"Dualism makes you forget there ever was a whole."

## "Dualism makes you forget there ever was a whole." Dualism is a sly thief. It sneaks in through the back door of our minds, quietly erecting walls, stacking fences, creating borders within our consciousness, until we no longer remember that once, there were no divisions. In its relentless dance of opposites—good and evil, light and dark, self and other—it insists on pulling things apart, making them seem separate and self-contained. Yet in doing so, dualism blinds us to the truth that there is no real separation, only different expressions of a single, unified existence. This illusion has seeped so deeply into our lives that we come to believe in its mirages, mistaking fragments for the whole, missing the intricate latticework that binds all things together. Dualism makes you forget there ever was a whole. This fractured view we carry is not some benign belief. It penetrates our daily existence, shaping how we treat each other and how we treat ourselves. The mind begins to view the body as something "other," to be subdued or mastered. The heart sees the mind as a foreign entity to be tamed or silenced. And so we spend our lives fighting wars within ourselves, unaware that this battle is only an echo of a larger, imposed belief that things must be divided to be understood, that we can only make sense of the world by dissecting it. But can we, in truth, understand the world by slicing it into pieces? Consider a river. When you break it down, you lose the river. It becomes molecules, atoms, particles—but the flowing, unbroken nature of it, the river as an experience, is gone. The same is true of ourselves. When we break our lives into distinct compartments—into body and spirit, reason and passion, heart and mind—we lose the entirety of who we are. We lose the river of our experience, the river that cannot be neatly divided. This is the paradox of dualism: it promises understanding through division, but in reality, it deprives us of comprehension. In making us believe we are separate, isolated entities, it obscures the unity that underpins all existence. We become ensnared in the illusion of difference, of otherness, and forget the shared ground from which all life springs. The trees, the rivers, the stars, even the very atoms in our bodies—they are all dancing together in an endless cycle, breathing in and out as one being. Dualism, however, makes this invisible. It turns the symphony into solitary notes, stripping away the music and leaving only noise. Reclaiming wholeness requires courage because it means stepping away from a world that constantly reinforces separation, from a culture that insists we define ourselves by what we are *not* rather than by what we are. It means challenging the basic assumptions that have shaped our minds since birth and looking beyond them to a truth that cannot be seen or measured, only felt. It is a return to the core of being, to the truth that we are not isolated islands but part of an intricate web, connected to every living thing, each thought, every breath that has ever been taken. In our most profound moments, we glimpse this wholeness—perhaps when staring at a starlit sky, feeling the warmth of a loved one’s hand, or standing in silent awe before the vastness of the ocean. These moments remind us of something ancient and fundamental: that separation is an illusion, and we have always been part of a vast, interconnected whole. The journey of awakening, then, is not about acquiring new knowledge but about remembering what we already know. It is about peeling away the layers of dualism that have hidden the truth of our unity, until we stand naked and whole before the mystery of existence. So let us remember this truth. Let us remind ourselves daily that every division we see is a construct of the mind, a passing illusion. We are not separate; we are not alone. We are waves on the same ocean, rays from the same sun. And in embracing this unity, we heal not only ourselves but the world around us, piece by piece, bringing the wholeness back into focus until dualism loses its grip and we can see, once again, the beauty of the unbroken whole.