Transcending Duality to find Peace
2023
The movement from 2 to 3.
We stand at a time when we are transcending duality.
Until now, our perception has been limited to understanding the world through contrast of 2 poles. Hot, cold; high, low; light, dark.
This has further been taken into our emotional and moral worlds — happy, sad; good, bad; right, wrong, victim, perpetrator.
Physics, which is the first order basis of the natural world is governed at its core by unforgiving duality/poles — charge, light, weight, height. When we go to chemistry we have the interaction of elements reaching and crossing equilibrium and giving rise to new elements, the advent of playfulness. Finally in biology we begin to have the story of life and its movement.
What an incredible nested progression.
There is no value judgment within the natural world. There is life and there is death; there is light and there is shadow. The natural world easily transcends this duality to move into co-creation and the river of life instead of remaining stuck in judgement of one over the other.
Much of our human suffering today is psychological. In situations of stress, our mental models begin operating within 2 poles and these poles have value judgements. When given 2 poles we can start to spin and this spin can become emotionally charged due to value judgements — causing energy drains and suffering. Yet, when we introduce a third element — the moral charge dissipates, we transcend the dichotomy, create something new and we are perhaps closer to finding balance.
For e.g. “Did I do the right thing?” In some cases this is a productive conversation with the conscience in most other cases it is simply the mind wanting to remain busy and the ego looking for ways to shelter themselves from blame/responsibility.
To insist that every decision has a right or wrong or a good or bad — is to have internalized all external and archaic control mechanisms.
Our current tendency to create two poles, one good and one bad, within any stressful situation is exactly what creates conflict and drama
The media, including the news, has tapped into our desire for drama to create these narratives and counter narratives of the good guy and bad guy. When something goes wrong, we look for the party that is to blame and then want to bring that party to justice. And so the poles just spin around each other, continuing cycles of victory, crime, punishment, revenge.
To transcend to a 3, we have to take responsibility for things we did and did not do.
Move away from us vs them and towards collective responsibility. Not out of pity or necessity but out of the understanding that we are all connected and responsible for each other and our environment and support systems.
The movement from 1 to 2 has taken almost the entirety of the existence of the human collective. Moving to 3 is incredibly rapid in comparison and can feel like a quantum shift. The pressures of such a rapid and intense shift is having resounding effects in life and the planet, with incredible amounts of death and destruction.
The most important work we can do at this time is to take away the blame game within ourselves and outside of us.
This is true in all aspects of our lives and is the core of all our healing. Acceptance and forgiveness of the way we are and the understanding that we are evolving towards our ideals. Our impatience and our pain emerge from our desire and deep knowing of that ideal and yet having to face a world that is so far from it.
The story of Climate Change is the story of humanity’s collective evolution through a very rapid window of time. This involves the loss of an old world and a movement towards a new world. There is a tremendous amount of death, destruction and loss, as we start a new cycle. There is grief from all that we took for granted and never appreciated about the world that is now, almost, gone. We are in denial. It was our choice, yet we do not remembering making a choice, just a fear deep in our bones that we have perhaps made a deep grave mistake and yet there is no turning back of the clock.
The tricky thing about being at the brink of something truly novel, is that we cannot know what the future state is. Our imaginations can only pull from the past and that which we know, fact or fiction. When the transition is painful we try to go back to the past and pretend that that was fine, even when we were screaming to want to get out of it. There is so much grief, starting with denial and then bargaining. All this occurs due to our fear of the unknown and feeling wildly unprepared for what is to come.
This journey and this grief will change us fundamentally to prepare us to build the new world that is already on its way.
Our only enemies are within, in the form of doubt and division. The transcendence we need is to go from me and you — to us — at the level of the human collective as supported by mother nature and the entire universe. When we can transcend division and distrust and enter unity, we can feel love and support of the collective pouring in, we remember the brilliance and kindness of all our being and can settle into our place with peace and looking forward. Once we can exist, cooperate and act from this place — no matter the scale we will be aligned in the synchronous movement towards this inevitable new possibility.
