The concept of duality is an ingrained thought in us. We can seldom go outside the matrix of opposites. To every aspect described, there is a contra. So, what exactly is duality? This is a question I have asked myself a lot lately. It is something I strive to understand, because of the fundamental position it occupies in the way man has come to see everything. Think about it.
Man and nature; mind and body; spirit and man; self and man; good and bad; pleasure and pain; knowledge and ignorance; system and environment. The list goes on. In fact it is endless. Take any aspect and you can always create its complement. In my thoughts about duality, I have come to see there is a bias in the way we see things. When we refer to a pair of opposites, our thoughts compress it into a binary logic. That either something is present or it is absent. There is no middle ground. The deterministic view of things. The Newtonian way of understanding. The world at the scale we see.
But is the world 'organized' as such? Personally, I am beginning to think the whole idea is flawed at its core. My reason for such an argument is ground on the presumption that duality is a simplified view of a more fuzzy world. We don't deal with 0 and 1 in reality. We have a spectrum ranging from 0 to 1 passing through everything in between. There is a continuum. The problem of duality is centred in the act of communication and is not a reality in itself.
Take the case of an important human emotion, viz. happiness. Our intuitive understanding of such a feeling is binary. When I say I am happy, it precludes the possibility that I am sad. That is because we see happiness and sadness as two binary states. But if such a case were true, then what is the meaning adjectival qualifiers like very happy, delighted etc. Certainly they do denote a greater or lesser happiness. Another duality? This would only result in an endless regress.
What I want to say is that when we deal with duality, there is a degree associated with it. For eg. Happiness is not merely a state. It is a state with a degree or extent. Happiness then is not a pure quality. It is rather an admixture where the quality of 'happy' is more than 'sad'. I might then go on to add that when we are neither happy nor sad, it is a case where the two qualities are in equal proportion. The state of indifference.
The key idea here is that there is no boundary in duality. The perception of duality is the passage of the aspect from preponderance in one end of the spectrum to the other side. Both qualities exist at all times nonetheless.
Its just the percentage distribution. You are right.
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