Dualistic thinking Options

Dualistic thinking is very relevant to people following spiritual paths of any kind, since it involves believers who claim to see and experience another existence and others who having not experienced anything they would describe as other-worldy, disregard these claims and it therefore divides people into two camps.

The language used is also a form of dualism as it separates entities into good and bad and places into discrete areas thus: Heaven and Hell.

Is dualistic thinking useful and a good way of hanging ideas on hooks for further exploration or does it lead to extremes of thought that lack balance and settle people into positions that are hard to find their way out of?

My apologies to Mediocracy. I was not attacking you in anyway. What I was doing was creating real life excamples. You took my words in a specific way and judged them, catagorized them. You felt attacked while in fact this was not my intent. This is how confrontations between people start, even large scale wars, while in fact they could've been avoided.

This topic is indeed about Dualistic Thinking and that covers a large variety of things to discuss, basically anything which is opposit of one another. The reason I took the "good vs evil" route was because it was already partially initiated in another topic. Also because this is the direction which is most obvious to people. An everlasting topic which you also see in movies just as well as in real life interactions between people.

To the question if I practice dualistic thinking...well who doesn't one way or another? Yet I'm trying to understand and learn to stop it within myself. Seeing this is not an overnight thing to change it takes time. It means altering the current way of thinking. The first step is being conciously aware of what you're doing and then slowly alter it to what you want. Seeing things for what they are, without judgement, allows you to initiate change. So yes I am capable of using certain aspects of non-dualistic thinking in my favor. I get better and better at it as well.

There are always opposites such as Yin and Yang, Small and big, Day and Night, man and woman...finding the common ground of everything is when you can start to see things for what they are. The dualistic thoughts and boxed thinking will deminish in due time once you gained that type of understanding of the teaching. Whether you try to follow the teaching is up to the individual themselves. Saying that you follow a certain path doesn't automatically mean you've complete understanding or power over it. That will grow in due time.

I've said my piece about good vs evil and am interested about taking this topic in other directions of Dualistic thinking. So take it off and see where it ends shall we (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)