Faith, Works, and Other Concepts

In this post I'm going to introduce a topic that many Christians may not have heard before, Duality. Bear with me, tough it out, and I'll show you something that is pretty cool!

Examples of duality are easy to find: extremes of light and dark, hot and cold, right and left, inside and outside. We humans are adept at seeing, and even enjoy seeing contrasts.

These dualistic concepts are like endpoints on a line, the whole line being the continuum of non-duality, or oneness.

For example, I am motivated to take care of my kids. The motivation is from love. But it is also from duty. On one hand, I find that I want to, but I also find that I have to!

We might try to make a statement about love, that because it is a coming together, that it must equal non-duality. But that leaves out duty. A more correct statement would be
LOVE + DUTY = 'TAKING CARE OF MY KIDS'.

What about in the book of James where it says that faith without works is dead? There you have another line, with faith on one side and works on the other. And that continuum could be called 'CHRISTIAN LIFE'. Duality would be only existing in one specific point on that line, whereas non-duality would be living the whole thing at once!

Let's look at some other concepts. Can you say that Freedom without Law is dead (or vice versa)? What about Passion without Direction? Would Hot without Cold make any sense? What about Left without Right? (Etc.) Where do we live? We do not live on the endpoints of those lines. We live on those entire lines, the whole enchilada! That is as close to non-duality (wholeness) as we can get.

Here's a cool visualization:
Start drawing lines for all the concepts you can think of (and label them), and have all those lines cross in the center. You will end up with something resembling an asterisk but with more (near infinite, actually) lines.

Now, you might be tempted to label the very center 'Creation' (as it looks like a simplified Big Bang) but hang on a minute. Creation would be the whole ball of wax, right? All of Creation is THE biggest picture of non-duality that you can come up with!

But what would you call those end-points? Duality. Each of those end-points represents a limited dualistic view of reality, the reality being the totality of creation. And the movement is to an extreme of duality, of separation from the whole. But none of us want separation, isolation. In general, speaking about any human being, however misguided they might be in their actions their life is spent trying to achieve balance. In a sense, we are trying to go back to what we had at creation: non-duality.

That’s a really cool thing to realize because it takes away the feeling of difference, the feeling of separation from the rest of humanity, most of which seem quite different to us. There really is no basic difference at all. Any perceived difference is an illusion, or a clouded view.

Now here’s another cool thing. All the things you like in life, like fishing, golf, whatever —anything that gives you that peaceful feeling— is you wanting to get back to the center, back to origin. Every single human being, and everything in the universe, is trying to come back to the center! Hot neutralizes cold, pressure neutralizes vacuum, etc. And every human being is trying to regain their center by whatever recreational activity or other pursuit that gives them that feeling, no matter how misguided.

Even the things that we don't appreciate, like suffering, bring us to the center because it tries to change you, move you. Whatever it is that does this automatically brings us closer to center, which is why it is said that your enemy is your best teacher.

Everything brings us to the center, like a big funnel! We are all trying to get back to our point of origin, like fishes swimming upstream!

Chalk it up to the way God created us originally, or maybe it is from our separation from God (which actually sounds more likely), but we have been pushed into a dualistic view / life. But our innermost desire is to return to God, to non-duality!

Here is something else that is amazing. If you sincerely try to absorb and internalize a concept, what the true meaning of that concept is on a personal level, you will at some point get a glimpse of the non-dual continuum that it is on, and you will begin to understand its complimentary concept. For example, if you delve into the meaning behind Law, you will find the concept of Freedom.

These concepts (what we've visualized as endpoints in our graph) are not like NOUNS (things), they are like VERBS! Duality focuses on the endpoints, on what it GETS. Non-duality has no focus, but is expanding, GIVING.

In the beginning, God was all there was. This 'all-ness' was one, no splits, non-dual. If Non-duality still is, then duality is an 'illusion', or at least a narrower, shadowed vision of reality.
At best, our vision is cloudy. But the real reality is non-dual!

The spiritual is REAL. The material world is either an illusion or a limited view.

If God is only real to us as a physical THING (or if we make things into gods) it is called idolatry.

If we make concepts like love, faith, freedom, (etc.) into THINGS to be acquired or manipulated (instead of internalizing them on a real level) then we are not on the same wavelength as God.

Dualistic thinking (thinking in terms of THINGS) separates us from God and others. It's us versus the world.

IE- Living materialistically is not living spiritually. This comes as no surprise, does it?

The spiritual world is real. The material world is an illusion or a limited view!