– updated August, 2026

To fully undo the belief in duality, we must engage with it as it is. Only by acknowledging duality and living with it can we hack it. 

From Duality Hack #8.4 in the free eBook Alexius’ Duality Hacks.

When Alexius was six years old, lying on the floor as his father kicked him, he sensed that the world is a stage. It’s a charade that makes us appear as separate entities in a world with more than one. Instinctively, Alexius mimicked fear, shivering all over to seem frightened by someone else. His fearful performance appeared to satisfy his father, who then ceased his assault.

This led Alexius to conclude that making the body tremble to appear scared was the way to stop being maltreated, thus gaining an illusion of control despite being beaten.

So, since provoking a muscle spasm in the body prevented him from feeling helpless, it became Alexius’ way of dealing with danger until he recognised the duality flow: the interaction of two contrasting elements. However, this hack is not about Alexius’ way to the duality flow but yours. So, we’ll explore that in the following. 

The loneliness of singularity versus the togetherness of twofoldness

As every experience in a world of duality is composed of contrasting impressions, insisting on a distinct feeling, such as love, means you miss its counterpart. That’s why you feel disconnected when you hold onto an idea of pure love. 

Fortunately, your mistake is easily corrected. First, you perceive your singular impression of love as ‘It is what it is’. Then, in a state of expectation calling for nothing specific, your distinct impression of love gently turns inside out, exposing its counterpart: hatred. Shortly after, hatred gently turns inside out, revealing that it contains love.

Just as breathing in and out is a continuous cycle, so is the interaction between love and hate. Like breathing in and out, love and hate aren’t experienced simultaneously. Yet when you experience love, you know it paves the way for hatred, and vice versa – just as breathing in confirms breathing out, and vice versa.

Thus, since hate defines love, which in turn determines hate, there’s no genuine love without hatred, and vice versa. Consequently, if you feel one of them, you have both. However, you have none if you suppress hate to hold onto a singular version of love. In that case, you feel disconnected until you remember that connectedness comes from the dynamic collaboration of opposites.

It’s not the events themselves, but rather 
your reaction to them, that you perceive as ‘It is what it is’

Perceiving your response to an experience as ‘It is what it is’ aligns you with duality, giving you an immediate feeling of closeness. However, if you confuse your response with the event itself, you end up feeling alienated because you treat the meaning you assign to your response as if it were the event.

For instance, a friend’s behaviour triggers emotional pain from the past in you. Instead of acknowledging what’s going on within, you mentally disassociate from the hurt by equating it with your friend’s attitude. In other words, you mistake your past emotional pain for your friend’s behaviour, leaving you feeling alienated from your friend and from your own feelings.

Consider another scenario: in a work environment, a project fails, so you say, ‘It is what it is’ to accept the outcome and move on. But if your purpose in doing so is to hide your sense of defeat, you’re denying yourself the closeness that comes from the interaction between defeat and victory. Instead, you’re left with the loneliness of moving on in the face of defeat. In other words, you don’t get the togetherness of twofoldness but the seclusion of singularity when you use the perception ‘It is what it is’ to hide your reaction to something.

Or let us say that when you look at a photo of your hometown, a wave of sentimentality suddenly overwhelms you. This intense emotion clashes with the carefully built image of yourself as cool. So you look at the photo and say, ‘It is what it is’, to reinforce your self-image and detach from sentimentality, as if the emotion belongs to the photo, not to you. In other words, you replace the sentimentality the image evokes with the image itself, using the phrase ‘It is what it is’ to maintain a facade of detachment from your past and preserve your cool image.

On the other hand, if you don’t try to use the photo of your hometown to escape your sentimental reaction to the past, but instead perceive that reaction as ‘It is what it is’, your response is revealed as twofold. Sentimentality gently opens, revealing toughness within. In a literal sense, sentimentality and toughness interact like breathing in and out, showing their emotional relationship. Therefore, you neither feel sentimental nor tough, but rather the vivid energy of their interaction, leaving you feeling revitalised.

In short, when you confuse the meaning of an event with the meaning assigned to your response, you treat your reaction as an objective statement about what the event is. Therefore, even though you say, ‘It is what it is’, you claim ‘I know what it is’. Hence, you don’t feel revitalised by the interaction of opposites. Instead, you feel tired from suppressing your feelings about something to be in the know. Ergo, since it’s never an event that impacts us but our reaction to it, it’s always our response to an event that we perceive as ‘It is what it is’.

Unfortunately, you may be so used to hiding your initial response that you’re unaware of the meaning you assigned to it. Fortunately, when you become aware of your response, ever so slightly, and perceive the definitive meaning you assigned to it as ‘It is what it is’, it opens up. Then its counterpart unfolds from within, as already described, and you feel complete in the interaction of opposites.

Every reaction is twofold in a world of duality

When you view your response to something as twofold, your reaction doesn’t appear exclusively right or wrong. Hence, it neither brings pleasure nor worry, but a fulfilment that doesn’t depend on something particular.

This doesn’t mean you can’t respond with sadness if somebody rejects you. But since you perceive sadness as ‘It is what it is’, you see it as interacting with happiness. So, no specific feeling traps you.

In other words, when your single-minded reaction to something is perceived as ‘It is what it is’, your response isn’t limited to a specific emotion, such as rage. Instead, you go back and forth between rage and peace so that these contrasting elements outline each other, and you experience them to the fullest.

Delighting in this lively interplay, you explore new pairs of opposites. Their dynamic dance brings such euphoria that you forget the opposites and just are in the dynamic flow they generate, taking you on a path with no distance to what you never left: that which is One. Thus, the journey to oneness, whether it lasts a split-second or years, becomes insignificant in the joyous flow of duality.