Duality and Reality by Leo

Duality and Reality by Leo - July 2016 Scholarship Essay

I have great respect for teachers, as they are people who voluntarily burden themselves with the considerable task of imparting needed knowledge to others, nurturing others’ growth, and serving as role models. This is not to say that poorly performing teachers do not exist; they certainly do. But on this matter, I consider one of my favorite quotes: “I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn’t learn something from him” (Galileo Galilei). Rather than seeing only the extremes of “good” and “bad” teachers, as social norms tend to suggest, I choose to see a vibrant spectrum of teachers, each with something unique to be learned from him or her. Even now, the unique lesson I learned ten years ago from one such person guides my thinking on this subject.
Was Kevin Hancock a good or bad teacher? I will leave that determination to the reader. All I can say is that he was one of my many teachers; one from whom I learned something significant. He told my English class this: “Humans tend to think in dualities. In reality, there are often more than two ways to look at something”. At the time, this assertion fell on my numbed ears. It was my first year of high school, which was full of complete strangers, and I was still in a mild shock from the stark change of environment. But somehow, this viral idea pierced my shell of angst, embedded itself in my mind, and lay dormant. As with many things we learn, it took years for this idea to fully resurface. It did so at a time seemingly unfitting for its relative simplicity.
About five years after that day, I lay severely injured on a hospital bed, looking at the world through strange double vision, courtesy of a rare type of stroke. A rupture in my brain had sent me through a coma, into a bizarre fusion of my conscious and subconscious minds, next to death, and out the other end of this distortion to a world in which I finally understood Mr. Hancock’s words. Humans think in dualities. I certainly did now. I thought in terms of injured and uninjured, Leo before the stroke and Leo afterwards, and real and artificial. The last duality I appropriately considered in terms of two things: firstly, the real world in which I live and the fake one I had dreamed of while unconscious, and secondly, the real world seen with one eye and the false image the other forced into my consciousness.
Even after I left the hospital and gradually resumed some semblance of my former life, the revelation that humans think in dualities continued to permeate my thoughts. It appeared when I thought about my life, my family, other people, world events, neuroscience, philosophy, mathematics, art, and more. The thought occurred to me time and time again. Why do we humans think of the future and the past? The factual and the hypothetical? Right and wrong? Light and dark? Familiar and unfamiliar? Yes and no? Left and right? Dead or alive? Are these in fact true distinctions that exist in reality, or are they constructions of our dually-fixated minds?
These questions likely seem, at best, inane; at worst, insane. Nevertheless, the words of my long-past teacher have birthed a cascade of inquiries and hypotheses in my mind as to the nature of dualities in the human consciousness. It has become an ever-present topic of interest to me. In the field of psychology, I think this to be one of the fundamental topics of interest and sources of insight into how we think. It could be comparable to a concept like inertia in physics.
My teacher’s instruction that humans think in dualities, and his further clarification that there usually exists more possibilities, has had a profound influence on my world, which I no longer let unconsciously be ruled by them. I am aware of how others and I are prone to think, and I do my best to avoid limited, inefficient thinking. I let this idea inform and color my every thought. It may be unfortunate that an extreme alteration to my life was required for me to understand the significance of this, but the teaching has since helped me understand the world. For this I am grateful to my teacher; for giving such a powerful thing to me.