My mind keeps telling me that life is a game. Maybe everyone in your life has a something to teach you, and duality is just part of the game.
My mind keeps telling me that life is a game. Maybe everyone in your life has a something to teach you, and duality is just part of the game.
I think that the issue is that when someone says life "is" something, the identification of life with a concept causes us to limit our perception to whatever parts of life fit the concept. It's fun to think of life as a game, or something else. But that doesn't mean life "is" that thing. To me, life is kinda strange. Of all the possibilities for anything to exist, what exists is what we see daily: floors, walls, ceiling, beds, tables chairs, nature, sidewalks, etc. Isn't all that kinda weird if you think about it? The fact that anything exists at all, and apparently without explanation, is odd.
If you ask yourself why, a megaphone doesn't suddenly pop into existence and start telling you why. You can ask yourself why your whole life, and reality sits there, mute, and just keeps going.
People play a lot of games in the current era, so there's a tendency to think of life as a game. We live in a society with advanced technology that humans didn't have when we first evolved. Living in a society causes some to think that we're living "in a simulation." But that's still just an idea, and one that's a result of something we encounter daily.
Some mystics think that reality and each individual entity in it are emanations of the unbounded infinite ultimate "reality." That possibility makes sense to me, because I often think in terms of Socionics, and the abstract principles of the types appear to exist in each human individual. The abstract principles are kind of like prisms that reflect different shades of light.
In the Tree of Life of Kabbalah, there are 8 sephira (spheres) other than the ultimate sphere called Kether and the fully manifested sphere called Malkuth. And, coincidentally, there are 8 information elements. There are 8 basic Chinese trigrams, 2^3 because yin/yang repeated 3 times gives you 8 possible outcomes. Curiously enough, each information element has 3 parts, each part of which has 2 options. Eight again.
The Enneagram has 9 types, but type 9 is often described as a composite of all the other 8 types, and is referred to as the "king" of the Enneagram. The Tree of Life has 3 triads. So does the Enneagram.
Duality might be a necessity for consciousness, because how can you be aware of any one thing without being aware of what is not that thing? And yet the things are up to you. You can notice a tree, or trees, or a forest. You can have a table, a chair, a table and a chair, or maybe a restaurant or a kitchen. You can make other divisions like canopies, or table legs. The things appear arbitrarily definable forever. But you still only notice them because there are things that are not them.
Any way we define or describe life necessarily must not be it, because to describe something necessitates leaving something else out.
Duality is the ultimate necessity of experience, because to experience anything, there seems to be necessary an experience and an experiencer. Perfect unity of consciousness is unconsciousness.
Last edited by Aramas; 04-17-2020 at 04:12 PM.
I would rather think of things (chairs, floor, nature) as materialization of ideas, because behind every "organized" form of matter there is a specialized significance, even though one can think of many utilities for different objects, but in general, what makes something what it is is some previous adaptation to some practical purpose or just the result of circumstances leading to an arbitrary adjustment to the environment. Some would call it vital force of nature, or God, but there is basically some idea behind anything that can be sensed