Dvaita - Duality!

Hello all,

Namaste! Hope all of you had a great week where you were able to bring another piece of your puzzle called life more into focus. Last few weeks we were discussing spiritual aspects like Dharma and Karma. We also discussed Maya, the illusion many times we may encounter in this material plane. Today let us discuss another aspect that comes in Hinduism or more in Vedic philosophy.

 The 13th-century philosopher Madhvacharya introduced the school of thought, Dvaita or dualism. According to his philosophy, the ultimate reality (Brahman or in Dvaita terms, Vishnu, the supreme soul) and Atman ( individual souls) exists as separate and independent distinct realities. There have been debates on Dvaita as well as Advaita (all are one, oneness) school of thoughts. 

Here I am not going to get into a debate about whether one school is right or wrong. That let intellectual thinkers and philosophers deal with. I am discussing today what I intuitively feel about Dvaita from a material or the realm of physical reality. What can be Dvaita in the truest sense?

Material reality: Before that, we have to discuss the physical reality. All of us have taken a physical birth with a body, mind, and Soul. Everything we perceive and experience is from within this body. Being in this physical reality we have no idea how it would be to exist outside this body. We may have existed outside a body before this birth and we may exist outside a body after this birth. But as of now we only know who or how we are within this body. 

The physical reality of the Earth-humans!
Image credits-Pixabay.com

So, the reality from the body perspective becomes very important. Even if we say we are part of the Universal source energy or Brahman, if we cut our finger, blood does come out. If we stub our toe somewhere it does pain and swells up after some time. If we jump from a high rise building, we do die to our death. So, the physical reality within this body becomes very important. So, anything and everything we perceive, we can perceive only with us as the center point. 

We may think otherwise. But our experiences, attitudes, and perceptions play a big part in the role we play in our own life. Why am I discussing material reality instead of Dvaita? There is an underlying reason for it. So, as we discussed we can only perceive our reality being within our physical body. Even though we can imagine out of body experiences or flying through the Universe as long as we are in our physical body, we can be only at one place within that body. This I am saying about everyday normal being just like you and me.

Within this body, we perceive time as seconds, minutes, hours and years. We perceive our relationships as various emotions whether love, hate, compassion, kindness or anger. Within this body, we achieve our success, get dejected at our failures, feel exhilaration in our achievements and sadness when our dear ones depart. So, in everything our body and our perceptions from the body are important. So, this is fact and reality.

So, when we are within this physical body, everything has a dual nature. For happiness there is sadness. For good there is evil. For dark there is light. For laughter, there is crying. It is a given. We cannot escape that. For rainy days there are sunny days. For anger there is kindness. For wrath there is compassion. For wealth there is poverty. For sickness there is health. Everything has the other side. For positive, there is also negative. Can you see the pattern?

The spectrum: We think that there are two sides to each coin of life. If one side is dark, the other side is light. If one side is laughter, the other side is sadness. If one side is health the other side is sickness. But what if instead of two sides of a coin, it is a scale or spectrum. In that scale, every quality, emotion, or attitude takes its place. Many times we judge people and place them on either side of the coin. But people should not be judged and placed into two divisions as we wish.

Nowadays my thought process is according to the level of awareness a person has developed they can fall in any place on the spectrum. As their awareness increases, they move to the lighter and brighter side of the spectrum. Before that, they tend to fall anywhere on the spectrum as they prefer.

But this scale has both ends of the exact opposite nature, that is the truth. If one end is light, the other end is dark. If one end is laughter, the other end is sadness. If one end is the truth, the other end is fakeness. If one end is good, the other end is evil. If one end is masculine, the other end is feminine. If one end is yang, the other end is yin. Like this, the opposites are a reality when we live in this materialistic world.

Dvaita- The duality of the physical realm, good and evil; light and dark!
Image credits-Pixabay.com

But as humans who don't have much-developed awareness, we only see the person from the point of good/bad, good/evil, kind/arrogant, compassionate/rowdy. We don't see the whole spectrum of emotions they may able to embrace. What am I trying to confer? 

In the same person, there are seeds of goodness as well as evil. Both seeds lay embedded in the psyche. What the mind and thoughts nurture that seed would grow and prosper. So, this shows that within a human body we have to live a life of duality, Dvaita. For good there is evil. For light there is darkness, For humbleness, there is arrogance. For compassion there is rudeness. We cannot escape this reality of Dvaita, the dual nature of the Universe that we perceive through our senses.

Dvaita: Duality! For a Dalai Lama, there is a Hitler. For a pauper, there is a magnate. For a genius, there is an idiotic person. The dual nature is inescapable. Within the physical body, we come across both the light and the shadow side. For everything good, there is everything dark as well.

Even though we may not realize it every one of us has the seeds of the light as well as the shadow side within us. We have discussed a concept before, that 'Our inner reality reflects outside', So, if there are a lot of fights, arguments, and chaos within our life, that shows our inner reality is more towards the dark spectrum of the scale. If our life is more calm and peaceful. that shows we are nurturing more of the light side within us.
 
There is a concept in Psychology. I have before mentioned the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung who elaborated on archetypes. The Hindu mythology and Vedic Philosophy works well with the concept of archetypes. He has a quote, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” In our deep unconscious mind, we have the light as well as shadow sides. Many times we embrace the light sides and reject our own shadow sides.

Carl Gustav Jung (Swiss psychologist, 1875-1961)
Encyclopédie du Monde Actuel (EDMA);
copyright belongs to
Charles-Henri Favrod [CC BY-SA 3.0]

As long as we reject one side of us, even if it is the shadow side, like an annoying little kid who totally vies for attention, it keeps coming up in our life as circumstances, people, and behaviors. We try to keep on pushing it away and totally neglect it. But it keeps popping up everywhere until that person acknowledges that yes, such a shadow side do exist within them.

Let us take an example. Say for example a person is totally fearful of being abandoned in old age. They have this deep fear within of being very alone. They try to hold tight to people, homes, or situations. They keep an iron tight grip on people and things that they are familiar with. Even though outside they are showing total bravery, deep within their mind the energy is that of fear of loneliness.

This is the subconscious energy they are putting out to their inner reality. Of course, what do they attract into their life? The same energy. The situations in their life change, people move away, kids find their own nest, suddenly whatever they feared the most starts to happen one step, one day at a time.

Instead, what can that person do? They need to acknowledge, "Yes, such a fear do exist within me. But life any second is very unpredictable. Anything can happen. The floor underneath my feet can cave into the Earth. A bolt of lightning can hit me. A Tsunami can come and wash away from my home. So, nothing is predictable. But I can always keep my energy positive and high, acknowledge my own fear, and make it my ally and use my life towards the very best use for myself, my family and others".

In this space, the person is seeing the whole spectrum of the light as well as the dark side. Nothing jumps at them from their blind spot. They are totally acknowledging the shadow side of fear. Now, the fear like a kid being given attention calms down helps them to overcome the same fear using their own courage. The real blessing of the duality.

The Dvaita concept. The physical reality which exposes us to the scale that encompasses the bright to the dark side. The good versus the evil. The compassion versus the arrogance. The kindness versus the rudeness. The gentle versus the brutal. Right doing versus wrongdoing. It is there very much within the physical reality when we are within this body. We can't escape it.

The duality of the material realm!
Image credits-Pixabay.com

But acknowledging the whole spectrum helps us to transcend it to a place of peacefulness, calmness, and balance. Yes, there is both good and evil in this world, even as ungerminated seeds within ourselves. But as long as we keep our own inner reality as kind, gentle, balanced and with good intentions, that would be what comes knocking at our door.

There is a story of Yudhishthira as well as Duryodhana going for the tour of Hastinapura in Mahabharatha. For Yudhishthira, every person felt like very good, while Duryodhana perceived everyone as bad. It was their own 'inner nature' that was getting reflected as perceptions and the personality people were embracing. The same is the reality for every one of us human beings as well.

If we don't acknowledge our own duality, the light as well as the shadow side, and embrace the whole spectrum, we keep on getting mired in our own experiences and situations and blame our fate in this lifetime. Remember, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate"- Carl Jung.

The deep wisdom of duality, the concept, Dvaita asks us to embrace. Only after embracing Dvaita, we can even think of proceeding to the next concept and stage of Advaita-Oneness, the way all of us, everything under the Sun, the Stars, and even the Universe being woven by the same fabric of Universal essence or principle called Brahman. So, let us first embrace Dvaita to later proceed to the concept of Advaita!

I wish you a good weekend and I'll see you next Friday!😉 

Next week: Advaita-Oneness!

Credits: Images and links from Wikimedia Commons and Pixabay.com

Ralph Waldo Emerson writes, "There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance ; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried".  

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