Rand: I’m going to kill the Dark One. I’m not just going to seal up the Dark One, I’m going to end him. 
Moiraine: The dark one is beyond killing.
Rand: I think I can do it …
Moiraine: The Dark One is part of the Wheel.
Rand: No. The Dark One is outside the Pattern, not part of the the wheel at all.
(Book 14 Wheel of Time – A Memory of Light)

What if it’s not a world of duality at all, of God and the Dark One, of good and evil? What if separation in all its forms never was? What if illness, evil, poverty, anger, hatred, greed, pride and injustice are just illusions without a speck of ground upon which to stand? What if they actually, factually are nothing more than smoke and mirrors?

A few weeks ago I was taking my medication and spent a little time raising the pill’s resonance before popping it into my mouth. I could feel the love, the purity of life and love in all things, but when I said I ‘accept all the goodness’, this errant mind said, ‘and the bad’. I watched this mechanical response over the course of weeks and every time I spoke of good, mind added bad. I wasn’t making a conscious decision to add it. It was robotic. It almost convinced me that good automatically included bad. I’d been surrendering for so long to all that life presented – and much would easily be termed bad – that I had unconsciously concretized the worldly belief in duality as reality. It lived inside me no different than my physical heart.

It’s not surprising that spiritual people flee this world. People literally die to get out of here.

I admit, it seems like all sets of opposites exist in the world of duality – good and evil, black and white, love and fear. But do they really? When consciousness resonates in the reality of duality they appear to. That’s a given. But, when consciousness remains conscious of Itself, as the True Nature of all nature,  consciousness remains conscious of that which resonates as duality but is no longer ruled by it –  In the world but not of it.

That’s a grand insight, all the more grand when it is preciously integrated as truth, but what’s it actually good for? We can watch but not play? Now that doesn’t make god-sense at all.

The assumption that we cannot avoid the consequences of duality when we step back into the world of form, when we act from within the world, is not a given. Although if the idea is to avoid the consequences it would be true – since any attempt to avoid something implies we believe it to be real. ‘Are at the effect of’ might be a better term than ‘cannot avoid’. Contrary to popular opinion, that assumption is off the mark, and it deftly steers us back into the territory of the separate self. It’s a tricky little mirage.

It is true if consciousness falls back into the resonance of the reality of duality, if consciousness descends back into hell. But what if It doesn’t fall back into the old storyline? We can be of this world while walking upon it, while living in it. Perhaps, just perhaps, we’ve missed the point entirely and what it means to walk this earth is to walk as consciousness in form, to love as consciousness unconditionally. Maybe this isn’t a training ground at all but something much more brilliant.  

So many awaken, put the plaque on the wall, and leave the world behind, standing as consciousness but no longer active participants in this marvelous world. What if that’s not what we are here for? What if we are to walk this land like the masters before us, unaffected by ideas of death and thereby able to raise the dead, able by our model to lift the consciousness of those who put their faith in duality’s reality? What if we are radical love’s presence, immune to the touch of a leper’s hand, while capable of spreading love and healing not by intent but by simple presence? What if we are alchemy itself, able to open our hands and create at will?

What we believe we see. Our beliefs limit us, limit even our ability to see them, let alone see beyond them. They limit the outpouring of unlimited expression, that which we are. Belief in duality, that there is good and bad always results in split manifestation. Most believe this is a world, a realm of both possibilities and impossibilities where suspicion, sickness, and suffering are as natural as love, wellness and happiness, perhaps more so. What if that isn’t true? What if it was never intended to be a playground of duality? What if we had it all wrong? What if we kill the idea of a Dark One (for that is all it is) and the wheel keeps on spinning?