– updated August, 2026
The Sun shines on Earth but remains separate from it. In the same way, psychological aspects may highlight the body, yet they don’t merge with the physical realm.
From Duality Hack #7.5 from the free eBook Alexius’ Duality Hacks.
Before and after Freud – now with Alexius’ Duality Hacks
Alexius’ Duality Hacks aren’t the only ones that examine how we use the body to hide psychological problems from our awareness. In Bioenergetics (see Wikipedia), the theory holds that the body becomes ill when we put psychological issues into it. Before Freud, though, the prevailing belief was the opposite: that all sickness, whether psychological or physical, was rooted in the body.
But Alexius’ Duality Hacks rejects both conventional perspectives. Psychological and physical problems are not intertwined, even though the brain processes both. The brain treats them as distinct: the body requires food, not love, to survive, while psychologically, we crave love, not food, to thrive.
This Duality Hack (#7) explains why the belief in a physical-psychological connection is mistaken and offers guidance to undo it, enabling the body to address its material needs and the psyche to resolve immaterial concerns independently.
If your phone breaks and that makes you sad, fixing it probably removes the sadness from your awareness. However, it remains subconscious and resurfaces when something else psychologically bothers you. But if you remember that your phone triggered both sadness and happiness, you enter a constant interaction of contrasting emotions, the duality flow. In this flow, your phone or anything else doesn’t have to be perfect for you to feel okay. [Photo: Alexius]
Looking at the fusion of non-materialand material issues, where it’s conceived
Modern psychologists propose that we dissociate unpleasant feelings by ascribing them to bodily symptoms. But, since emotions are non-physical, they cannot interact with flesh and bone. So, when someone imagines anger combining with their stomach, that fusion occurs only psychologically, not physically. However, as this self-deception provides temporary psychological comfort, we often continue to associate emotions with physical sensations to escape discomfort.
While fantasising about dissociating anger may temporarily hide it from conscious awareness, the emotion remains active in the subconscious. So, when the suppressed energy comes up, we feel queasy in the spot where we pictured the anger, which makes us anxious. Yet this fear originates not from the body itself but from the psychological act of hiding anger, which creates a persistent sense of threat from what is concealed within the psychological sphere.
Thankfully, when we acknowledge our fear in the psychological realm, we can perceive it as ‘it is what it is’. This reveals that our fear is not a standalone emotion but is interconnected with calmness. Thus, as fear contains calmness, we don’t need to escape fear to feel at ease. On the contrary, we need our fear to define calmness, enabling us to feel it genuinely.
You can’t combine a circle and a square. Likewise, the psychological and physical realms remain entirely distinct. [Photo: Alexius]
Appendix
In this Duality Hack (#7), we have explored a common way to remove unpleasant emotions, such as anger, fear, or sadness, from our awareness by imagining we dump them into our bodies. We have also examined projecting enjoyable emotions, like joy, love, or peace, onto the body to make them seem more substantial and lasting. In both cases, you free the body from this imagined fusion of the intangible with the tangible by looking at it where you pictured this connection, namely, in the psychological realm. It’s so airy that whatever you look at dissolves.
However, as non-duality is endless, ultimately, there’s nothing to heal other than the belief in a world of duality. So, why bother spending time undoing the belief that you can integrate the body with something immaterial? Firstly, time is an illusion. Secondly, in a world of duality, materiality defines immateriality and vice versa. Hence, you don’t combine them if you want to undo your belief in duality, as that assumes you live by duality.
Still, at times, Alexius chooses to view things from the special self’s perspective, which claims to know how to fix the body. However, because Alexius’ choice is founded on a sense of inadequacy, it deepens that feeling. Consequently, frustration builds until Alexius returns to the basic self’s default perception, ‘it is what it is’. He then feels content, regardless of his physical issues.
For more about correcting the supposed body-mind integration, see Duality Hack #8.2, #8.3, #8.9, and #9.4.
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