An essay by Sha'Tara, local writer and friend.

The Duality Paradox

Sha'Tara ~%~)

Anyone familiar with new age talk will now think they know all about duality, as, "It's a bad thing!" Like the subject of ego (cringe!) so much disinformation has been spewed out about duality, it can make your head swim... or send you crawling back to your old religions in desperation. The problem, of course, is that "duality" is simply not understood by people immersed in Matrix propaganda. Understanding or accepting the duality principle is a major key to a door leading out of Matrix reality.

An interesting insight: "If you cannot die, then you cannot live;" or put another way, if you haven't died, you haven't lived. At the outset, that says the "immortal" gods have a serious problem: having never died, they have never lived. They come face to face with the paradox of duality and the only way out is to lie to themselves and their worshipers about their true nature: they must make-believe that they are powers above and beyond life. Therein lies the great fiefdom of the Matrix - that which rules, pretending it is unchanging: the domain of the System, of what I call the evil trinity of Religion, Government and Money. But more importantly, what it really says is that "life" in duality never ends, it just changes shape; it evolves.

What is duality? Obviously, it's the juxtaposing of opposites: up - down; left - right; hot - cold; male - female; light - darkness, or total absence of light. If you're of a religious bent, you could (erroneously) add: God - Satan for good - evil.

But this isn't the arena of theologians, scientists or philosophers: it's the everyday reality for everyone. We live within the duality paradox. And the task of the living being is to create a balance between these endless opposites. And how is that done?

Duality is the driving principle that eventually forces all of life to develop empathy or destroy itself. Since all of life must evolve, either towards higher forms, or towards destruction, only that which opens its empathic sense can survive, overcome and grow. However much "time" non-empathic life-forms use, their end is, according to the duality principle, inevitable.

What is empathy? It is that sense that prohibits anyone from harming another without feeling exactly the same it is inflicting on the other. In a sense, the empath becomes a prisoner of his own thoughts and deeds - no escape except by blocking the empathic sense, thus becoming a total sociopath. The being who deliberately shuts down his empathic sense after having awakened it can no longer "do" any good to other individuals or to society. Even his apparent good deeds, if any are forthcoming, will be a poisoned chalice. The same principle applies to any exploitative corporation or group that earmarks a share of its earnings for charitable causes. That "charity" is a poison that only an empath can sense and understand. The little good that it does is intended only to veil the great evil it depends on. Empathy is the balancing factor of life in evolution.

How is the "empathic sense" unblocked? In these worlds, the only way is by giving.

Giving - a process that comes from empathy - is an emptying. Proper or true giving is never done in the hope that something "good" will come from it. Giving is not about hope for success for that which is being given to: giving is deliberately entering the process of dying. Here, the duality paradox is able to kick in: the more you die (empty yourself) the more you live. Simple and obvious to those who live this way; incomprehensible and the subject of scorn to hedonists.

We can illustrate this by comparing our life to a cup. When we are born, the cup is mostly empty. As we learn to survive by aping our "betters" the cup fills with all the things that define us, our "stuff:" the relationships, loves, desires, controlling habits, petty jealousies, hates, cravings, pleasures, addictions, fears, belief systems, thoughts and acts. We become that which the cup contains. Once the cup is full, or practically so, we can no longer change. We can read all the great teachings, we can attend meetings, do religion, do charity, pray, hope, believe - none of that matters as long as the cup remains full. No change can ever be forthcoming. And the problem here is, that cup has come to mean more than comfort: it means life to the unobservant.

To dump out the cup and wash it out and deliberately leave it empty is tantamount to committing suicide. The old self rebels against that thought for all that it knows itself to be resides in that cup. Yet, if we are to change, assuming we find dissatisfaction with the way we see ourselves, then we must throw out the old. For only an empty cup can be filled anew and cleanly. Only with an empty cup can the spiritually awakened individual decide what goes in the cup, or rather, what must continually be emptied from the cup in order to receive the life-giving and affirming ingredients that re-fill the cup. For we do not refill our own life-cup. Our task is to continually empty it. Empathy forces that to happen. If it isn't happening, empathy is not active. And one mustn't make the mistake of thinking that if one's possessions are forcibly taken, that means the cup is empty - not at all. It has to be a personal, volitional act of self-dispossession or to put it in harsher terms, of self-immolation on one's self-altar.

Emptying one's life cup means dying to the self and leaving oneself open to new input. Perhaps the process can be likened to a complete blood transfusion when one's blood has become a poison to the body. The process is difficult to explain because there exists an infinite number of ways do this and each awakened individual must find her or his own way. We live in the shadow worlds of the Matrix; in programmed spiritual darkness. There is no understanding here. Love is substituted for empathy. Education replaces intelligence. Computers replace thinking. Man becomes machine and the Matrix wins another round - one that may well last long enough for man to destroy his bio-environment and his tenure on this world. We are driven to survive, or to get the most out of "life" as the Matrix presents it. Personal and collective selfishness or one-upmanship is the rule, the great virtue of society. It goes against our deepest desires to selflessly turn from those desires in order to serve the world in a free and unassuming fashion.

The last chance for man to change is his individual willingness to throw out all of the old ways, beliefs, systems, and to freely accept life in the duality paradox: to teach himself, individually, how to die in order to live. Not a popular thought in a hedonistic and perverted society. The Matrix is about getting, taking, and having. It is certainly not about open-ended giving. What would happen to global squirrel-cage economics if people began to realize how relatively easy it is to "cheat" the Matrix, all the powers-that-be, from God on down the hierarchical ladder, by making room in their lives for the duality paradox to work as intended? To become a balancing factor, an avatar?