Duality Vs Advaita (Part 1: The Introduction)
"Wa men kulli shayen khalqna zawgyne la'alakum tadhkaroon."
In english: "And all things have We created in pairs in order that you may reflect on it."
Reflection and duality have seemingly been such a large part of my life lately, so when I read these words I was stopped cold. I stopped and tried to understand the implications or true meaning behind these words. I racked my brain long and hard without any real answer coming to mind. Maybe I've been away from school to long. Anyways, it was after maybe an hour of reading and reflecting that my mind turned to a friends discussion of "The Flip Flop Extreme Theory."
To quickly summarize what I remember about the theory, it revolves around the idea that you can only have one perspective at a time and therefore you cannot fully put yourself or your mind into more than one feeling at a given moment. Thus, our lives are filled by constantly jumping from one extreme to another, or flip flopping back and forth (correct me if I'm getting this wrong). Which is basically the theory of advaita, or "non-duality."
The idea behind duality is that everything is polaric. Everything is interrelated and connected, because without one there cannot be the other. Like hate and love for example, if you did not know or experience love, it would be impossible to understand or experience hate. Like anything that can be experienced or thought, they just cannot exist independently.
So what does all this mean? If thoughts and feelings cannot exist independently, why can you only focus on one at a time? Are you really just focusing on one at a time or are you focusing on the two opposites? Have I truly gone insane? These are the questions that I've started to ask myself and I think these are the questions that I'll end up killing myself over. I've started writing about my thoughts in greater detail and will post them at a later date. Same blog time... Same blog channel.
In english: "And all things have We created in pairs in order that you may reflect on it."
Reflection and duality have seemingly been such a large part of my life lately, so when I read these words I was stopped cold. I stopped and tried to understand the implications or true meaning behind these words. I racked my brain long and hard without any real answer coming to mind. Maybe I've been away from school to long. Anyways, it was after maybe an hour of reading and reflecting that my mind turned to a friends discussion of "The Flip Flop Extreme Theory."
To quickly summarize what I remember about the theory, it revolves around the idea that you can only have one perspective at a time and therefore you cannot fully put yourself or your mind into more than one feeling at a given moment. Thus, our lives are filled by constantly jumping from one extreme to another, or flip flopping back and forth (correct me if I'm getting this wrong). Which is basically the theory of advaita, or "non-duality."
The idea behind duality is that everything is polaric. Everything is interrelated and connected, because without one there cannot be the other. Like hate and love for example, if you did not know or experience love, it would be impossible to understand or experience hate. Like anything that can be experienced or thought, they just cannot exist independently.
So what does all this mean? If thoughts and feelings cannot exist independently, why can you only focus on one at a time? Are you really just focusing on one at a time or are you focusing on the two opposites? Have I truly gone insane? These are the questions that I've started to ask myself and I think these are the questions that I'll end up killing myself over. I've started writing about my thoughts in greater detail and will post them at a later date. Same blog time... Same blog channel.
posted by Geoff at 9:35 PM
2 Comments:
The thing about things like this, ideas and ponderings like this, is that there are no definitive answers. Sometimes you just have to accept that there are things in this world that are beyond the fathom of the human brain. It's part of the enchantment of the world and of life as we know it. Just enjoy exercising your brain, thinking itself in circles, and appreciate the frustration of not being able to gasp it, and respect the feeling of non-knowing.
I guess this is a long winded and delayed way of me saying that I'm glad you've been thinking of these things. It's sort of what saves me from the boredom that plagues so many. Thinking of things that can never be thought of enough, enough being a sort of final understanding and conquering of the concept.
So few of these are full sentences.
Oh, what I should have put in the first response, but forgot to...which would have been the real response to the post...
Um, these things may at first seem contradictory and incompatable to the well trained and brainwashed western-thinking mind. But I would say that they are somehow contradictory yet compatable...in an ungraspable sort of way. That is, I have no wordly way to describe how they work together, but they just do.
One thing I can say is that you summarized the flip flop extreme theory quite well. But perhaps one thing to keep in mind is that while fully thinking and focusing on one thing at a time, and therefore being more than one thing at a time, may be impossible, according to ideas previously discussed, but does not mean that more than one thing can exist at a given time.
So...you could very well have multiple things existing on the same plane, or intersection, of time and space, while having your brain only fully comprehend one at a time, yet not negating the existence of the other things.
Red wine makes for long-winded sentences.
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