OGT DAILY Day One Hundred and Forty One DUALITY

Duality is an inescapable feature of being human; our continual oscillation between sleep and waking; alertness and relaxation; laughter and tears; strongly held passions of love and hatred.  To be human is to experience the dual nature of reality.   The determinist philosophers see duality as an aspect of religious belief, while they hold that consciousness is the result the physical presence of electrical pulses within the brain and the evolutionary development of these impulses over millennia to become the layers of a mind.   Here in lies the contradiction for me.   Religious philosophy of all kinds from Christian to Buddhist speak of prayer as a way of being with God or recognizing that God resides within us.  That we must transcend "samsara" - as the Hindu refer to the human cycle of birth, suffering, death, rebirth - by recognizing our own "oneness" with God or divinity.  

Or perhaps for me it is really the acceptance of duality as recognition of humanness, which is freeing. We can choose to remember that any state of being or feeling, both painful and ecstatic will eventually be balanced by its opposite.  If we can hold these dual forces than we attain balance and a form of oneness.   Whether there is a divine entity or not seems beside the point to me of the grace and harmony achieved within ourselves when we find balance.  

detail from the Fall of Icarus - Breugel the Elder

Rubens

I'm reminded today of the urge in science to push further and further toward the edges of reality and answers to the questions of our origins in the cosmos.   In 2018 NASA plans to send a probe, which will fly directly to the sun's corona where temperature reach 1 million degrees Fahrenheit.  Humans have always worshiped the sun, source of all of our light, and perhaps our conceptions of God. Greek god Icarus flew too close to the sun and for his hubris was thrown into the sea when his waxen wings melted.   Humanity will ever strive to reach for union with this higher light, and transcendence from the stress and strains of our world.   I'm inclined to believe we can strive to find it here within each other.  Namaste.

Model of solar probe