Digital Duality
"You are either with us or with them", thunders a president.
"Non believers shall die" says a fanatic.
"God is supposed to do good, how can you justify existence of god when there is so much evil?" asks another agnostic friend.
The problem as anyone can recognize with little thought is not as much in not being able to finding answers to these questions. It actually lies in the way the questions themselves are posed. Everything when seen in terms of a digital reality..a hard Yes or No, good vs evil, believer vs non believer hides the kaleidoscope of colors that creation is. It fails to distinguish the subtle shades of dawn from the night that it follows and the day it precedes. As I read somewhere, light and darkness are not two opposite concepts. Darkness is not an independent entity. It is just the absence of light. Just as silence an absence of sound. Cold an absence of heat.
Perhaps this was the reason why the sages of yesteryears compared knowledge to light. Ignorance just as darkness is absence of knowledge. And curiously enough, light, heat and sound are all various forms of energy. And knowledge is power.
Then why do we all see this duality? Why can't our knowledge of these concepts give us the supreme bliss of nonduality?
Engineer in me points that man is critically dependent on senses to perceive the world. His very existence is defined by the senses that create the perception of the world around him. But then the senses are just like any other sensors we build. Every sensor has a limit of detection. Below or above that threshold it cannot detect any change. Therefore, even thought we live in a continuum we perceive things in a dualistic way after a point. We see things as light and dark, sounds and silence, right or wrong whereas in reality none of these differences exist on any scale.
Perhaps this is what is meant by the vedantic tradition that insists that the existence of man is dependent on his perception of dualism. The moment it ceases, he ceases to exist. Perhaps the quest is to go to the find the horizon where the dualism meets the non dualistic ocean of bliss.
@
"Non believers shall die" says a fanatic.
"God is supposed to do good, how can you justify existence of god when there is so much evil?" asks another agnostic friend.
The problem as anyone can recognize with little thought is not as much in not being able to finding answers to these questions. It actually lies in the way the questions themselves are posed. Everything when seen in terms of a digital reality..a hard Yes or No, good vs evil, believer vs non believer hides the kaleidoscope of colors that creation is. It fails to distinguish the subtle shades of dawn from the night that it follows and the day it precedes. As I read somewhere, light and darkness are not two opposite concepts. Darkness is not an independent entity. It is just the absence of light. Just as silence an absence of sound. Cold an absence of heat.
Perhaps this was the reason why the sages of yesteryears compared knowledge to light. Ignorance just as darkness is absence of knowledge. And curiously enough, light, heat and sound are all various forms of energy. And knowledge is power.
Then why do we all see this duality? Why can't our knowledge of these concepts give us the supreme bliss of nonduality?
Engineer in me points that man is critically dependent on senses to perceive the world. His very existence is defined by the senses that create the perception of the world around him. But then the senses are just like any other sensors we build. Every sensor has a limit of detection. Below or above that threshold it cannot detect any change. Therefore, even thought we live in a continuum we perceive things in a dualistic way after a point. We see things as light and dark, sounds and silence, right or wrong whereas in reality none of these differences exist on any scale.
Perhaps this is what is meant by the vedantic tradition that insists that the existence of man is dependent on his perception of dualism. The moment it ceases, he ceases to exist. Perhaps the quest is to go to the find the horizon where the dualism meets the non dualistic ocean of bliss.
@
posted by atma_tripta at 10:58 PM
3 Comments:
thats presuming everything is binary :)... what about our brain? The logic isn't clear yet!
That is the difficulty. Out senses by design have to be digital at some point but the mind is not.and therein rises the duality I speak of.
@
If the universe were to function only by the sanction of the human mind, then wouldnt it be one chaotic world?
The planets were rotating fine before we "discovered" them, Gravity did not wait until Newton's postulates..
An Atheist holds unwavering belief on the non-existence of God. Can he prove it? Not really..but still he believes.
That unflinching faith is what we term as God.
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