8 The duality flow goes to non-duality.
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