How to Navigate the World of Duality

​Human life is an ideological flow, a movement from crudity to subtlety. In this movement, there is one consistent thing, and that is change. Change is a part and parcel of human life. And to have changed, you must have contrast, dark and light, painful and joyous.
 
Human life is a combination of these experiences. You have a high experience; you feel delighted and blissful; you’re on top of the world. Then you have a difficult experience. You feel that the world is against you, that God is not with you, that you wonder what you have done wrong. And then again it turns, and it turns and turns.
 
You are a young man, a young woman, then you are an elder, and then you leave the body behind. You continue your journey and again you are a young man, a young woman. And so it goes, changing, changing, changing.
 
Nations, people, collective of society, and human beings also go through change. And there are dark times and there are times of prosperity. There are times when people starve because the weather has gone bad. The crops are ruined—early frosts, late rains. The crops are destroyed. The people go hungry in the following winter.
 
Wars, pestilence, difficulties abound. Yet times of prosperity and abundance, times of cultural accomplishment, arts flourish, and people’s creativity develops. Those times come and they too pass.
 
Change requires contrast. And there will always be difficulty and delight. But the extent to which it governs your life depends on where you put your heart and your identity of self.
 
This changing world is a world of dualities, a level of being where the ego self-abides, where you want to be accomplished, you want to be liked, you want to be successful, you want to be prosperous, you want to be happy, you want to fulfill your life mission. All of this is normal, but all of this is the speaking of the ego. And it abides in this world of dark and light, of contrast and change.
 
When you move a little deeper to another level of being—some call them dimensions, some call them Koshas, Lokas, cosmic levels of being—when you move from this plane to a subtler plane, like moving from the surface of the ocean where the waves are crashing and moving deep into the still waters where there are no waves, no highs, and lows, it is just quiet. When you move in the still waters of the mind, where the heart lives, not in muddy, murky waters, but in the pure pristine love of infinite being, where that love and that presence permeates, there is stillness; there is love; there is peace that does not change, that does not move from high to low, but is always even, always the same.
 
You may move in and out of that awareness, and as you do, you experience the high and the low, but that is the movement of your consciousness, your aware attention from one stratum of being to another. The pure deep stratum never changes, but you enter it and then you exit. Enter and exit. And this goes on until the need to exit fades away.
 
The still waters, where the mind does not chatter and the heart is connected in love, in peace, this stratum of consciousness, this dimension, there is no life and death. All abides in an evenness. Dualities cease to be. There is no high and low, no good or bad mood, no young and old. You are as you have always been, melted into an infinite being, a part of an integrated whole where there is no seeking and no seeker, no grasping and no fearing. There is only the calm quietude of being. There is only love that does not wax or wane but is.
 
This is the true potential of human life, to move from this idea of duality, of ego self and other, of body-mind identity and other outside of the body-mind. When conscious awareness, when your intelligent awareness moves out of this changing duality of this plane of existence and sinks deep into the eternal core of your being, then the foundations of time, space, and person change. For time becomes endless; the time is now; the place is everywhere; the person is an infinite being. The individual body-identified self that lives in the world of contrasts ceases to be in this calm ocean.
 
There is nothing to engage with, no one to impress, no battles to win, nothing to acquire. And there is nothing to fear. Fear has no place in this ocean of eternity, in the depths of being. There is no fear; there is no grasping, no pulling away. There is an eternal being, love beyond measure, truth, and peace, deep peace.
 
It is the haven of your soul, where you can rest and abide. When you are there, you have always been there. You will always be there. It is in the moment of now. But it appears that your awareness drifts away from that moment of now, from that timeless presence into the world of opposites and change and you explore uniqueness, you explore success, you explore failure, you explore being human.

Awareness abiding in this. Then in the depths of meditation, in the silence of a moment in nature, in the moment of love with another being, you transcend this level of your being, this level of old and young, dark and light. The level of contrast and change disappears as if it has never existed, and you find yourself on the timeless shores of eternal being.
 
You remember; you have always been on these timeless shores. There has been a dream in your mind, a dream of duality and contrast that you have created and played in the field of illusion. But then you remember who you are. You are not the ego self that has suffering and has accomplishment, that has pain and happiness. You remember—then that feels like a dream, and that you awaken from the dream into reality. And in that reality, the separate self lets go and melts into the Satguru, the eternal being, the one.
 
Where you have been, no one abides. There is only being, knowing, infinite love, and great peace. For there is no striving, there is no fear to run from, no wonderful acquisition to acquire, no happiness to grab hold of. There is an evenness and a quietude, a deep eternal piece of eternal being, one without a second. Within this eternal peace, this consciousness lies the dreams of worlds upon worlds, different dimensions, and so many different beings and creations.
 
But when you awaken in the truth, all of those dreams dissolve. All of those acquisitions, all of the fears. The root cause of suffering, the separation of self and others, is no more. There you are home.
 
In your daily life, your mind goes here and there, forms this attachment and that has a preference for certain ideologies and beliefs, wants to follow a certain diet, but in the larger scheme of things, in the depths of your being, all of that is irrelevant. For when you truly accept the Satguru, when you truly love the Satguru, you don’t harbor any of this. Let it go. Humble yourself to let go of love divine.
 

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You remember; you have always been on these timeless shores. There has been a dream in your mind, a dream of duality and contrast that you have created and played in the field of illusion. But then you remember who you are. You are not the ego self that has suffering and has accomplishment, that has pain and happiness. You remember—then that feels like a dream, and that you awaken from the dream into reality. And in that reality, the separate self lets go and melts into the Satguru, the eternal being, the one.
 
Where you have been, no one abides. There is only being, knowing, infinite love, and great peace. For there is no striving, there is no fear to run from, no wonderful acquisition to acquire, no happiness to grab hold of. There is an evenness and a quietude, a deep eternal piece of eternal being, one without a second. Within this eternal peace, this consciousness lies the dreams of worlds upon worlds, different dimensions, and so many different beings and creations.
 
But when you awaken in the truth, all of those dreams dissolve. All of those acquisitions, all of the fears. The root cause of suffering, the separation of self and others, is no more. There you are home.
 
In your daily life, your mind goes here and there, forms this attachment and that has a preference for certain ideologies and beliefs, wants to follow a certain diet, but in the larger scheme of things, in the depths of your being, all of that is irrelevant. For when you truly accept the Satguru, when you truly love the Satguru, you don’t harbor any of this. Let it go. Humble yourself to let go of love divine.
 
You say you love the Guru but what does that mean? That you admire what they said? That you think it makes you important to know it?
 
Take that ego and give it to the infinite, give it to the Guru. Let that Guru washes your heart with true love, love that does not demand, love that does not set qualifications, love that does not expect, love that surrenders, surrenders into the one, surrenders the beliefs, the concepts, the vanity, the self-depreciation, all of the ideas.
 
You know, many people hold nearest and dearest to them their worst fears, their secret sense of inadequacy that they would never show anyone. But it their heart it festers. To love the Satguru is to give that to him, to her, to give that to the one. The fear, the secret inadequacies, the compensations, the bravado, to give it all. Those things which you hold most dear are your ideas about who you are.
 
They are erroneous. Shed them. Surrender them to the Guru. It is these beliefs that separate you from the Self of yourself. What is it hardest for you to let go of? Where are your true attachments?

In reality, there is only one, the true Guru, the infinite one. That one can manifest in various ways for you. But in the end, when you give up this idea of yourself, the Guru is everywhere in your own body, in your mind, in your feelings, in a blade of grass, a cat, a tree, the sun, even the computer. Everything is the form. All forms are the one, the changeless one, that does not abide in opposites—but rather opposites abide within the one.
 
And when awareness in deep love surrenders to the one, to the Satguru, there can be none other than that eternal one. The idea of you is a belief. Are you ready to surrender to the Guru, to truly love the Guru? Because to truly love the Guru is to be willing to give everything, even those shadowy inadequacies, even those still small fears, even the tenderness of the heart. Giving it all, recognizing that there is no one and nothing but the infinite.
 
So the Yogis call this world of change a dream, a relative reality in the truth of the soul. Are you ready to be humble enough to give it all away? Are you ready to love enough to give everything: your ideas, your judgments, your beliefs, your feelings about yourself, the world around you?
 
You do Puja. It says, “Lord, I give back to you what is already yours.” It’s the dream that there is a separate self, the dream you dreamt in the mind of the great dreamer. It is a relative reality.
 
But when you let go of it, when your love deepens to true surrender, then you give body, mind, heart, and everything to the one. And you realize there has never been a separate self. The infinite Brahma, the divine Satguru, embodies in all of creation and dances the dance of duality in the mind of eternal being. Who are you?

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