Thinking About Duality

Can we all agree that life at least appears dualistic?. There are some posters here and people I know of who believe the body is the mind, and without the body, there is no mind. This idea confuses me. Granted, because I am aware of myself, I will acknolwledge that it is impossible for any thinking, self aware being, not to be afraid of death. It's impossible. Its hardwired into our condition. Caring about the world and feeling good implies a time when there will be nothing. The nothing, compared to the something of life, gives the comparison a singular terror that strikes a self-contemplating mind with forcefulness. You can be gripped by it, torn by it, and then you resolve to push it away from you.

Or, we can insert something 'in front' of it. This is where dissociative processes kick in. Early on, most of us (if not all of us) have experienced a time if primordial fearfulness, triggered by the recognition that death means the end. I think I was 5 when I thought about this and I got an intense anxiety attack. In fact, it was precisely the intensity of the arousal that seared the memory, which allows me, 25 years later, to recollect it. Emotional events, correspond with neuromolecular events; this means that emotional events are constrained by the physical properties of the chemical processes. Through this configuration, mental events that persist or enter consciousness, do so because of the way subcortically generated modulating neurotransmitters leave strong 'imprints' on the cell architecture of the neurons affected.

Dissociation is a psychologically evolved mechanism designed - and consistent with - the self-protective behaviors of all life-forms. It is more subtle because our minds are more aware. We note the world in it's particular properties and qualia, and by doing so, evolve a consciousness that relates with the world in a rather "univocal" way. We know at a new moment, and the properties of resonance - of the past on the present - seeps into our consciousness without our awareness. In this way, we are constantly being "played" by the emotional dynamics of past and context, context 'highlighting' some features of the environment, eliciting unconscious 'self-organization' processes that revolve, planet like, along the evolutionary prerogative of "adapt to survive".

But to survive to what? Our body's have preferences for a state of stability or equilibrium. For humans, this state, on a social level, is a feeling of happiness, comfort, safety, pride, humor. We strive for the various 'good feelings' that accompany our actions. It's theses 'good feelings" which form the backbone of the evolutionary logic of a human nervous system - and the mental functioning of the experiencing agent.

This discovery, which, if one thinks about it, puts us right in-line with the ethnological principles of all other animal behaviors, considers the mind as a process with consistent "attractors" and "repellors"; these initial conditions and input, so many of which are body based, function simultaneously and with one another, from moment to moment, adjusting itself while in interaction; focusing and attending, feeling and enacting. How much are we even aware of? Do we realize that we are unaware of a vast swathe of activity "dissociated" from the beliefs we tell ourselves? If we act for reasons that have a meaningful basis in dynamical processes that persist in the right brain, that lie outside awareness as we articulate reality for ourselves, often delusionally, in the left brain, what does this mean about us, or about the human self? Or the mind?

Still, I am utterly convinced in the meaningfulness of the world we live in; and meaningfulness, as a mental construct, is a product of awareness. And no matter how hard I try, I cannot for the life of me think of mind as a 'substance". Evolution, movement, time. Mind shares more in common with this "forward" causal-arrow motion than with anything physical; yet people often speak of it as a substance, and so apply a certain metaphor, of H20 becoming water, to demonstrate how one thing at the molecular level can become something else at the macro level. Yet, they are both "things". Things which somehow become hardy, physical, real-looking. All of the universe is like this, yet a force pushes it into disequilibrium, and this force, according to Ilya Prigogine, is time.

Time, in this sense reminds me of mind. We still speak of 4 dimensions, of the 3 spatial directions and the concept of time. Time is change. Time is evolution. Yet, is it not phenomenal that the universe began as dot and is now spread out infinitely in 3 physical dimensions, pushed outwards by the explosion of time - of change - disequilibrium?

What is awareness? This question boggles me as it seems completely different from physicality. In the universes evolution, from the get-go till today, a process of diffusion has led to levels of organizations, in galaxys, solar systems, planets, that has provides a chemical context for life. Life is cognition. Life is a 'knowing' - knowing what to do to stay alive: to stay ATTUNED to the environment around you. Cells, Multicellular organisms, organisms which cognitively 'connect', such as ants and bees; and who express behaviors of an emotional knowing, such as in most mammals. And then this feeling component took on the quality of a knowingness; a knowing of a knowing. A sensing of 'qualia', a speaking to self, while speaking to other selves just like you. The complexity of this dynamic behooves a type of knowing that we call 'love', as an antidote to the knowing we call 'suffering'.

How can anyone possibly deem this remarkable progression, meaningless?

There is no duality in god and god is everywhere, there is no place where god is not.

a reply to: FormOfTheLord

Does that include hell?

originally posted by: WakeUpBeer
a reply to: FormOfTheLord

Does that include hell?

But of course!

a reply to: Astrocyte

Can we all agree that life at least appears dualistic?.

No, because that is the core issue: life does not even appear dualistic. The language, on the other hand, sure does.

originally posted by: Astrocyte
Can we all agree that life at least appears dualistic?.

The illusion is that there is a you and that there is also life - which makes two. Really there is just life happening - which is not two.

Time, in this sense reminds me of mind.

The individual can only appear to be real if time is believed. Where is time now? Life can appear as a 'story' about an individual - but it is not an individual - it is just life simply happening.

Life is not made of two things. In fact there are no things - there is only what is happening. Life is not happening to you or to anyone - life is just happening. Non dual.

originally posted by: Astrocyte
Can we all agree that life at least appears dualistic?. There are some posters here and people I know of who believe the body is the mind, and without the body, there is no mind. This idea confuses me. Granted, because I am aware of myself, I will acknolwledge that it is impossible for any thinking, self aware being, not to be afraid of death. It's impossible. Its hardwired into our condition. Caring about the world and feeling good implies a time when there will be nothing. The nothing, compared to the something of life, gives the comparison a singular terror that strikes a self-contemplating mind with forcefulness. You can be gripped by it, torn by it, and then you resolve to push it away from you.

Life and death are not opposites - they co exist. You are non existence itself but you have not yet realized.
This reality consists of being and non being. To be or not to be??

What can die? Only that which appears can appear to 'die' (cease to exist).

Think about it when you are dreaming your making everything but your still you right? Same when we are awake, its just persistent.

According to Robert Bruce, author of the book 'Astral Dynamics' duality exists and can be experienced.

When a person goes "out of body", if they look at their physical body or get too close to it, it can result if feelings of duality because it's possible that the conscious mind can also be aware of the unconscious mind near by causing the person to perceive both awarnesses at once.

If consciousness continues on after the death of the physical body, it would seem to indicate duality in that we can exist in two states at once. Physically and I guess spiritually for lack of a better word.

a reply to: FormOfTheLord
two things I am most sure of
1) there is a god
2) I am not he
Dualism simplified.

originally posted by: Theophorus
a reply to: FormOfTheLord
two things I am most sure of
1) there is a god
2) I am not he
Dualism simplified.

Believe whatever you want, doesnt change the absolute truth in god.

a reply to: FormOfTheLord
In one of your replies you had mentioned that God is everywhere. Are you referring to everywhere as being in our time space continuum? If so, is it not true that the term "everywhere" or "everything" only refers to the physical? Is God a physical being? what absolute truth are you speaking ?

The soul never dies.
Thinking about duality is dualistic in that though is a dualistic process.
That is why Zen stresses no thought. Not because the absence of thought is non being but because no thought is non dualistic. Non dualism is wholeness and ecstasy.
a reply to: Astrocyte

You are God, He is you.
God is God through You.
Or to paraphrase, God R Us
a reply to: Theophorus

originally posted by: Theophorus
a reply to: FormOfTheLord
In one of your replies you had mentioned that God is everywhere. Are you referring to everywhere as being in our time space continuum? If so, is it not true that the term "everywhere" or "everything" only refers to the physical? Is God a physical being? what absolute truth are you speaking ?

In time out of time there is no time in god, there is no duality, all is one. This universe or another all is one, physical and beyond physical.

a reply to: FormOfTheLord
So what you are saying is that there is no degree of separation between physical and non physical ? How is it that you have come to this conclusion?

a reply to: starswift
Its easy to except concepts without thinking to much.

originally posted by: starswift
You are God, He is you.
God is God through You.
Or to paraphrase, God R Us
a reply to: Theophorus

I am not you. My thoughts are not your thoughts. I did not create myself. This alone constitutes dualism.

originally posted by: Theophorus
a reply to: FormOfTheLord
So what you are saying is that there is no degree of separation between physical and non physical ? How is it that you have come to this conclusion?

What I am saying is god is everything physical or not. Evidence you can see for yourself when you dream.

originally posted by: FormOfTheLord

originally posted by: Theophorus
a reply to: FormOfTheLord
So what you are saying is that there is no degree of separation between physical and non physical ? How is it that you have come to this conclusion?

What I am saying is god is everything physical or not. Evidence you can see for yourself when you dream.

your saying that God is everything physical or not. You still have not explained how I am everything that God is. The absolute truth is that I am NOT God and god is not me. I cannot create something from nothing. again, how is it that you have come to the conclusion that God and I are one in the same?