Acknowledging the interconnectedness of opposing elements is the key to feeling whole in a world of duality. Consider hell and heaven, sadness and happiness, and disappointment and contentment. These opposing elements are not independent but interdependent entities, making you feel complete in their interplay.
If you feel sad and perceive your singular feeling as ‘it is what it is,’ you recognise it is twofold. Sadness is not alone but interacts with gladness. Joining their interplay leads to other duality pairs, such as tears and laughter, weakness and wellness. This interaction of opposing elements is the duality flow. Since it makes it impossible to uphold a singular image of yourself, eventually, nobody appears to hide non-duality.
From Duality Hack #8.1 in Alexius’ Duality Hacks.
Suppose you disassociate yourself from the negativity in your psychological sphere by projecting it onto others. In that case, you also disconnect yourself from your positivity because, without negativity, it cannot be defined. The same applies if you conceal your negative thoughts and feelings from your awareness by projecting them onto vulnerable parts of your body. In short, when you hide your negativity from your consciousness, the experience of yourself as positive is fake. See Duality Hack #1.10 on quickly regaining the feelings projected onto others
Any experience perceived as positive is bound to be complemented by one deemed negative because any experience is built upon pairs of opposing elements in a world of duality. A foreground, for example, is paired with a background so they can define each other – like negative thinking confirms positivity, hate verifies love, sunset defines sunrise and so on.
To formulate genuine positivity in yourself, you must restore the negativity you have cut off from your awareness. Therefore, when you perceive something as nasty in the world, you acknowledge it is your own negativity you see because we get what we have – like the sun’s colouration of our skin is determined by our pigmentation. However, that does not mean there is a beggar in your psychological sphere if you see someone begging. But it means you have negativity in your psychological sphere if you insist on begging is negative. Read about that in Duality Hack #7.3.
In that case, a quick look in your psychological sphere is enough to reveal your negativity – like a glance from above is sufficient to ratify there is water in a well. When aware of your negativity, you can perceive it as ‘it is what it is.’ Thus recognising it is complemented by positivity. Like two sides of a coin, they define each other so you can experience them genuinely. Furthermore, the interaction of opposites is the basis of duality, so you feel complete experiencing them. Hence, you can have your belief in duality completely undone.
Acknowledging hell does not make it go away. Instead, it exposes that heaven complements it, and they constantly interact to define each other.
There is neither something real nor unreal in non-duality because that requires more than One. Consequently, having genuine or fake feelings is equally unreal. However, appearing as someone in a world of duality is more enjoyable when you act by its playbook, where all feelings are set up in pairs. For example, love is paired with hate so they can define each other, and you, therefore, have a genuine love or hate experience. But if you exclude hate only to feel love, there is no hatred to define love. Hence, love becomes theoretical, thus annoying. In contrast, genuine feelings are vitalising. [Photo: Alexius]
Descending to hell, you return to heaven
The above was the short version. Here comes the longer one. When you begin recognising your negativity, its interplay with positivity in the psychological zone may not get your attention immediately. Therefore, identifying your negativity may feel like hell because forgotten and unpleasant emotions keep coming out of the dark.
It may start slowly with a familiar sense of depression that you a long time ago hid from your awareness by imagining it behind the pain in a vulnerable part of the body. See Duality Hack #7.5. But since depression often is repressed anger, sooner or later, it flares out in brutal hellfire. Maybe it feels like acid-like splashes in the body part where you initially imagined hiding your rage. Or perhaps it feels like a ruthless and evil force torturing you.
When something is interpreted solely as evil, and you perceive this singularity as ‘it is what it is,’ you feel evil’s buddy, goodness. However, it is not the opposing elements that make you feel complete but their constant interaction because it is the basis for a world of duality. In contrast, standing explicitly by one of the opposing elements makes you feel lost
Not avoiding but acknowledging your feeling of hell, you can perceive your single-minded impression 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. The interplay is like ocean waves: sometimes big and fast, and at other times, hardly any motion.
Amazed by the polarity of heaven’s pleasure and hell’s displeasure, you realise there is no heaven without hell in a world of duality – like there is no breathing in without breathing out. You cannot have one without the other.
Joining the interaction of hell and heaven makes you feel complete. Hence, you explore other duality pairs until the feeling of completeness becomes so intense that you forget to define yourself, thus not hiding the formlessness of non-duality. However, the process leading up to that may seem more comfortable if the problematic areas in the body where you once projected hate, for example, to uphold a singular feeling of love, are fixed.
You free the body from your projections by acknowledging that all emotions are in your psychological sphere. This sphere is so airy that any emotion looked at quickly reveals it is not alone but in an interdependent relationship with its counterpart – like two halves of a whole.
Living per duality is child’s play
When twofoldness is accepted, hate is as enjoyable as love because they contain each other. So, since you do not need to get rid of hatred by projecting it onto the body, it does not have to defend itself against something non-physical. Consequently, the body is not in attack mode, so the brain, which has the blueprint of its composition, can restore the body through its anatomy and connection with nature.
In other words, the brain, not you, knows how to handle the body. Still, you may help it by calling a healthcare professional. However, your help is not needed to connect the body 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 mental ideas of perfection.
That does not mean you must abandon your ideas but that you perceive them as ‘it is what it is’ to see your reasoning is dual. Thus, in the duality flow, your next step comes effortlessly – like breathing out following breathing in. However, be aware that the duality flow is not physical, so it is in the psychological sphere that your next step is effortless.
You get a preview of non-duality by taking a break from duality. It feels like walking on clouds. However, since it calls for more than one to feel something, the preview of non-duality is a simulation. [Photo: Alexius]
Taking a break from duality and returning to undo it
If your descent into hell* seems so distressing that you overlook its counterpart, heaven, a break from duality may be fitting. However, the break does not come from pacifying yourself via meditation but by not withholding your anxiety. Then, the intensity of it ignites a take-off into the empty breath (see Duality Hack #9.1-10).
You need less than a minute with the empty breath to have the slate wiped clean, thus re-establishing the basic self. See Duality Hack #9.10. Since it perceives its response to an experience as ‘it is what it is,’ its reaction is not sensed as singular but twofold. Therefore, as you probably have guessed, That does not mean non-duality is a fusion of heaven and hell or a 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 as it is formless, thus endless.
However, the topic of this Duality Hack (#8) is not non-duality but living per duality. You need to do that if you want to undo duality – like you need to play a game to finish it. So, we continue talking about duality in the following hack.
*) You may find the book Descent to the Goddess interesting regarding the descent into hell, although it is not in line with Alexius’ Duality Hacks and supposedly only for women.
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