Somewhere Along the Spectrum: Transcending Duality

Call it what you will, there have been many names for it throughout the millennia. In the beginning, or perhaps more accurately, a beginning, seeing as we live in a vast, infinite, multidimensional universe, there was the big bang, that point of singularity, unity, and the great creator did issue out the great primordial om, speaking into existence all that, 'I am." As Spiritual Leader Echart Tolle noted in this regard, "You are not in the universe, you are the universe, an intrinsic part of it. Ultimately, you are not a person, but a focal point where the universe is becoming conscious of itself. What an amazing miracle...You are here to enable the divine purpose of the universe to unfold. That is how important you are!" And perhaps the greatest exemplification of this is the way that as human beings, we all have the desire to grow, expand, and create, which is the very personification of the true essence of the universe.

That being said. it was from this point of singularity, within the first dimension of universal consciousness, that did give birth to this sense of duality. In this way, duality can be viewed as a constantly revolving wheel rotating on a fixated axis between purpose and mission. Any experience that anyone of us will ever encounter in this lifetime, is but a mere reflection or projection of this universal self. This is why tantra is crucial, in that it teaches us to love ourselves in any given space, or time. The sum total of the eight billion souls living on this earth, and the planetary or collective consciousness that this gives rise to, are each but one of the infinitesimal manifest forms in which this universal consciousness experiences itself and all that it can be. How difficult it can be to fully grasp the very essence of infinite. It is within the three-dimensional confines of our reality here on planet earth, that we experience said duality in terms of right versus wrong, good versus bad, light versus dark, rationalist epistemology versus empirical epistemology, mimesis versus anti-mimesis, and so on and so forth, seemingly to an endless proportion into infinity. However, it is not that this is wrong, or an inaccurate way of viewing things. It is simply that we are ascending into a place of higher planetary or universal collective consciousness that will allow us to transcend this way of experiencing our lives. A place of non-duality if you will.

Think back as far as your shaky recollection of memory may care to serve you. From an early age, at a point even before grade or elementary, this is been the sort of paradigm that has been taught to us, almost from the moment of our birth. When discussing major world issues, it has, for the most part, by and large, been from this sort of black-and-white mindset of for or against. Where do you stand on this issue? Yes or no. And it is perpetuated to an equally endless degree the further one advances throughout the traditional academic setting. One is either for one approach to a thing or the other. In the discussion, we may acknowledge that it may be a combination of the two, and it is not so much one or the other, but usually, that is as far as said conversation plays out, and rarely do we see to the full gamut of the shades of grey that lie in-between. The fence that we speak of is like this very narrow strip of uncertainty, which declares that we do not know which side of this dualistic dance that we believe in.

This also permeates throughout our society in the way that, in almost every realm of our lives, this very same paradigm has taught us to view life through this very left-brained, linear sort of way, which is ironic, because the life that we is so far from linear, and could never be plotted on any graph of this magnitude. If anything, what we experience is a never-ending fractal pattern spinning out into Infinitum. Endless possibilities of the same pattern, at least, until the point that the pattern is recognized, at which point it becomes something else entirely.

And it is even detectable in the way that we view time, or more specifically, the mental or psychological construct of time that we have come to worship, which enables time itself to be the stubbornly persistent illusion that Einstein spoke of. "Time and space are not conditions in which we live, but modes by which we think." In this way we think of it in this kind of circling way, as the clock on the wall, in an endless cycle of past, leading up to present, but that is not entirely accurate. Anything that will ever happen, will happen now. All that there will ever be is now. Time is not a circular motion, but could better be viewed in a multi-dimensional m0dality; that is the multi-dimensional now that has no end. String theory maintains that there may be as many as twelve dimensions to our known universe, but with time, it seems there are no bounds. We try to make time itself limited, which is foolish, because time is formless as it is also, ironically enough, timeless itself. But I suppose that is all relative.

Before I continue any further, I find it fitting so that I may satisfactorily describe a life of non-duality, divulge a little bit of personal information about myself. To keep it short and simple, I have Asperger's, which with it carries with it its own irony. Now, as I am sure my audience knows, Asperger's is included in the overarching category of ASD, or Autism Spectrum Disorder. Plainly put, my condition is one that is measured in terms of a spectrum. For instance, I am more highly functioning than others, in the same way, that I am more verbal than an individual on the spectrum that is completely non-verbal. It is for this reason that there is the saying, "If you've met one person with Autism, you've met one person with Autism," which is to say that being Autistic comes in so many different forms. It never looks the same in each individual case, but the individual is still Autistic. They meet the defining criterion for that specific categorization or label. How it still amuses me when I tell someone new that I have this condition to hear in response, "But you can talk," or, "But, like you socialize and stuff." That individual in question was looking at it from a dualistic place where I was on the non-verbal, socially awkward, and lower functioning side of possible extremes. Just as people will be like oh, people with Asperger's are geniuses, and conversely, slow if I were using a lexicon that was politically correct, and that meant as not to offend anyone, because God forbid that. In this way, I have always found that the word that best could best describe Autism is Gamut, which is also the name of my Autism website because it consists of a full spectrum.

Even still, one need not look very far to see along a spectrum, both literally and metaphorically speaking. The gift of vision is perhaps one of the greatest illustrations. As human beings, we rely heavily on our sense of sight to interpret and perceive the world. I have always found this to be particularly fascinating, because we rely on it as if all the information that is readily there for us, accounts for just about everything, that at the very least needs to be seen. But in truth, we really don't see much. We see a small blimp of a vast electromagnetic spectrum. Between the microscopic point between ultraviolet and infrared, we only ever see around .0036 percent of perceivable energy on this tremendous wavelength. As a part of my own condition, I have learned not to view life in terms of dualistic extremes, but rather, as a world of differing layers, degrees, or spectrum, respectively. Now, let's take a look at what a non-dualistic perspective or consciousness looks like, at the most basic level.

So, what does non-duality look like? As a conceptualization, the precepts behind it are deeply embedded in Buddhism, and as such, it is one that has been around for some time. To begin, let's take a look at some of the more rudimentary dualistic extremities. For instance, let's take our first glimpse through the polarity that is introduced behind good versus bad, and from there we will use the lens of truth, as it is starkly juxtaposed against falsity.

In the frameworks of culture, good and bad are viewed from this very black and white mindset. Such and such a thing is good, whether that is God, Jesus, Buddha, something that we may be fond of, whatever it is, that thing is innately good, and this is agreed upon. Conversely, the counterpart to the thing, Satan, Demons, Adolf Hitler, genocide, all constitute what is bad in this world. But this is interesting is it not? For something to be categorized under these broad labels, there must first occur in the mind a kind of litmus test, or judgment to immediately take place in the operations of the psyche, and as such, what are we even comparing these ideas to? This is fascinating on a variety of different levels. Throughout each of our lives, at any given moment, we are constantly having to make decisions, judgment calls, choices, for consciousness, after all, implies choice, to an extent that we admittedly enough, probably could not account for every last one, and with them, comes a kind of sense of risk management that we are subjected to. After all, all of life is a risk. You took a risk this morning when you drove to work on the freeway, but that was the decision that you made, with all the data you had readily available to you; this was the action that you needed.

The fascinating thing about this is the fact that, unless the individual is extremely arrogant, or perhaps ignorant or even naive, one can not but help to admit, maybe quite painfully so, that their judgment is faulty. I've been told by passerby's that I have an extraordinarily good sense of judgment of character; but, compared to what? And even as this is relayed to me, I can only be certain, in that my judgment is faulty, and the only real thing that I can be certain of is uncertainty. And this is undeniable.

For instance, my mind is always telling me that this relationship thing, is a wholly good thing. I exert a great deal of time, energy, and effort to the kind of means to an end in attaining one, because the operations of my mind tell me, love conquers all, it will be this wonderful thing, you will be happier, this thing is good. Go for it. But does that really ever align with the expectations we have? My mind has told me this many times before, that was its judgment. Granted, there are moments of love, happiness, and other sorts of more earthly pleasures, that we could ascribe to as good, it was also much more than all of that. I don't know about you, but heartache, grief, disagreements, jealousy, envy, jealously, breakups, and divorces, really don't register as good or well.

And even if one is a good judge of character, how accurate is that litmus test? One minute, we take a friend of ours, hope them to be a partner in life, and as such, we may take them to a business venture that we hope that we can join them, come to find out that that particular venture is not something that they are particularly interested in. All of a sudden, this individual in your life to whom you ascribed characteristics as intelligent, or motivated, and all these other defining characteristics that were up to your standards, and in the matter of a mere instance, it as if they become the antithesis of all those characteristics, and you may be so inclined to tell them that, "you're not the person that I thought you were." Well, my friend, I am sorry you had such poor judgment, what else can I say?

And we make these poor judgments all the time, even if we may not be consciously aware of them, and we hardly ever admit to them. In my own case, I made the very conscious decision to do the whole collegiate grind, to which the university became my life. By and large, this came as a result of another tremendously faulty judgment. It seemed the right thing to do because it was what all my friends, family, and other influencing individuals in my life said I needed to do. It was the thing to do after all. This judgment was made from a place that, well, statistically speaking, people who go to college earn more in their lifetime; a kind of expectation that if I did x, that I would be rolling in the benjamins, I'd be able to go out and do more, would have financial security, and as such a vast social circle, and a plethora of potential suitors or life partners. Jesus God almighty, I very faulty my judgment was back then. As much as I loved the university, it was hardly even close to the savior I was promised, and the reality of student loan debt and everything else included with paying one's college tuition was far from the expectation of financial security, and that's not just the case with me. I know an incredibly brilliant woman who graduated from UCLA, and to whom is a Doctor, and even still, her family is up to their eyeballs in student loan debt, owing to the institution something like 500,000 dollars. My heart goes out to her, for how incredibly poor our sense of judgment was back then.

And these poor judgments are taking place all the time. In the background noise of our minds, we look at a place of employment, and we say, aha, this is a good thing. I want to have that experience. Such and such a career is perfectly suited for me. I will work there. And for a hot minute that is the reality. You beam and gloat as your friends and family congratulate you. You and your friends may go out for a night on a town to celebrate, and you are overcome with pride. You have done a good job. Then, nine months later, you have no energy, you're exhausted and on the brink of burnout. It was nothing like you had imagined in the forefront of your mind, not to mention you have the worse boss you've ever worked for; in fact, they are so horrible, you will tell everyone who is willing to listening that you're quite sure that they are a narcissist, and you begin to look for every possible reason to jump ship. I don't know about you, but that kind of sounds like poor judgment. It's not what I thought it was we might say.

This is also entirely fascinating, because so much of what we view to be good or bad, isn't even necessarily a personal belief or opinion, but a cultural or societal one that is engrained into us. So much of what considers to be the self, or the ego, or whatever you'd like to call it, doesn't even originate from the authentic self but is sort of implanted within us from an early age, based on our location and environment, and it's hilarious because from it emerges ethnocentricity, or a belief that one's views and beliefs are better than another's, and people who are xenophobic, or who fear these other ideals, and it comes from a very closedminded, standoffish place of rejection, that isn't wholly accurate and again deals specifically with extremes of good versus bad. A person in America will be as loyal to capitalism, Christianity, democracy, and love for hamburgers, as the person in Asia is more likely to express one of the eastern philosophies, and a full gamut of other beliefs and dispositions, that they are so readily ready to die for as a direct consequence of the experiences they were subjected to in said local. So, how much of what we believe in, actually, the judgments that we make regarding what is good, or bad, even originates from the self? I'm going to say not many because if that were the case, I think I just might create for a new political, educational, or religious pedagogy entirely; one that is more accepting, and that has a unified sense of unity or coexistence; maybe one that focuses on consciousness, who knows. Generally speaking, what we believe, the opinions that we have, and the judgments that are made, are the beliefs, opinions, and judgments or a kind of extension of, our parents, friends, family, teachers, mentors, and all other individual's who have influenced us during our lifetime. And again, in so doing, it is just another judgment; we are assessing that what is being told to us is good, acceptable, and so on and so forth.

Nevertheless, looking at life from a non-dualistic standpoint is fairly simple and easy. It all comes down to layers, degrees, and a kind of spectrum. It's all part of a larger whole. So let's look at what is good. A person may say, I want to be a good person. Tell me, what is good? And compared to what? In what way? That is somewhat vague and sprinkled with glittering ambiguities. In the same way, when dealing with the opposite side of this polarity, someone might be inclined to say, I am bad, or I am a horrible person. Again, what measurement are you using to come to that conclusion?

Let's focus on the first instance. 'Am I a good person?" Well, comparatively, more than likely, just a guess here, but the totality of who you are is better than Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Lenin, or perhaps Mao Zedong. In the background of our minds, these individuals are to varying extents, inherently bad, because that is what comes to mind when such notions as mass genocide come up. So lets at the moment describe that comparatively as more good than, on a scale of differing degrees of goodness. In the same way, compared to the likes of a Buddha, or an enlightened or Ascended Master, let's say Jesus, or maybe even the Dali Lama, Echart Tolle, Confucious, or any other for that matter, we not even being close to the mark in this regard, could be viewed as good, but, sort of not as good, or less than, but that in itself, doesn't even constitute for a, 'oh, I am a terrible person,' appraisal. Compared to Adolf Hitler, you're an amazing person.

But, there is no such thing as good and bad, it is how you perceive it. One man's hero, is another person's tyrant, another man's monster. What are we quantifying as good? We may look at the works of the Dali Lama, and agree upon that what he did was intrinsically good. But there will always be the person that wants to be the cynic, the skeptic, the muckraker, to whom might even go out of their way to show that this isn't so. Oh, you think the Dala Lama is so great they will say. Did you know that he once stayed in the same room as his naked sister to see if any temptation did rise? They will continue, and they will go out of your way to convince you to see them in their light. And so, the spiritual leader, guru, or hero in your life, is another man's pedophile, and he will do everything in his power to make sure that you see things eye to eye. And this is typical. For those who are Christian, everyone that doesn't believe in Jesus is just bad and is going to hell. Religion is one of the main belief systems that permeate, rather perversely, that its paradigm is superior to all others, and bedazzled full of ethnocentricity and xenophobia. So any other religious or spiritual leader that doesn't fit in the cookie-cutter shape of your religion is bad or wrong. This is hilariously ironic, considering that we are all sinners in this way. To sin, quite literally, means to miss the mark. The message of any religious leader or spiritual one has been of love, or arguably consciousness, and a great deal of us are missing said mark.

And again, what quantifies. Most of the time we look at defining and observable surface-level characteristics. To illustrate this point, there was a kind of chart of different characteristics, and it asked which of these individuals would you want to associate with. Two of the individuals in question were off-putting in this way. They either smoked like a degenerate or were well known for the heavy consumption of alcohol. In the case of these two men, by and large, the habits that they were known for, could have registered as bad. The third individual was a devoted Christian, was a naturist, a Vegan, and it seemed as if it was nothing but positive traits. The results were surprising in this way because the first two individuals were that of Roosevelt and Churchill, and the positively described Christian, vegan, naturalist individual was Adolf Hitler. In defining what is good, what litmus test are we using?

So instead of viewing things as an either-or, black-and-white, dualistic kind of dichotomy, non-dualism puts both good and bad on the same scale. It's like the portrayal of a young Einstein, which I will highlight with the following excerpt:

Does evil exist?

The university professor challenged his students with this question. Did God create everything that exists? A student bravely replied, “Yes, he did!”

“God created everything? The professor asked.

“Yes sir”, the student replied.

The professor answered, “If God created everything, then God created evil since evil exists, and according to the principal that our works define who we are then God is evil”. The student became quiet before such an answer. The professor was quite pleased with himself and boasted to the students that he had proven once more that the Christian faith was a myth.

Another student raised his hand and said, “Can I ask you a question professor?”

“Of course”, replied the professor.

The student stood up and asked, “Professor, does cold exist?”

“What kind of question is this? Of course it exists. Have you never been cold?” The students snickered at the young man’s question.

The young man replied, “In fact sir, cold does not exist. According to the laws of physics, what we consider cold is in reality the absence of heat. Every body or object is susceptible to study when it has or transmits energy, and heat is what makes a body or matter have or transmit energy. Absolute zero (-460 degrees F) is the total absence of heat; all matter becomes inert and incapable of reaction at that temperature. Cold does not exist. We have created this word to describe how we feel if we have no heat.”

The student continued, “Professor, does darkness exist?”

The professor responded, “Of course it does.”

The student replied, “Once again you are wrong sir, darkness does not exist either. Darkness is in reality the absence of light. Light we can study, but not darkness. In fact we can use Newton’s prism to break white light into many colors and study the various wavelengths of each color. You cannot measure darkness. A simple ray of light can break into a world of darkness and illuminate it. How can you know how dark a certain space is? You measure the amount of light present. Isn’t this correct? Darkness is a term used by man to describe what happens when there is no light present.”

Finally the young man asked the professor, “Sir, does evil exist?”

Now uncertain, the professor responded, “Of course as I have already said. We see it every day. It is in the daily example of man’s inhumanity to man. It is in the multitude of crime and violence everywhere in the world. These manifestations are nothing else but evil.”

To this the student replied, “Evil does not exist sir, or at least it does not exist unto itself. Evil is simply the absence of God. It is just like darkness and cold, a word that man has created to describe the absence of God. God did not create evil. Evil is not like faith, or love that exist just as does light and heat. Evil is the result of what happens when man does not have God’s love present in his heart. It’s like the cold that comes when there is no heat or the darkness that comes when there is no light.”

The professor sat down.

The young man’s name — Albert Einstein.

All things can be viewed from this sort of layers or degrees of perspective. In terms of goodness, some things are wholly less good than others, with badness, being at the far end of the scale, very near absence of goodness. And at the end of the day, it is that faulty judgment that deciphers how we interpret light, or lack thereof, goodness, or lack thereof, and so on and so forth. You receive more of what you focus on. A friend might tell me that the night sky is dark, and I will still point out to them the stars. At some other point in the world, or in the universe it is day; point the darkness out to me then. Just as someone might describe to me that the sky is blue, and I will be quick to point out to them the hues and pigments of pink as the sun sets, or the greens and purples of an Aurora Borealis, and the other colors that comprise the totality of the sky, and truth itself can have a transformative nature to it, which brings me to the other spectrum that I would like to speak to; truth as it is compared to falsity.

One of the courses that most captivated my need for mental stimulation, was that of my Philosophy classes. However, that being said, there was some fleeting feeling that I could not help but shake, in all my ruminations of the material. By definition, a Philsopher is someone that is a lover of truth and wisdom, and as such, they actively pursue both wisdom and truth. This for me created for a kind of dilemma or paradox, and it is one that is ever-present in our dualistic mindset. For, it occurred to me that, if one were to pursue either truth or wisdom, whichever it may be, that by reason alone, it implies that said individual is lacking both of these things. It is only when we lack something that we pursue; one does not go to the great length and pains of pursuit if they had something. And similarly, if the individual is truly a philosopher; at the moment they technically become one, that is they have truth or wisdom, then at that very moment, when Socrates declares I know nothing, do they simultaneously cease to be one, for, using the same logic, if one was already endowed with wisdom or a kind of universal truth, at that very moment, the pursuit of it becomes unnecessary. They have the truth, they have wisdom, what else is there left to pursue?

And that is the downfall or downside to the dualistic mindset or the one of polarity, in that in many ways, even as clever, or intelligent as it may sound, it typically creates for this sense of lack. We are all constantly pursuing something; wisdom, happiness, monetary gain, or some other thing, like dogs chasing after it's tail, and the energy that is created from this, and that is put out into the cosmos, is that of I am lacking this thing, or I don't have this thing, so I must pursue it, and the result is that is what we get more of. We receive the energy that we put out into the universe.

That being said, truth, and conversely with it falsity, can be viewed as part of the same integrated spectrum of goodness, or anything else for that matter, but it's interesting in the fact that it has this transformative nature to it, which is perhaps something we can learn from. In our society, a great deal of time passes, and we hold or covet something as a sort of universal truth, and it's interesting in the way that we go to great lengths to decipher something as a sort of universal truth, but this again in itself suggests that things come in varying degrees as opposed to being dualistic counterparts. At one point in human history, it was a universal truth that the world was flat, or that we were the center of the universe. But we analyze that belief to the moon and back, and just when we think we've understood it when we've recognized the pattern in the fractal, it becomes something else entirely, and that is a new truth. A century from now, the universal truth of relativity, quantum physics, string theory, the laws of attraction, while we hold steadily to them now, maybe but another misinterpretation that led to some other concept of what our reality is like.

The point that is trying to be emphasized here, is that truth as all things, come in sorts of levels, degrees, or can be viewed in terms of a spectrum. At the top of, or at the far right of this spectrum, we have a universal truth. God speaks in integers, physics, the notion of past lives, or some notion that is universally applicable or true. And the further down the spectrum, through the shades of grade, one is receiving a truth, that is in part truth, but that is sort of diluted or watered down. It is less true, or not as true, but there is some truth to it. There is always a little truth to just kidding. Or the way we stretch the truth or tell little white lies. The words coming out of our mouth are in themselves true, but they are also false in the way that we string them together to create a veil between the truth that someone is searching for. And the more watered down the truth is, the further it goes down the spectrum, the heavier it becomes, and we can almost detect this, because the truth is of a higher vibration, and the truth always comes out, because of the fact that it is of a higher vibration. Like in the absence of light analogy, the falsity is just the far extreme of the truth that so watered down, that it is just a heavy puddle of the same thing, but without the composition of the actual thing. Again, there is no good or bad, it is all perception. Perception is everything. But then again, the only thing I can be certain of is that I know nothing, and that much I am not sure of.