Tiffany Godley
Stepping Stone 13 Guide
"I am really just a learning and growing individual who finds joy in connection, silliness, and the practice of finding meaning in the malaise."
Up. Down. Right. Wrong. True. False. Smart. Stupid. Quiet. Loud. Outside. Inside. Democrat. Republican. Gay. Straight. Religious. Atheist. Entertaining. Boring. Beautiful. Ugly. Broken. Whole. Logic. Intuition. Fact. Fiction. Give. Take. Love. Hate.
What’s the story here? What do you notice about this collection of words? What comes up for you as you take them in?
It is likely that you pick up on a few things relatively quickly. For example, you might be thinking these are all contradictions… opposites—e.g., up is the opposite of down, right the opposite of wrong, true the opposite of false, and so on. This simplistic, either/or way of perceiving the world is commonly referred to as dualistic thinking or simply, dualism.
"We live in a world that is far too nuanced and complex to be understood in simplistic this versus that terms."
It appears that much of the suffering and dysfunction in the modern world is rooted in dualistic thinking. Indeed, as author and activist Satish Kumar writes, “All the big problems in the world today are rooted in the philosophy of separateness and dualism.” By recognizing the prevalence of dualistic thinking, we may be able to see, with clearer eyes the divisive world that we now inhabit. Indeed, the word pairs that I introduced (above) reveal our tendency, as humans, to separate reality into what we regard as better (superior) and what we perceive as worse (inferior). You can check for this tendency within yourself by noting how you may have automatically assigned superiority to one word in each pairing—e.g., smart over stupid; beautiful over ugly; broken over whole.
But the larger truth here is that we live in a world that is not so much Either/Or as it is Both/And. Said differently, we live in a world that is far too nuanced and complex to be understood in simplistic this versus that terms. For example, as revealed in the steppingstone section entitled “The Myth of the Separate Self”, each of our bodies is home to roughly 30 trillion microbes, the great majority of which are essential for our health and wellbeing. In this light, it is no exaggeration to say that each of us is a “walking microbial colony”—i.e., we are BOTH human AND microbial!
This is hard for many of us to reckon with insofar as we have been conditioned to see ourselves as separate, autonomous beings, living in an Either/Or … Us vs. Them world, instead of experiencing our lives from an open-ended, Both/And perspective.
When it comes to living my life, day-by-day, I am beginning to realize that separation is a myth. Everything INTER-IS. Indeed, by succumbing to dualism, we participate in the creation of a world marred by violence, arrogance, fear, separation and suffering. BUT, of course, this need not be. Indeed, it is by taking time to acknowledge the negative ramifications of our dualistic mindsets, that we might free ourselves from the trance of dualism.
