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The problem was not my questions, but my dualistic mind

Francisco Miraval

I spent many years researching and trying to understand the difference between reality and fantasy. One day, however, I realized that I fruitlessly pursuing a useless task because all reality is indeed just illusion (or maya, as the Hinduism teaches) and that illusion, even if it is just a dream, it is real enough for us, because life itself is but a dream, as Calderon de la Barca wrote centuries ago.

Once I realized the foolishness of my attempt, I was also able to realize that I was applying the same pseudo-intellectual approach to other areas of my intellectual endeavors, wrongly assuming every option was always an option only between two possibilities, this party or the other one, this system or the other one, this religion or the other one.

I them realized and remembered that those questions about choosing between two options began when I was still a little boy. People asked me, “Whom do you love the most, your father or your mother?” or “What would you like to be when you grow up, a firefighter or an astronaut? And, of course, there were questions about soccer, “Which team you root for, Boca Juniors or River Plate (or any other well-known rival teams)?”

When you are a child, you are not in position to challenge anybody asking you to divide the love you feel for your parents or the inappropriate question about the profession you will choose for the rest of your life. Also, they force you to choose, as if there were a limited amount of love and you should establish percentages of love in your mind.

Even worst, they always offer you only two choices (firefighter or astronaut), ignoring all other options. And the worst of all is that each option is presented as “the enemy” of the other one: if you like this team, then you can’t like the rival team.

In my early adulthood, there were many more disjunctives to solve, always mutually exclusive and increasingly complex, and with real consequences in real life after selecting one of the options. At that time the usual options were Protestant or Catholic, capitalism or communism, Republican or Democrat (or their equivalent in other countries), traditional marriage or egalitarian marriage, public or private education, and similar examples or “enemy” options.

Sometime later (but rather recently), I finally understood that the problem was not my questions. After all, I had enough information and understanding about the arguments for and against each option. I was the problem or, to be more specific, my dualistic mind that understood everything in terms of black or white, light or darkness, friend or foe, true or false, eternal or temporal.

I also understood that the dualistic mind has clear historical roots connected with a certain worldview which is not the only one, the most recent one, or the most accepted one. As Richard Rohr explains, the dualistic mind is immature, far removed from the multidimensional mind of the future analyzed by Howard Gardner.

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