"Dualistic Thinking is a Sickness"
- Lao Tzu
Few people would argue against the idea that humanity follows a matrix of destruction of individual health, as well as family, society, and the planetary health. At the same time the pattern of human consciousness all over the world is one of dualistic, divided thinking and awareness. Did anyone else think along the same lines of Lao Tzu and Einstein, that the dualistic division of conceptual thinking is a type of sick departure from reality?
"It is I who come from that which is integrated. ... a person once integrated will become full of light, but once divided, he will be filled with darkness."
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The seduction of conceptual thinking
This article looks at the above Lao Tzu's statement that dualistic or conceptual thinking is a sickness. As radical as it may appear, the same assertion has been echoed by one of the modern history's greatest thinkers - Albert Einstein, father of modern theoretical physics.
"Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world."
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― Albert Einstein
Do the building blocks of thinking - concepts - even come close to approximating the world we live in? Upon consideration of what concepts are, we believe that conceptual thinking is a departure from reality, a false "world" pulled over our eyes and that, behind this deceptive veil, hides the Divine we all subsist in. This veil of dualistic conceptual thinking, which Lao Tzu called a sickness, is the root for all our individual and world ills.
It is said "the devil hides in details" (pun intended)
In trying to solve problems, humans have never looked at the way we arrived at our knowledge we are so seduced by. For instance, consider the bamboo to the left. We can google the word bamboo and read all kinds of facts about it, which leads us to feel content –because we have a wealth of knowledge about bamboo. However, to really KNOW bamboo we must consider not only WHAT we know about bamboo, but HOW our early ancestors came upon their knowledge of the existence of bamboo.
We define any individual "object" or "thing" by EXTRICATING/DIVIDING it from the multitude of INDISCRIMINATE connections it is embedded in. Our concept of any given “thing”rests upon defining what it is NOT; by differentiating that thing from the things around it that we chose to ignore.
Therefore, "knowledge" of an existing “thing” is actually knowledge of "what is not that thing"... In other words, it is the lack of knowledge of how the thing is connected with everything around. Our celebrated human“knowledge,” which some see as "rivaling God's," is brought forth out of the ignorance of everything around the "things" we think we know.
Human "knowledge" is "negative" knowledge in the same way an old 35 mm film is a "negative" for the pictures developed from it. Rather than affirming the truth of what we know, our "knowledge" is imparted form, or defined, by what we do not understand. Therefore, it backfires. When the effect of ignored interconnections catches up with us, we obtain unwanted results.
How Does Dualistic Thinking Affect Our Lives?
For instance, our approaches to world problems, such as how we treat physical or mental health, are founded upon the concept that the mind, body, and spirit are separate entities. This concept handicaps our ability to obtain desired outcomes and poses a systematic problem reflected in all the mal-adaptive syndromes within all the dimensions of human life: physical, mental, emotional, social, political, international, and environmental.
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Human knowledge is made of passed-down on imaginings shaped by that which their cultures have agreed to ignore. This "knowledge" is then stored as concepts and used to make sense of reality and that in turn helps people form their sense of "self."
However, in the absence of dualistic consciousness attachments can not exist, thereby...
"The root of suffering is
dualistic consciousness"
The Esotherapy Perspective
To be able to interact "meaningfully" with other people, we have to agree to acknowledge and ignore the same things in order to have a common language. As a consequence, people are socialized to ignore the same features of reality that everyone else ignores - which is, in effect, MOST of reality.
To better understand this, think of awareness as a radio and of beliefs as radio stations. Beliefs of each culture are set to a certain "frequency" and while people interact by "tuning" into that frequency, it is impossible to listen to another "radio station". Your consciousness radio will be able to receive only transmissions in that frequency that will confirm the “reality” that frequency offers. This inability to receive other information closes people off to most of the NONDUAL reality of existence.
Is There A Way Out Of Illnesses and Suffering?
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There are a few ways out. We use Esotherapy®, an applied self-realization process that leads to
unbounded healing through a non-dualistic approach for integrating consciousness fragmentation. Esotherapy® wakes us up from our dream of separation from the environment and from each other by providing a gentle and supportive environment within which our root assumptions of what and who we really are may be gently revealed, diligently explored and challenged.