Duality

[ARTICLE UNDER CONSTRUCTION]
[ARTICLE UNDER CONSTRUCTION]

Duality (from the Latin word duo meaning "two") denotes an opposition or contrast between two concepts or two aspects of something.

Mme. Blavatsky wrote:

The odd numbers are divine, the even numbers are terrestrial, devilish, and unlucky. The Pythagoreans hated the binary. With them it was the origin of differentiation, hence of contrasts, discord, or matter, the beginning of evil. . . With the early Pythagoreans, however, the duad was that imperfect state into which the first manifested being fell when it got detached from the Monad. It was the point from which the two roads—the Good and the Evil—bifurcated. All that which was double-faced or false was called by them “binary.” ONE was alone Good, and Harmony, because no disharmony can proceed from one alone.

Manvantaric impulse commences with the re-awakening of Cosmic Ideation (the “Universal Mind”) concurrently with, and parallel to the primary emergence of Cosmic Substance—the latter being the manvantaric vehicle of the former—from its undifferentiated pralayic state.

Both of these aspects of the Absolute — Cosmic Substance and Cosmic Ideation — are mutually inter-dependent.

It will be apparent that the contrast of these two aspects of the Absolute is essential to the existence of the “Manifested Universe.” Apart from Cosmic Substance, Cosmic Ideation could not manifest as individual consciousness, since it is only through a vehicle of matter that consciousness wells up as “I am I,” a physical basis being necessary to focus a ray of the Universal Mind at a certain stage of complexity. Again, apart from Cosmic Ideation, Cosmic Substance would remain an empty abstraction, and no emergence of consciousness could ensue.
The “Manifested Universe,” therefore, is pervaded by duality, which is, as it were, the very essence of its EX-istence as “manifestation.” But . . . the opposite poles of subject and object, spirit and matter, are but aspects of the One Unity in which they are synthesized.

In human nature, evil denotes only the polarity of matter and Spirit, a struggle for life between the two manifested Principles in Space and Time, which principles are one per se, inasmuch they are rooted in the Absolute. In Kosmos, the equilibrium must be preserved. The operations of the two contraries produce harmony, like the centripetal and centrifugal forces, which are necessary to each other—mutually inter-dependent—“in order that both should live.” If one is arrested, the action of the other will become immediately self-destructive.