Thursday, January 9, 2014

Understanding and Being With Duality and the Ego



Conscience is the dog that can't bite, but never stops barking.
Proverb

The ego is the symbolic, linguistic nature of the world, the personal narrative we all experience internally about the external world. It is a useful tool that has gone too far and has overtaken the minds of many; an infestation of cultural and personal memes, a hypnosis. Just as lines of longitude and latitude are not physically there but rather mentally "put there" for navigation and help, so is the ego. It keeps coming back, spontaneously messing with you, playing with you, is you, but not all of you. Learn to love the ego. The more you fight and resist it, the more it persists. Pay attention to it, watch it dance, but don't join it. Let it go by. It's gone, it's back, it's gone, it's back. Here, there, here, there, here, there; into infinity. However, here and there are the same thing; two "sides" creating the whole one process. Duality, two seemingly separate things, is one process because one cannot be without the other to compare it to. Imagine a world with no white and only blackness. In this world of blackness you could not see anything but the blackness and because of this it would not be "black" but rather it would just be with no label. Add white into the picture and now black becomes something tangible because you have an opposite to compare it to. One cannot live without the other. If there was only good and no bad in the world, you wouldn't even know what good was seeing as you would have nothing to compare it to, therefore, there would be no good. You need bad in order to have good and black in order to have white and vise-versa.  On another level, and yet on the same level, you can "transcend" the ego and see everything from the same place but as all of it. You will see that you are the entire process, not just a speck of it.


All starts from nothing and all ends in nothing, all is therefore nothing. All dances in-between nothingness as what you are seeing right now at this very moment.

If you transcend the singular, separate, cut-off individual, you will see the whole in the individual. The internal, and the external, the bad and the good, up and down, black and white are all examples of duality. You know intuitively that they are different. Black is obviously not white, good is obviously not bad. It looks different, is different, but both are contained within The Reality (I use "the" here to emphasize the singular reality we all experience at different "times" and different angles). Everything is contained within this one connected 'thing' that we choose to call a variety of different names: The Universe, Tao, God, and any other holistic attempts at a description. This is from our separated, individually labeled dissections of the universe. I want to stress that there is nothing wrong with this, in fact, there is nothing 'wrong' with anything. Something being labeled as wrong is simply a label. From a holistic, all-seeing perspective, all is one and therefore nothing is right or wrong everything just is. Dissecting the world into parts is incredibly useful and allows us to map out our environment and share it with others. Language is beautiful. It allows us to communicate with others and gives me the ability to write these blogs. However, with our internal dialogues, it has the ability to take over you, hypnotize you, into a world of pure symbols, illusions.


I invite you to step away from your screen for a second. Breathe in fully, exhale fully, wait a second, and repeat throughout. Look around the room. Pick one thing in the room, a plant, a chair, a table, whatever. Once chosen, look at it and forget for a second it has a mental label attached to it. See it as it is and nothing more. Next, try and do this for everything in the room. Instead of seeing the room as individual parts creating and assembling the whole, see it as one connected process that grows from within itself. See it as what it is. Notice the space in-between each object and how it holds it all together, seemingly separate.


There is no outside to come in from. All is contained within. The universe is not assembled through separate parts, it grew and is still growing and you are all of it, right now. The big bang is still happening. You are not a result of the big bang, you are the big bang, coming on as whoever you are, right now. You are not just what you define yourself. The universe is playing a game with you; you are playing a game with you, but there is no "you".