The Meaning of Duality

 "You really can change the world if you care enough." – Marian Wright Edelman

“Keep your faith in God, but keep your powder dry.” – Oliver Cromwell

"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that." - Martin Luther King, Jr.

“One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.” – Josef Stalin

Within every single one of us there lives a mind, capable of producing thought and as a result, an action. Within every mind there lives the idea of vice and virtue, guiding us through deliberation of our behavior. What distinguishes us as humans from the animal kingdom is the innate capacity for free will and our ability to manipulate it and achieve either great or grotesque things. There is a fine line between great and grotesque and we can view that line as duality – a name given to distinguish good and evil, right and wrong, dark and light.

This concept is not too foreign to us as it is more commonly known to many in the form of Eastern philosophy as Yin Yang. An online dictionary defines this as: “two complementary principles of Chinese philosophy: Yin is negative, dark and feminine. Yang is positive, bright, and masculine. Their interaction is thought to maintain the harmony of the universe and to influence everything within it.” This profound dichotomy says that our well-being, health, future and destiny all rely on a particular balance of these almost completely polar opposites.

Growing up we have learnt through science and Western ideology that there are fixed axioms, or laws that govern and distinguish various phenomena around us – ensuring that there is a permanent belief or response that nearly everything revolves around an “either/or” mentality. 

What is meant by this is that through our Western philosophy and the shift into a more anthropocentric (everything revolves around humans) state of mind, we do not see the balance as being of both parts, but as one part only. With regard to Yin Yang, there are two almost complete opposites – masculine, feminine; positive, negative – yet the balance lies in the two separate parts being as a whole.

In Jay Kumar’s Duality, Wholeness and a New Paradigm of Consciousness and Health, our worldviews are challenged in that he mathematically represents our logic behind the restricted way in which we view duality (where something is understood as “either X or Y”, not “both X and Y”). His idea can be further explained: “…we understand ourselves as disconnected and separate from the greater Whole. If X = Human and Y = the Whole, then our current ideological worldview is Human ≠ The Whole… the premise of this discussion asserts that there now exists a new emerging paradigm of consciousness where Human = Whole.”

What, then, does all of this mean for us?

The dual nature within ourselves should be perceived as limitless in that it functions through the cohesion of both good and bad. Rather than claiming to be either a saint or a sinner, the fact is that we are inherently both the hero and the villain. Without the dark, there cannot be light and without the light, dark cannot exist.