Mr. Not-A-Thing replied to my statement that in a non-dual reality, “ You can’t have your cake and eat it too.”
He said, “ If you believe that you are the ego, then you deny oneness with the unified field of existence. And if you believe that you are one with the unified field of existence, then ego doesn’t exist. It can’t be both ways in the same moment.”
And I said, “I have a “yes but” for you based on one of your ideas i.e. that the ego doesn’t exist. I know what you mean, assuming that reality is non-dual. You mean that a thing and its opposite can’t exist simultaneously. It’s an “either/or,” not a “both and”. But if there is something to be known, assuming that reality is a duality, then ignorance of that something exists and that “something” is you, consciousness, the factor that knows both what is known and what isn’t known, in which case it can be both ways.
That leaves us with a doubt about the nature of reality. Is it dual or non-dual? It can’t be both because you can’t have it both ways as you say. If you have it both ways then duality is real and you can’t tell which reality is real and which isn’t. If that’s the case, you won’t get out of bed in the morning to pursue your desires, because you won’t know which of the objects of your desires is real and which isn’t, not to mention you won’t know which of your many desires themselves are real. Real…the word…indicates something that stands on its own i.e. doesn’t require a second thing to justify its existence.
But, what if reality is neither non-dual or dual? What if they are just concepts that exist only as concepts to help non-existent 🙂 egos discriminate i.e. choose between one thing and another, which they do all the time. In fact, an ego is just a sense of agency, not an actual living entity, unless it is non-separate from the ever-present conscious self. That leaves us with the fact that I, the self, is existence shining as consciousness, which is not a duality in so far as you don’t exist unless you know you exist..which you do…and you don’t know you exist unless you exist…which you do. In metaphysics this fact is called dependent origination. One thing can’t originate. Creation takes two.
The ever-present unborn always available unborn I…myself…is neither dual nor non-dual. It just is. So all one can say…if one speaks the truth…is “I,” a statement that does not imply duality. Nothing is opposed to myself…the “I.” I embrace every thing that appears in me. Each and every word that follows the word I, which accurately identifies me as reality, is as good as non-existent because I, existence shining as awareness, am unborn. If I was a created self, I would be modified by what seemingly happens, but I never change. Thanks to ignorance, objects pretend to be real and present themselves to me. But since they are born of ignorance they aren’t real and have no effect. Aren’t you the same unborn awareful entity today that you were the day your body appeared?”