Duality
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David Gregory
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Its the moment you think you can't that you realize you can.

Celine Dion

Duality is the two sidedness of the world. The fact that everything has an opposite, or a polar complement.

There are many examples of duality.
bulletGeneral examples: feminine/masculine, mother/father, passivity/activity, dark/light, body/mind, intuition/logic, night/day, soft/hard, internal/external, wet/dry, follower/leader, receptive/creative, and nature/technology.
bulletExamples from the psyche: potential/ego, and subconscious/conscious mind.
bulletExamples from the natural world: the north and south poles of a magnet, the positive and negative charge of an electrical current, the wave motion of light, and the alternation of winter and summer.

Everything has a complement.

These complements are easy to recognize in the contrariness of light and dark, or male and female. The Chinese language acknowledges this inseparable reciprocity in the word yinyang.

Opposites are not really opposites.

They are two sides of the same thing. Health and sickness are two sides of a physiological condition. In another example, life and death are viewed as two alternating aspects of our eternal existence. We can picture this complementary relationship in various ways:

bulletWe can view the complementary relationship as a cycle on a sine wave. For a while, we are on the positive side of the cycle, and later we are on the negative side of the cycle.
bulletWe can view the complementary relationships in their mutual dependence. Yin and yang cannot exist without the other. For people who desire wholeness, this means that we cannot have good without evil, nor life without death, nor growth without decay. We stop trying to annihilate a polarity's unpleasant half.
bulletWe can view the complementary relationship in the familiar symbol of the yinyang. This symbol contains a black tadpole and a white tadpole, each incurring into the other's half of the circle. As a further incursion into the other's territory, the black side contains a white dot, and the white side contains a black dot. This signifies the idea that nothing is entirely yin or yang. Everything contains elements of both, and these polarities are complements rather than true opposites. They are relative to one another.

This duality occurs because our true self wants to study its own nature. Our true self is composed of spirit, just a brick is composed of clay. Our true self is studying spirit. Spirit is a homogeneous substance, thus, it cannot be studied in its totality. Instead, our true self uses various functions, that are analogous to our physical senses to perceive spirit's individual aspects such as its designs. When our true self looks at spirit through these senses, it perceives designs as they would appear in various material dimensions mental, emotional, and physical. In these dimensions, a design expresses itself in a duality simply because of the nature of these dimensions:

bulletA design itself contains dual aspects. When a design manifests, both aspects manifest.
bulletSomething exists in the material world only in contrast to that which is different from it.
bulletThe material world is always in a state of balance. It requires the balancing effect of opposites but this balance is not static. It is maintained throughout the continually changing phenomena. The changes are powered by the energy that is released by the splitting of the one, spirit, into the two, dualities, as in the splitting of an atom in nuclear fission.

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Last modified: April 13, 2008