The philosophy behind duality

Gearing up for philosophy

Understanding spiritual phenomena is something that for the longest time has fascinated me, and because of it, I've created the term 'empirituality' which is meant to be the union of the words 'empiricism' and 'spirituality', as an attempt to abstract myself from the multiple spiritual theories going on at the moment (you know what I mean, angels, dimensions, the secret, aliens, Illuminati, etc.) and allow myself to take my spiritual experiences at face value and go deeper from there.

But by not being able to separate myself from the experience I'm part of (since I find any attempt at objectivity a futile exercise) it seems like this ‘empiritual’ journey has turned more into a phenomenological activity that understands the inevitability of the individual perspective without feeling a subtraction from a more integral perception.

When I was in college I’d always find it tiresome when people referred to philosophy as a ‘pothead’s discipline’; but with age, I’ve come to realise that it’s not entirely those people’s fault to have that preconceived prejudice. We live in such a utilitarian world, that indulging in the contemplation of ideas that we might not have an immediate use for, seems counterintuitive in an always productively demanding system, and rather seems as recreational as pot. But the keyword in the last sentence is ‘immediate’ since to imply that philosophy doesn’t have a utility that impacts productivity, would be fallacious.

Not engaging in philosophical questioning would reduce humans to automatons without any possibility of awe or meaning, and that would’ve made humanity perish a long time ago. Even if our meanings have been replaced with shallow shadows, I trust that all humans engage in philosophical activities in some way or another even though I also think that interrogations with big implications are usually too anguishing for most to contemplate for a long time.

The last point that I want to make in this segment is to express that for me philosophy is the most accessible and egalitarian discipline we can participate in if we understand it from a Socratic perspective, where you are not required to have recognition in academic environments or to be validated by intellectual snobs to participate in it because philosophy is so inherent to human nature that shaming someone for attempting it would be the biggest act of nescience that a person could do in their lifetime.

The neglected reality

When it comes to reality -and this word shouldn't be relegated to a materialistic perception- I always like to think of the example of the square, the cube and the tesseract. These three elements -the square, the cube and the tesseract- are basically the same object looked at from different dimensional perspectives, which means that understanding the tesseract doesn’t take anything away from the square or the cube, and yet. it provides a better grasp of this 4th-dimensional figure; just like the alchemical kingdoms, each figure is equal in nature but different in gradation.

I remember a quote -that I’ll paraphrase in a moment- provided by Richard Feynman; who is not exactly “a saint of my devotion” -as we say in Argentina-; but this example is something that I find deeply useful to comprehend the contribution of philosophy to spirituality.

In this interview, Richard was telling the interviewer that he had a friend who was an artist of a sort and this friend asked him once: “Why do you wish to understand a flower from a scientific standpoint? It takes the artistry and the poetry of it.”, to what he replied: “I also see the flower as an artistic and poetic expression of nature, and understanding it scientifically doesn’t subtract awe but adds to it”. You can see the interview in minute 36:44 at the following link, but the main point that I’m looking to make with this anecdote is that sometimes it can be very easy for us to believe that sensible or aesthetical perceptivity and rational perceptivity are two forces in dispute when they don’t need to be and in fact, they are not. What breaks my heart completely is seeing how the majority of us feel more comfortable relegating some common aspects of the human experience, like spiritual or health occurrences, for example, to one perceptivity or the other and reducing them to one spectrum.

I honestly don’t believe that “some things just don’t have an explanation” and I feel that in the aim of reaching a unified universal connection with the Cosmos -especially in the spiritual community-, we don’t realise that we’re not going back to the source by longing for simpler times but actually we’re avoiding what now it’s seen by the collective and can’t be unseen. And even if that duality is not all that exists, because I do believe that a unified perception is possible and present, I believe we won’t be able to reach it by avoiding duality but by accepting it, since duality and unity also don’t exclude each other.

But I’m being too harsh to people with predilections for the sensitive side of the perceptional spectrum -in which I find myself by the way-. My need for understanding spirituality comes from the honest inner space of being fed up with seeing very rationally attached people bastarding and invalidating any phenomenon that their mind, closeness or fear prevent them from experiencing. Our levels of individualism have reached such heights that it’s now inconceivable for us to believe that experiences that can’t be massified can exist outside our psyche or imagination, and so spirituality is separated from what is real in the collective narrative, and those who dare to say otherwise are subjected to ridicule or diminishment.

So my entire philosophical journey has been formed around the multiple spiritual phenomena imbued in my reality, always trying to avoid the upward-mentioned conspiracy theories that try to reduce reality to a simplistic and lazy comprehension most times bounded by the limitations of mortality or wishful thinking. This pursuit is not motivated by the hope of finally attaining definite proof that the spiritual realm is real but I do have the hope of at least demonstrating someday that approaching it logically is not impossible.

The ultimate duality, non-duality is the ultimate

I don’t believe that unity is a jump from this reality but actually, a natural and unavoidable progression if we stop resisting ourselves… but also if we don’t.

I was once told that science and philosophy can always be divided into Platonic and Aristotelian currents, implying that everything that is more theoric, abstracted and uranic belongs to Plato’s line of thought, and everything more empirical, materialistic and gaianic belongs to a more Aristotelian approach of discerning reality. I’d go further from there and I’ll dare to say that the duality of sensitive perception and abstract understanding is the universal duality. it’s is present in science, it is present in art -look for proportional and colour theories-, and is present in religion -otherwise, theology couldn’t exist-. Even more so, as a parallel and proportionally inversed analogy to the Platonic and Aristotelian approaches to knowledge, I dare to state that we can also develop sensitive perceptions from ideas as much as from physical stimuli per se.

I believe this duality to be the ultimate Yin and Yang that holds the key to an integrated perception of unity, and it’s only through this duality, which can also be summed up in feminine and masculine forces, that we indeed have something to experience and understand since existence can’t happen without it.

And following that premise, I want to add that in a way, I perceive myself as a protector and holder of a Divine Feminity and my philosophical journey is nothing more than an attempt to find the black dot on the white side of the Yin and Yang symbol in the hope that this integration comes faster. What makes me feel idoneous to the labour is that only those capable of recognizing, respecting and honouring their darkness can go to the other side and not lose themselves, and life has proven me worthy of this challenge many times over, since, as I mentioned at the beginning of this article, I prefer being transparent with my emotions and actions and owning them with their consequences, even at the detriment of a collective admiration or approval, than to repress them for the sake of comfort and safety.

The sensorial perceptions that have shaken the stiffness of this sceptical hegemonic narrative we call “reality” have been laid before me and, hopefully in the upcoming posts, I’ll be able to make it approachable to you too, dear reader.

Photo by Tina Bach on Unsplash