The 'Purpose' of Everyday Dualities

[Himanshu]

Leo's latest video on scientific dualities triggered a deep sense of discomfort within me, for good. It felt like falling in an endless well. It started with panic (of having lost the pointers to map my experiences) and soon transformed into bliss (of realizing that I was the creator of those categories anyway, and I can make them as up as I want, if I want).

My mind tends to be really active in symbols and symbolic imagery, and with the intention of integrating this with my everyday life, I started to wonder what the role of symbols (like the language I am using to get this across to you) is - in the whole network of reality.

Have you seen a Rainbow? It doesn't just have seven colors. The distinction between what we call Violet and Indigo is not easily discernible. 

An example, quoted from an Environmental Psychology book 'Drunk Tank Pink'

 

 

 

 

 

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In 1672, Sir Isaac Newton passed a beam of white light through a clear prism and projected the resulting rainbow against the wall of his laboratory. He perceived five distinct colors within the rainbow, which he labeled red, yellow, green, blue, and violet. These labels pleased him for a while, but he believed that colors and musical notes shared a single structure and that both fell along seven-step octaves. So he returned to his rainbow and decided that a thin sliver of orange fell between thicker bands of red and yellow, and a subtle strip of indigo fell between the blue and violet bands. The resulting seven-colored rainbow is the one we know today. 

As it turns out, Newton’s choice was far from trivial, because colors and their labels are inextricably linked. Without labels, we’re unable to categorize colors—to distinguish between ivory, beige, wheat, and eggshell, and to recognize that broccoli heads and stalks are both green despite differing in tone. To show the importance of color labels, in the mid-2000s, a team of psychologists capitalized on a difference between color terms in the English and Russian languages. In English, we use the word blue to describe both dark and light blues, encompassing shades from pale sky blue to deep navy blue. In contrast, Russians use two different words: goluboy (lighter blue) and siniy (darker blue).

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While the English students probably looked at the target blue square and decided that it was “sort of lightish blue” or “sort of darkish blue,” their labels were never more precise than that. They were forced to decide which of the other blue squares matched that vague description. The Russian students were at a distinct advantage; they looked at the square and decided that it was either goluboy or siniy. Then all they had to do was look at the other squares and decide which one shared the label. Imagine how much easier the task would have been for the English students if they had been looking at one blue square and one green square; as soon as they determined whether the target square was blue or green, the task was trivially easy. In fact, an experiment published one year later showed that Russian students perceive dark blue to be just as different from light blue as the color green is from the color blue to English students.

A 'thing' does not exist until it is categorized in some fashion. A category does not exist until it is 'defined' within rigid boundaries and is given a name.

This seems obvious when you get it. Leo's 3 part series on Dualities is to trigger an unlearning process of the 20 years of schooling / scientific indoctrination. 

Analysis is crucial for intellectual work. For finding distinctions, developing a set of characteristics that define it and studying those set of characteristics to form conclusions. But the problem with this approach is that Analysis leaves out more than it covers. We keep adding new words into our dictionaries every year because new concepts are born every year. Further, different cultures have a fundamentally different concept of, for example, time. 

Synthesis attempts to rectify this problem by zooming out as wide as possible and noticing all the subtle and nuanced ways everything is networked together.

True Holism is the integration of Analysis AND Synthesis. 

[Leo Gura]

42 minutes ago, Himanshu said:

My mind tends to be really active in symbols and symbolic imagery, and with the intention of integrating this with my everyday life, I started to wonder what the role of symbols (like the language I am using to get this across to you) is - in the whole network of reality.

This is a supremely important question. I encourage you to really contemplate it and research it deeply.

The mind is almost entirely symbolic. But what are symbols? What is language? These are not easy questions to answer but in them lies to key to liberation from the mind.

[Hello from Russia]

@Leo Gura

I also found that contemplating those questions (symbolism and language) gives an enormous boost to your effectiveness in practical matters. For example having more understanding and awareness on how symbolism works helped me to improve as a graphic designer a lot as this profession is all about communicating certain messages through symbolic elements. This work indeed improves your life on very practical earthly levels too.

[Joseph Maynor]

 

[Joseph Maynor]

Think about this: duality is a duality too, see.  You have to transcend the Mind 100%.  It's useful though to go through all this duality material though, don't get me wrong.  Duality vs. Non-duality is a duality.  This is why you need the Zen Mind aka Satori.

Recommended reading: study this carefully

https://terebess.hu/zen/mesterek/Suzuki-DT-Introduction-Zen-Buddhism.pdf

Edited April 21, 2019 by Joseph Maynor