5 Grappling with duality

Everything about Jesus Christ is all about the fight for good. This includes the story of his life, the whole big reason for his incarnation—which we’ll get to—and his long-remembered teachings. But if we’re going to talk about the good, we need to be willing to look at the bad. And suddenly we’re immersed in one of the biggest and perhaps the most badass battles of them all: duality.

Duality is where the battle between opposites is waged. And this battle creates tremendous confusion in our lives. Let’s take a minute and track through how duality shows up in a person’s life.

Here in duality-land, white comes with black, good comes with bad, and yes, pleasure comes with pain. But of course any spiritual guru will tell you that’s not the whole game: it’s all about love. That would be true, on the level of unity. As we’ll discuss a little later, we have all come from the oneness, we are part of the oneness, and we are heading back to the oneness. But for now, we are stuck here in the twoness.

Conditions here on Earth are such that, no matter how spiritually evolved we may be, we are going to get to deal with death. And in fact, dealing with death is the way through the dogfight of duality.

We have a clue we are trapped in a dualistic illusion—and as we’ll see, all duality is just that, an illusion—when we find ourselves stuck in a struggle from which there is seemingly no way out. Right there, in that moment, we need to know just one thing: we are not in truth.

But at this point, the majority of our being seems to only know one thing: there are no good options. Here we are faced with some buried fixed idea about life. This is an image that until now we were not even aware existed. We are so convinced of our wrong conclusions about life—which were formed very early in our childhood—that we don’t think to question them. And they are undoubtedly hard to dig up on our own.

In this level of duality, which is the plane of the ego, we need to reach out for help. If we ask, help will be given. Working with someone, such as a therapist, spiritual healer or friend, we can begin to pry open our tightly held beliefs, searching for evidence of something that—just consider the possibility—may not be true.

Listen and learn more.

Read Holy Moly, Chapter 5: Grappling With Duality