The mind creates dualities. The mind tries to help us discern perspective by creating dualities. The Buddha regrets that the mind succeeds so thoroughly in this endeavor. He hopes we appreciate that we imagine these dualities. However, most of us commit deeply to thinking and believing in the strands and veils of polarity. We believe in either one side or the other.
On this plane At this point we get to play with this aspect of our own life. Playfulness brings contrasting perspectives into proximity. We juxtapose contrasting views. In some cases the duality actually dissolves. And with this dissolution humor infuses our experience. We internally ask how we could believe that those two aspects of life only exist in opposition. We experience how they blend together or when looked at from another perspective occupy a different realm. Or they can align in such a way to be eclipsed and disappear.
I think a mathematical formula exists to express this resolution. We start with a line, an imaginary string of points, rather than a string. We line up the points on a continuum, concerning some aspect of life. We realize that the points don’t actually all fall on the line, but never mind that. Then we rotate the line in space so that it stands on its end, allowing that the line extends forever. And then it piles up as a point. In that moment the polarity aligns and resolves. Its line like a star in the sky comes to us as a twinkle in the night. That gaseous mass spans miles and this edge and the opposite edge represent polar opposites, but that difference resolves in our perception of the night sky.
Do you remember the white foam core design school project and how it turned from inspired formulation into discarded elements? [See note seven] That might have been grace on a breeze.
Perhaps we all need to hold expectations just so, so that we might fall through dualities successfully.
As all children know nothing separates one culture from another or one living creature from another. Only in our insistence in dualities and our indoctrination by them do we lose the actually quite porous boundary between the light and the dark, the new and the old, the skilled and the novice, the believing and the disbelieving. We can include the good and the evil and even the knowing that the duality doesn’t exist and the insistence against all odds that it does.
Duality Exercise#1: Favorite Dualities
Make a list of favorite dualities. Include any already transcended and the one’s that feel most stubborn. Let them stand. They can probably be arranged in order of seeming rigidity. Proceed by coming up with ways that set up a continuum between one extreme and the other for some of them. Now search for a perspective that approaches the line of that continuum from a different angle or direction. Consider playfully dissolving the persistent polarities. Jot down ideas and then imagine converting them into behaviors. Write down the dualities in order to see them in a different light. Write them around the page rather than on the line and runwordstogether and bre akt hemat u nusu alpo in tsso the ym akeo the rwords. We add a layer of transformation intentionally in order to capture a new perspective. We want to push our construct toward a novel discovery. We are just documenting several favorite dualities. We let them be understood.
At this point in the transcription of my original text, I came to the end of the pages in the composition notebook. I wasn’t done. Almost without thinking I flipped the notebook over and began writing my way back through the book in reverse. During the original writing, this moment opened a potential space that up to the point of recognition had remained unavailable to me. Although I didn’t actually write my way back through the text; none-the-less in a way, I wrote backwards while proceeding forward. Although no actual edge existed at the end of the composition book, I had written to the end and then playfully found a way to continue. It reminded me of letters I had seen where the text appears first in one direction then another and rarely on a diagonal. In play we frequently go right up to the edge of what we expect before we can perceive what happens next. This requires a profound sense of trust in our own ability to come to the wall and pass through it. In the example given, I could feel the disappointment mounting that I would run out of room before I finished what I wanted to write. The feeling seemed less interesting than the curiosity about what I would do next. The duality of there being not enough room and there being plenty of room to continue teased and comforted me. Elegant solutions develop to most perceived problems, if we just turn our heads, hearts, minds, bodies, spirit, and soul in a helpful orientation, letting our perception reassert itself. We release a few dualities in the process.
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