Duality is a human, Earth construct designed to help us explore experience. Humans naturally divide things into piles—good and bad, right and wrong, wet and dry, up and down, north and south, east and west, and many more. Because of our limited perspectives, we need those opposites (dualities) as a means of understanding our experience, as that’s the only way we can do it. Without up, we wouldn't understand down. Without left, we don't understand right. Without good, we wouldn’t understand bad. Obviously, the reverse is also true for each of these things.

Duality helps to reinforce our natural human desire to judge things (that’s how we put things into piles). It creates a scenario where people spend a lot of time trying to shut down the things they don’t like without understanding that we can't shut duality off. We need those opposites and extremes.

What you'll notice is that the duality of experience is parallel to the duality of emotion. Both experience and emotion happen on a spectrum or scale. We have the extremes, but we also have a lot of gray area in the middle. Humans are here not only to explore the physical world but also to understand and feel the wide range of emotions available to us. Even if we could shut off experience, we can’t change the emotional range, meaning we’d just feel more extreme emotions in response to much less extreme experiences. That might seem like a good idea from where we are now, but if you really begin to think about it, it’s actually quite bizarre. Imagine the most extreme overreactions to simple things—that’s exactly what life would be like all the time.

Logically, the story we want to tell ourselves is that if those experiences aren’t happening, then the emotions don’t need to be felt. Humans would simply adapt their emotional range over time. Here’s the problem with that: we’re here to feel the emotion. We can’t change that. Humans will feel emotions regardless of what experience is needed to trigger them. Don’t forget, humans don’t need experience to trigger emotions. Our own minds can do that for us just by sitting alone on our couch at home.

Since we’re stuck with the emotional range, it doesn’t make sense to try to limit experience. But what about suffering and pain? We need to remember that experience remains neutral. It’s just something that happens. Your reaction to it is, for the most part, a choice. You get to decide how to feel about what happens to you. If you choose to hold onto the experience and tell a painful story about it, then you’re going to create your own pain and suffering. There is the triggered, immediate reaction you might have to the experience, which may be somewhat out of your conscious control, and then there is the conscious response to the experience that happens after the experience is over. What we’re aiming for is to take conscious control as soon as possible in order to prevent self-inflicted pain caused by the story the mind makes up.

What most people don’t see is that they create a lot of their own pain and then blame the experience for it. They don’t understand what the mind is doing with the experience. They don’t understand that blame, shame, guilt, and victimizations are stories the mind makes up to protect itself. A story like blame doesn’t allow a person to actually take full ownership of their own thoughts and feelings because they spend their time blaming the experience for how they feel instead. That perpetuates a painful story that isn’t true, which then becomes self-inflicted pain that gets blamed on the experience.

When we stop doing this to ourselves through self-mastery and self-awareness, the experience becomes less important. If the experience is less important than we’re less likely to need to change or limit it in some way. We’re more likely to allow the experience to happen because we understand how to manage ourselves within it. We’re no longer at the mercy of our experience in terms of how we feel in our day-to-day lives.

We make duality the bad guy. Duality is the villain in the story. Without duality, if everything was all good all the time, we wouldn’t have all this pain and suffering. But that’s simply not a true story. Humans will feel the range of emotion regardless. Shutting off certain types of experience won’t fix that.

The idea behind non-duality and non-judgment is to allow the experience to just be there. If you believe in a higher power, sometimes it brings up the question of how or why a higher power would allow these experiences to happen. It’s simply because the higher power doesn’t put experience into piles. Without judgment there really isn’t a duality. The higher power is, of course, aware of the duality but simply sees it as a spectrum of experience without judging one end or the other as good or bad. This perspective reflects the idea of non-duality: accepting the full range of experience without dividing it into opposites. From this viewpoint, the higher power understands that humans need to experience the entire spectrum in order to fully comprehend any one part of it, because that’s how we were created.

These constructs are hard for people to accept. We have an innate desire to remove pain and suffering. We want to protect each other. We want to help each other. We’ve also created a lot of societal constructs around these ideas, which offer a lot of pain. We have, to some degree, began idolizing self-sacrifice. We fight for loyalty to a fault. We choose to stay in painful relationships because we’ve been told we’re supposed to. There is a degree of fear of what happens if we don’t meet these expectations, as well. All the while, we spend our time blaming the experience for how we feel. We try to get control over other people. Some people try to manage their realities in such a strict manner that they end up isolating themselves, all in an attempt to protect themselves from the story of blame they continue to tell.

To fully live in a dualistic reality, we must balance our acceptance of the experience as just a thing that happens with an awareness of our tendency to judge and divide experience into piles. When we do this and use self-mastery to manage ourselves within the experience, we can free ourselves from it. We can manage our judgment, interpret the duality without reacting to it, and drop the stories of blame, shame, guilt, and victimization that keep us stuck in pain.

In the end, duality isn’t something to fight against, but something to understand and navigate with awareness. By embracing the full spectrum of experience, we learn that pain and pleasure, joy and sadness, are simply different ends of the same scale. Through self-mastery, we can choose how we respond, not only to external experiences but also to the stories our minds tell. When we release judgment and stop blaming external circumstances for our pain, we take back our power to live fully in the present moment. The key lies in recognizing that duality is not the problem—it’s how we perceive it that shapes our experience.

How would your experience change if you stopped judging and labeling every moment, allowing it to simply be what it is? Let me know in the comments!

Love to all.

Della