Living In a World of Duality
Gunner Jensen
October 07, 2006
All our life seems to take place between some kind of opposite energies: hot-cold, right-wrong, happiness-sorrow, sweet-sour, light-darkness etc. Some times we like only one part of this duality, but not the other part. We want to be happy, but not to feel grief - we want to feel good, but not to suffer pain - we want love, but not hatred … Maybe we think that the world should be different, that all the evil and misery shouldn’t exist … We may think that God (if there is a God) is not a good God, because what kind of God would create a world with war, killings, torture, hunger, injustice, and misery?
If we think a second time, we could ask ourselves what kind of experience we would have if we didn’t know the “negative” part of this duality. If sorrow didn’t exist, could we experience the state of happiness? If we didn’t know hatred and envy, could we experience love and friendship in the same way as we do now? Don’t all kinds of experiences require something opposite to be experienced at all? Would we appreciate the “good” things if we didn’t know the “bad” ones? Some times people are feeling unsatisfied with their lives, and then they hear about somebody who had a really bad destiny. Then suddenly they start feeling grateful for their good fortune, realising that it is not to be taken for granted. People, who are born rich, often don’t appreciate being wealthy, whereas somebody, who worked his/her way up from poor to rich, really appreciates this wealth.
Is the duality principle good or bad then? What about justice? Why are some people born rich and healthy, while others are born in total misery? Looking at a single life time of a single human being it is very difficult (or impossible) to find the justice in this fact. Let us, however, consider the possibility that we have already lived many lives, and that we are going to live a lot more. Let us assume that the universe functions in the way that what we give is what we get, and that we are eternal beings living lives after lives in order to learn and evolve. Looking at the world from this broad perspective, the duality principle appears to be a creation of genius, and maybe we do live in a world of complete justice. The world of duality is the playground, and we are living our lives using our free will to act as we find appropriate. However, the acts have consequences, and we evolve as beings learning from our mistakes.
A question is: where are we going to end? Are we going to develop from human beings to higher spiritual beings? A special phenomenon is the “enlightened” people. They seem to be living in a permanent state of bliss, independent from the environment around them. This is not an easy state of consciousness to reach, and only relatively few people on earth are known to have reached it (although it may be a growing number day by day). In a way they seem to be living in another dimension than the rest of the people on earth, like if they have skipped a lot of levels and jumped right to some kind of divine state of consciousness.
Is this a step further towards divine existence? Are we all going to reach that state of consciousness with the time? How much further can we reach?
If we think a second time, we could ask ourselves what kind of experience we would have if we didn’t know the “negative” part of this duality. If sorrow didn’t exist, could we experience the state of happiness? If we didn’t know hatred and envy, could we experience love and friendship in the same way as we do now? Don’t all kinds of experiences require something opposite to be experienced at all? Would we appreciate the “good” things if we didn’t know the “bad” ones? Some times people are feeling unsatisfied with their lives, and then they hear about somebody who had a really bad destiny. Then suddenly they start feeling grateful for their good fortune, realising that it is not to be taken for granted. People, who are born rich, often don’t appreciate being wealthy, whereas somebody, who worked his/her way up from poor to rich, really appreciates this wealth.
Is the duality principle good or bad then? What about justice? Why are some people born rich and healthy, while others are born in total misery? Looking at a single life time of a single human being it is very difficult (or impossible) to find the justice in this fact. Let us, however, consider the possibility that we have already lived many lives, and that we are going to live a lot more. Let us assume that the universe functions in the way that what we give is what we get, and that we are eternal beings living lives after lives in order to learn and evolve. Looking at the world from this broad perspective, the duality principle appears to be a creation of genius, and maybe we do live in a world of complete justice. The world of duality is the playground, and we are living our lives using our free will to act as we find appropriate. However, the acts have consequences, and we evolve as beings learning from our mistakes.
A question is: where are we going to end? Are we going to develop from human beings to higher spiritual beings? A special phenomenon is the “enlightened” people. They seem to be living in a permanent state of bliss, independent from the environment around them. This is not an easy state of consciousness to reach, and only relatively few people on earth are known to have reached it (although it may be a growing number day by day). In a way they seem to be living in another dimension than the rest of the people on earth, like if they have skipped a lot of levels and jumped right to some kind of divine state of consciousness.
Is this a step further towards divine existence? Are we all going to reach that state of consciousness with the time? How much further can we reach?