Non-duality and cognitive dissonance

 09/21/2023

Non-duality and cognitive dissonance pt. 1

[opening shot, sitting by the river]

“I will begin by stating that I refer to non-duality

in the most naive sense of the word. All is one, and one is all.

Nothing is entirely separate or isolated from anything else.

That is what I mean by non-duality, and of course to the average western mind, raised on active categorization of every possible thing into separate discrete words it sounds ridiculous.

And I suppose it is, that's what I like about it.”


[insert clip of Miriel pastor of vows saying: "Oh, what have we here? Very well, let us both learn together. Heresy is not native to the world; it is but a contrivance.

All things can be conjoined."]


“But before we understand non-duality we must understand duality first. Distinction is the splitting of one thing into two things. Light and dark, good and evil, up and down, and so on.”


“ The very simplest rational activity, perhaps the first rational thing a baby does is discover when something is there, and then it is not there. We call it peekaboo!

It is hilarious to a baby, and for good reason.”

“ The baby has a disappearing and reappearing happy face to entertain them. Here and not here. It is the first joke, and it is marvellous.”


“The Book of Genesis opens with a creation story. There is dark, then light. There is an ocean, then sky. And so on. Before this all was one, formless and void. Nothing, then something.

I could go on like this for ages, because opposites are everywhere all the time.

Duality is the human condition.”


“ We see separations without effort, we assume that. We discovered the separation between atoms, the separation between the electrons and the nucleus.

There is more empty space between things than there are things! How is the universe even held together at all, when entropy is causing all matter

to dissipate out into the cold distance of space? Gravity.”



“Mass brings everything toward it, brings us down to earth.

Sameness weighs upon us. Get up, go to work, brush your teeth, greet the customer. Eat the peanut butter and jelly sandwich every day. Your back hurts in the same place,

so you take the pills to feel no pain. You drink to erase the thought, to erase the separation from your loved ones with the bliss of forgetting.

Everything is terrible, everything is great.

It cannot go on like this.”


“I want to hop back in time, I want to visit Ancient Greece. Socrates and his students are hanging out and trying to outsmart one another.

They come up with this basic method of figuring things out, it goes like this. One guy comes up with an idea, they call it a thesis (which just means proposition, or proposal).

So one guy says his thesis, and another guy makes the opposite argument, or anti-thesis. So they go like this back and forth for a while, and eventually they reach a compromise,

each of them made some good points, and the stuff they agreed on ended up as a synthesis (or composition, product if you will).

And Socrates was so good at this that it got him killed.”


“Now this way of figuring things out came to be known as a dialectic. Philosophers did things with it over the years, most famously Hegel and Marx.

But dialectics is not just for philosophers, it's for everybody.”


“Let's go back to that first distinction from the creation story. Darkness and light. If your thesis is dark, the antithesis must be light. What could possibly bring them together,

what compromise? They are opposites, no? Let’s look behind us, what we cast tells us the answer. The Shadow, the union of opposites. In colour, we call it grey.

But this union is peculiar, because instead of simply making a third thing that is the opposite of the first two, it is a blend of the two that creates an entire spectrum.

There is infinitely more possibility in the space between darkness and light. They are both present at once.

And of course, the same is true for every colour, and every combination of colours. In the space between the absolutes is the infinite.”

[shot of the river]

“This is our first lesson in non-duality

.” //

9/24/24 //

Dictation by voice is a skill that takes some, hmm, practice I suppose.

, I am tapping my foot right now slowly 1212 then binary, 01010101 stop.

When at 0 like hypostatic I stop moving, observing my surroundings I just wait look and listen. Stop look and listen

, try listening to your surroundings there are deep tones and high tones and medium tones of sound and light and motion.

, our body, our senses, all our senses in fact, detect… in panoscopic space.

🤷🏻‍♂️🤣🫡