What Is Duality and Nonduality: The Pink Chair Phenomena

To identify and recognise any form of life, humans have categorised characters of everything observable for ease of communication and understanding. The brain, to recognise an object, has to define it. For example “a tree”. Now most of us know what a tree is, but have you asked this question; does the tree know it is a tree or do squirrels and birds that live inside it also think and recognise it as a tree? I highly doubt it. This means by recognising a tree as “other” we end up recognising “I” as a separate self, the assumed separate self. 

This concept of “I” and “YOU”, black and white, dark and light, creates the concept of duality when we observe reality with the filters of a brain. The brain, being physical in nature, is purely dualistic in nature. It knows the difference between hot and cold, without us realising that in reality “cold” and “hot” don’t exist. They exist purely in comparison to the observer and the experiencer. You only feel something is cold because your body temperature is higher than the object. The object itself is neither hot nor cold - it is just how it is. 

When the mind creates this separation between all things observable by the sense, it also creates preferences for these objects. By preferring one over another, we create a world where one situation and scenario is better for our minds than others. By defining, liking and having a preference for a specific colour, we are in essence disliking, or having less of a preference, for another. 

This phenomenon carries through into every aspect of human life. By defining ourselves as anything i.e. associating oneself with a gender, culture, religion, cult, neighbourhood, colour, race, nationality, school, sports… or anything at all, we create a sense of “another” 

This concept of everything having two different and opposing sides is the concept of duality. This understanding of the reality is the root cause of all social and economic problems the world has ever faced. It is this concept of “us” and “them” which has led to all wars, all conflicts, all pain and all atrocities in the world. Surely, when you realise there is no “other”, one can’t be in constant conflict with itself, can it?

Non-dualistic thinking remains at the heart of all religions which define god as one shared force which is everywhere and nowhere. These theologies also believe this force, being present everywhere, is also within and it is shared amongst all beings and non beings. How can anything be “this” or “that” if this is the case? 

We will discuss non-dualistic thinking in a lot more detail later in the book as this is at the heart of all spiritual thinking. However, it is a very difficult concept to a) understand and b) experience so we have to go back to unfolding the immense amount of conditioning our brains and body experience on a daily basis. 

As the 10-month long post graduate degree was drawing to a close, the pressure of finding a job to remain in the UK was building up. Towards the end of the course, I had to move out from the university accommodation and find my abode, which wasn’t fun for a student who doesn’t have a job and very limited reserves. Not to mention the limited student visa, which was a no-go area for many landlords. 

You know sometimes we meet people who we consider brave and adventurous. Or someone who has so much energy that is not easily understood. This happens when you, the conscious being, knowingly controls your brain. Its not that you control it per se, but the source of thought and action is from a drive inside. One factor is health and youth and the other is minimal planning and hence very little fear of the future. As we get older, all we want is a house, a family a job and somewhere to settle down. Have you asked why do you want or need all these responsibilities? What kind of a fearful mind and body do these expectations create today? Are these our true desires and do they trump the desire to live a good and enjoyable life? 

When we don't expect anything, we make sure our brain is super focused on the task at hand. It somehow realises and knows that now is the only time we have. It is not the brain that knows no boundaries when you are trying to achieve the impossible, it is some other life force which inspires the brain and the body to work hard. It is what we call consciousness or the conscious being.

This force is alive in all of us and it is stronger when we are younger. It doesn’t change at all. It has always been in us since the inception of the first cell of our existence. It is always there. It is the ultimate experiencer and the observer and from your own experience of life, you know it is in constant presence. 

When we are younger, our brains are much less conditioned with the “doing” one has to do to survive and live in this world. We worry not about big mortgages, kids, schooling, family holidays, taxes, bills and whatnot. 

Most of us will agree that as time passes and the brain gets engtagled with relationships, ownership and what should be instead of looking at “what is”, it becomes more timid, scared and worried. It is constantly busy with talking, chatting and running errands. Mind you, today this problem also exists with the younger ones given the state of technology, social, instant communication and above all toxic individualistic thinking which prevails throughout the world. We have literary left everyone to their own to survive or die, forgetting that a happy human experience is a shared and mutually defined idea. Only some have the ability to realise this fact and these are the people who feel young and energetic into their later years. Only some know how to control their brains and tame it so that it becomes a tool for them to use to achieve success in the physical world. How can you be one of them? Well, it happens by chance (karma) to you as you can’t change your mind without educating it from another source apart from your own thinking. So if you are reading this and understanding the concept of reality in detail, perhaps you can be one of these beings. 

So what happens when you intellectually understand this idea of perceived and programmed reality versus actual reality? The brain needs to be calmed down and shown the truth of where it is needed the most. 

What does this mean? There are myriad practices which can be used to achieve this and all revolve around meditation. When you sit down and relax your body and observe your thoughts, the brain is essentially choosing to ignore its own workings. It is a clingy object which demands constant stimulation and entertainment but this time all it is being trained to do is remain in the now - be still and observe its own conditioning. This is meditation. 

Is it easy? No. The brain is used to all the stimuli it gets from the body interacting with any form of sensory experience. The brain loves to watch more movies, it loves to smell better perfumes, it wants to see better sceneries, it wants to taste better food, it wants to hear better music, it wants to touch more exciting objects, it wants better clothes and so on… There are no limits to its desire to know and want more, however, it being a limited object itself, it can’t ever experiences and have it all. This leaves a sense of incompleteness and wanting more in this physical world, a feeling even the richest or the most successful person will always have. 

To train the brain one has to first realise the existence of the observer: the conscious being or the real you. 

Neuroplasticity starts with understanding the nature of reality and eventually experiencing it in meditation.  

Try this practice on a daily basis and you will find great benefits from it. Restrict the needs and demands of the brain at least once a day. Tell it and make it realise who is the boss here. If you are a smoker and the craving of having a cigarette hits you, just once every day don’t give in to this desire of the brain. Literary tell your brain “not, buddy. Not this time. Next time I will listen to you” If you drink coffee first thing in the morning, try not doing that a few times a week and break your routine and habit. Tell your brain “wait, you will have coffee after the shower or exercise” It could be with anything. Food, sex, drinking, shopping - any demands of the brain and its hunger for a dopamine hit. 

This practice achieves two things for us. Firstly, you will realise the observer and the knower of these changes. Secondly, the brain becomes more amicable with new concepts and changes to events and happenings. With time, it becomes much more understanding of the constant changes around it and eventually, if you put enough time and effort into it, it will become accepting of whatever is to come its way. It will have little presence of its own and it will allow life to come to you, instead of you piercing through life and fighting will all natural life phenomena to achieve success and some kind of happiness. It will become your friend, your buddy, who is ready for anything which it observes. In the now, where all reality happens.  

This also has a tremendous impact on how the brain then categorises right and wrong. When the brain has little preferences or memory of an object or an event it desires, everything becomes wonderful. You end up experiencing everything for what it is, without any judgement and preference of the conditioned mind. Let me just also remind you that all preferences, likes, dislikes, habits, addictions, structures - everything in the mind is purely the data which was fed into you. It is of course nothing to do with your experience of life. 

When you, the assumed thinking person or Sebastian in this case, start talking to the brain, instructing your brain and taming it, you start removing old habits and concepts from this machine and fill it with a more conscious program which is in sync with the operating system and code of life. Its programming and operation become compatible with the laws of the universe i.e. consciousness or the real you.

Try this practice today with something you are used to doing and you will find immense happiness and satisfaction. 

So what have we learned today? To realise the true self, the brain has to change itself to see the truth. It has to be re-programmed to look in and understand what it has been programmed with is not the truth. It has to remove its own programming first to realise the truth about your existence. But why is it so hard? Simply because we think we are the brains and this thinking person. Does that mean, we have to eliminate our own personality, desires, wants and all knowledge of reality in order to realise the truth? We have to delete this app Sebastian in the brain for the brain to see the real me. Yes, let me explain. 

There is a way, a method to run a machine. Our body is a machine, albeit with a memory. Now what do you do when your phone storage gets full? You delete some apps & videos from before. In a similar fashion, we have to let pain, sensations, emotions & above all thoughts pass so the machine runs smoothly. But there is a big problem.

Imagine you were deleting an app on your phone which starts shouting, crying & resists being deleted. Imagine it becoming very defensive and says “hello, I am not like others. You can’t delete me” This app actually accumulates more and more data and space as the phone runs so much so that is has made a “personality” of its own. It owns the phone now!

In our body and mind, this app is our personality. This person we have come to believe we are. It shouts. It’s defensive. It doesn’t even listen to someone who is trying to help you clean up the body and mind. It says “I am different” 

You know exactly what this accumulation of thought, trauma and emotions is doing to your body. But the biggest issue is that YOU think you are this app/person and hence you don’t accept any intervention from outside. So many human beings will resist change & help because their brains are programmed to do so. And then who suffers? 

Can you delete this app yourself? Of course. Does the app/your brain have a CNTL ALT DELETE somewhere hidden inside? Yes. How do you reach it if you think you are the app itself? 

How do you remove this personality and its desires, thoughts, preferences, fear & all that when you think you are this person? The app needs to crash like hell and delete itself (a death experience in human terms) or an antivirus is installed (some mystical plant medicine experience which points towards the delete button) or an external programmer (a teacher). And what happens when this app gets deleted? Oh boy, now the brain has to do something. It has to learn. Relearn. How to live. It has to take control back from this app and all it did to itself (body and mind). This is the journey of awakening and understanding to the realisation of the truth and the real self. 

And how do WE do that? We become still. We leave the phone/body/mind to do what it’s supposed to do. We let it run on its own OS, which is the same for all of us.

It’s anatomy.

But we remain still. And the brain & body learns.

This is not an idea or a theory. This is the reality of the universe. A reality which we can only understand when we realise that the true reflection and the code of the universe itself is within us. We are a glimpse of conciseness itself and it is only by discovering our true nature, that we can understand anything about life and its laws. 

Let’s go a little deeper into this subject. The universe and life is an immense concept. A concept we can’t understand no matter how intelligent and sharp we become. We have achieved so much in science and technology in the last 100 years, however, we are not close to understanding the nature of matter or the vastness and the structure of the universe. Quantum Mechanics tries to understand the smallest forms of matter and reality, while Relativity Theory attempts to understand the very large and immense nature of the universe. These two theories have done a lot to the worldly and physical ease, pleasure and convenience of humans, but we are no closer to understanding the nature of conciseness and reality itself.

We know what we see and observe, to an extent, but what do we know about ourselves? The knower of it all. Not much! 

This is simply because the universe wasn’t really made for just humans. If you believe that then you most be smoking something very strong! 

In a hologram which spans billions of light years, our brains and senses are very minute and minuscule concepts. That means that the universe and the meaning of life can’t really be understood by the limited senses we have. To understand anything at all about life and its source, we have to understand the workings of our own existence. We have to go in, instead of out. We have to realise that our limited senses are not equipped to understand the meaning of life and we have to shut them to feel the true force of the universe itself. 

Meditation is perhaps the only way to remove the layers of all of your senses, which feed the data to the brain, and feel the true nature of your existence. Only then you will be able to clearly realise all the magic which is happening in and around you every moment. This experience of life in the now, where the brain and its conditioning is removed is our natyre state of beings. This is called a non-dual state. 

Dualistic thinking, on the other hand, also leads to categorisation and bias of individuals and their potential. In the world we live in, it is very acceptable to say “Italians talk a lot, Greeks love to have fun, Brits are always complaining on a holiday, Indians move their head while talking and so on” We make countless such jokes that borderline casual racism. The issue is not the jokes themselves but the implication such language and understanding of the world has on human life. 

During my adult life, putting me in such a box was particularly easy. Everything about me, one paper, looked foreign to most people who looked at my CV. When one identifies themselves as something and creates a feeling of “myself” the other self needs to be defined as well. This description is all the workings of the brain and is rooted in past experiences and information provided to it. This creates me and the “other”

Brits only complain and moan on holiday because that is what we think of them. This thought is helping the mind to describe a group of 50 million people! Do you think that is remotely true? Absolutely not. I can bet on this that most stereotypes are created based on a very small number of events, that are programmed and fed into your brains via media, chats, gossip, news and just second-hand stories from other people.

A conception or belief of a Brit abroad doesn’t really create many issues for anyone. However, when the belief of all people who have anything remotely to do with for example the Muslim, Pakistani or Indian culture, billions of them, it becomes a global and a very personal issue for a lot of people. 

Back in 2004, what was interesting during the time I was desperately looking for a job was the fact that I was calm as a cucumber. There was something in me which had an utmost belief that somehow it would happen. The mind, not me, was being consciously populated with thoughts of scare and fear by many people around me. I could sense the pressure and worry from my family as I only had 2 weeks of money and visa left. For some reason, I never registered when my dad was worried or my flatmate was scaring me. The fascinating thing is that once the mind realises that fear is purely the creation of its own thinking, it can ignore it. 

Unnerved by whatever worries there were in my brain, I ploughed along. Ignoring my friends' belief that remaining in the UK is a must and it is the only place which will bring me happiness. Not fearful when my dad told me he couldn’t help me as both money and visa were running out. I just did what I had to do every day and never thought about the destination of the event itself. I applied for around 50 jobs every day, not expecting any success or hinging my life on getting an interview. I just did what I had to do at that time. This frictionless living, at that time, led to miracles and eventually, all that you read here. 

I am going to tell you a little story of two delivery drivers. They were to go across London to drop a parcel at the same address before going on to the next job. They left from the same place and in the same car. Whoever reaches their first delivery point gets the next job and hence more income. 

London traffic and weather are not the most reliable when you are on a timed job. Things can, and most of the time, do go against your plan (yup just like life). This is simply because you can’t control the weather or the traffic jams. However, if you have hinged your happiness and success on the arriving at the destination without any issues or problems, you have created a preference for events, without giving a single thought of what your state  of mind will be if those events don’t happen your way. You are thinking about the destination, or the satisfaction from it, and have a whole plan on how to get there but have forgotten to live while you are getting there.

This is exactly what happened. It started pouring with rain which led to low visibility and an accident on their route. Driver A mind’s got worried, created a whole scenario and kept on repeating it. “I might lose my job, I needed the extra job today for the money, The other will win, Oh shit, Oh f*ck…” and the curses and frustration continued to rise as he decided to go on the curb which led to him crashing into a motorbike all because of his inability to focus his mind on the job at hand i.e. driving!

Driver B’s mind realised that rain and traffic were happening and there wasn’t anything he could do about it. His mind accepted that it was worried and that was also ok. His mind choose to ignore the story of life and focus on the experience of life, which is always in the now, Both driver A and B’s minds ran a similar story but the difference is that driver B’s mind was programmed to ignore it. He puts on some relaxing music and then just focuses on driving the car in an “aware” manner. 

Driver A never made it to the destination and Driver B arrived a little late but got the next job. That lateness did not affect anyone in a negative way. It was just another “happening” 

You will only arrive at a destination, or an event when you stop thinking about it. Simple.

I get asked this question a lot “If you don’t make plans then how do you live and survive?” I think this is one very interesting and real aspect of life to look at. How do you live and survive in this world of form without making a plan?

Who said I am not making a plan? The plan is to live. Happily.

The plan is to be healthy. Eat healthy. Live healthy. Perhaps fall in love. Maybe family. The plan is also to help people. The plan is to take care of my body and mind. To make reality better for all of us. 

Isn’t this the general plan of life for most, if not all of us? 

Now tell me, how much thinking do I need to do to achieve this plan? Not much I think. I just need to continue doing what I am doing now and experience live as it happens. 

We overly complicate things by planning for our wants and desires, stemming from this data-loaded mind. Add to this the fact that we plan for a certain set of events to happen, with work, love of life. We have a set idea of what “we want” and what “I” desire. All of this without ever sitting down and considering the possibility that if this massive plan of life doesn’t go according to plan what will happen? Plus given the number of events and reactions happening in the universe right now, your set process of achieving happiness is never going to work. Instead, we need to embrace every possibility which could happen. Every one of them. This means accepting life as it appears.  

How do we do that? We drop all ideas, preferences, likes, concepts and descriptions from our brains. We have no preferences for the events which unfold. Our true nature, the nature of conciseness, is abundance and joy. You only realise that you are a bundle of happiness yourself when you look “in” and feel your own presence. That is meditation. 

When I talk about planning, I am also referring to our everyday plans. Like meeting a friend for a coffee at 3pm. So should we not make these kinds of plans? i.e. becoming isolated from this world and our peers. No, definitely not. You make these plans, just like you did before.

When you realise that happiness and joy are your true nature, these feelings, which every human is chasing, are already inside you. You also realise that anything external can’t bring you happiness or sadness. It can indeed have a positive or a negative impact on the brain but not to you, i.e. the one that is ever present and ever observant. The one which is always peaceful and still. You. 

This realisation is part of the process of “awakening” and then to the journey towards realisation of the self. Realisation of the truth.

So make that plan to meet that friend at 3pm. But also tell your brain that a) I will experience whatever happens in the moments I spend with her b) I will not my mind get annoyed if she is late c) and if for some reason she doesn’t turn up, I will just enjoy a stroll and a coffee alone. 

When you start practising this way of thinking with all large and small plans, you become open to all possibilities which might appear once the brain makes the plan. You are setting yourself up for no frustration and no friction knowing that happiness already resides inside you. Learn to meditate and spend 15 mins in the coffee shop with yourself and experience the essence of life. This will make you an immensely powerful and warm person. People would want to be around you just to feel your presence simply because you have realised that the drama of the mind is just in the mind. You become an example by just living your life. This way you will get that coffee with your friend (she will never be late as she is eager to meet you), you will achieve that goal, you will love and you will succeed. 

By not having a preference for a path, event or things - you open the opportunity of finding infinite other aspects of existence and reality. Imagine if you didn’t have a preference for one colour, you would be exploring endless shades of endless colours. By having a preference of for example red, you will most of the time just experience red. You will choose red and if it's not red, you will be less happy. 

Your brain loves this thinking as it helps it to understand objects and survive in this world. 

How do we survive in this world if we don’t have an idea of what red colour is, or even what “colour” is? 

Who told you red is red? 

Who told you a pink chair is a pink chair?

I had a conversation recently about the pink chair with my sister, the person who I have always loved the most. Yes, I haven’t talked about siblings yet, but they are always present with me. Always. The love I have for them is beyond the understanding of the brain. So I am not going to try and explain it using this book or the basic tools of language. This love is eternal. 

I saw a pink chair in her house in London. I looked at it for a while and realised that it was only a chair because we all agreed it was a chair. Someone told us at some point in life that this is a chair and this is what you do with it. We were also told by another person’s brain that this colour is pink. So this pink chair only exists as a pink chair when there is a consensus amongst all about its nature. 

Simply put, we have defined and understood it based on past data in the brain. It is a pink chair for us but for someone who has never seen a chair or has any idea of colour, or more specifically the colour pink, it is not a pink chair. It is not even an object if it had not been defined by any external data or memory. It just “is”. In the same way our own existence, if not defined, is just “is”. Both the chair and that being just is, at that moment in a “happening”. In fact, everyone and everything in that moment just is, before the descriptions of the bran come in. 

There is no pink chair and there is no you. These things only exist when you give them a meaning and, most of the time it is a collective meaning or consensus. In this case, we are humans and that is a pink chair because that is what we all believe in. Simple. 

Not that simple. But its the truth. 

Simply believing in something doesn’t make it real and objective. By defining it in a certain way, it becomes a pink chair but it could have been so much more - anything you want it to be. It can have endless potential. It could be simply a beautiful pink chair perhaps? Why won’t you want to define all objects, sensations, emotions, thoughts, pains and other experienced phenomena in a way that enhances your experience of life?

This is the essence of Nonduality and Logical Humanism - to clear your mind of all conditioning as if you are cleaning a database and go inside instead of outside to redefine your reality! 

Call that chair a beautiful pink chair this time… and the next time when you look at it, you will have the chance to describe it again in whatever way