The Concept of Duality and the Fullness of Life
“When you make the two one, and when you make the inner as the outer and the outer as the inner, and the above as the below, and when you make the male and female into a single one — then shall you enter the Kingdom.” Jesus in the Gospel of St. Thomas
“The human mind rarely sees beyond these opposites to the Greater Unity that necessitates them. But the mind can awaken to Greater Unity, and in this lies the purpose of Creation and of humankind.” Reb Yerachmiel ben Yisrael
“The creating intelligence must become what it creates if it is to fully express its own non-duality.” Laurence Freeman in Jesus, the Teacher Within
Over and over again we hear or read about the term duality in certain spiritual literature. Intellectually, we understand what the word means, but we may not fully internalize its meaning. The unabridged edition of the Random House Dictionary of the English Language states that duality (as a state of being dual) means having a two-fold, or double, character or nature. Note that in this definition, the “character or nature” of something is single, one thing, while dual describes this oneness as being two-fold. In other words, two sides of the same coin. Using this metaphor, Life, wholeness, is the coin, while all the aspects of duality that we associate with mundane life—right/wrong; heaven/earth; perfect/imperfect; good/ bad; question/answer, me/you; birth/death—the two sides.
Neither side of the coin of Life makes up the whole coin. Yet what do you get when you acknowledge and combine the two sides? You get Divine paradox (and meaning in life) because the sum is greater than its parts.
Combine right and wrong and you find Compassion.
Add love and hate and you come to Forgiveness.
Combine good and bad and you arrive at Non-judgement.
Combine male and female and you achieve Balance.
Give your will to Divine Will and you birth Creative Expression.
Combine hope and despair and you discover Trust.
Bring Heaven to Earth and you find Peace.
The nature of the Divine is couched in this paradox and told in the language of metaphor and myth. This is why we can become befuddled in our attempt to understand everything with logic and the intellect. But with this nature, the Divine is not captured within one definitive belief system, but provides for many paths. We honor All There Is by choosing a path and leading our lives accordingly. We can choose to see only one side of the coin at any given moment, our emotions flipping from one side to the other, or we can begin to see the coin as a whole, in toto, and reap the benefits of Divine paradox. The choice for Life is ours and ours alone. To see the coin of Life as a whole changes our perception, but doesn’t mean we are blind to the perception of duality around us. We acknowledge the emotions of happy and sad, the judgements of good and bad, but we no longer align or identify ourselves with either. We align and identify ourselves with Self (the inner Christ, Buddha, Goddess, Shakti, Light, etc.) which is Divinely inspired and full of paradox. In this way we come into the fullness of Life. What I am suggesting is that everything is God—a part of God, in God, and participates as God.* Even so, God is more than the sum of It’s parts—Divine paradox again. The ultimate duality is God/Self; transform consciousness and this duality becomes a unified whole—you are not separate from All That Is. When we pray, we pray to that part of ourselves of which we are not yet conscious. The magnitude of this is something to contemplate.
Our usual concept of life includes duality (struggle), but we can choose to see it more clearly as Life (Being) which is one, infinite, vibrant, steady stream of learning. We make the choice to evolve in consciousness each moment in thought, word and deed. This process of awakening to the fullness of Life leads to Bliss. When the process culminates you continue learning as consciousness continues to expand, but you no longer learn through struggle. We may achieve Bliss before we shed the body or after, but in either case Being continues. It does not die. Our purpose is to become whole, to re-member Spirit in this, our sacred and symbolic life.
Awakening to the fullness of our Divinity begins while we are in our bodies. I’m not suggesting the process happens with speed and ease, although eventually it does become easier. To look within at our own foibles and pitfalls and move out of the mainstream of thought is an act of courage. Changing habits, perceptions and being patient, accepting, loving and kind to oneself and compassionate with others, can take time. And yet this evolution of consciousness is our heritage. It is a process as real as the physical evolution of our bodies and brains. Side by side, the physical and unseen have shared a process of evolutionary learning—expanding in conscious inner wisdom and expanding in physical adaptation based on that consciousness. There is a genetics of consciousness just as real as our physical genetics, and this radically effects our awakening process – how we experience Spirit is within the context of our individual nature (a highly sensitive one in my case). Nevertheless, the goal is the same—to come into the fullness of Life and allow Bliss to bubble up from within as we continue to expand into an infinity of clarity and wisdom.
* “…God is a creative force, a motivating power, an over-all intelligence, and ever-present, all pervading spirit—which binds everything in the universe together and gives life to everything…I could not be where God is not. You are within God. God is within you.” — The Peace Pilgrim
© 2001 * Barbara Atkinson
