Moving Beyond Duality: Enough for Us All, Volume Three

By Dorothy I. Riddle

Are you free of prejudice? Less than five percent of us are because of the pervasiveness of dualistic, us/them thinking. In Moving Beyond Duality, Dr. Riddle draws on research from quantum physics, the life sciences, and the social sciences to describe our actual dynamic energetic reality and expose the unconscious habits that hold the harmful illusion of duality in place. She shows how we depersonalize ourselves and others (including nonhumans) through bigotry, dismissiveness, stereotyping, and objectification. Drawing on the latest research in neuroscience, she clarifies that good intentions are not enough to counter embedded habits. And she provides a series of practical strategies and exercises to uncover depersonalizing habits and create lasting change.

Moving Beyond Duality reminds us that it is relationship and connectedness that define uswhether by their absence or their richness. We are allhuman and nonhuman alikepart of the cosmic sea of energy that is the One Life, cherished in our diversity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Dec 11, 2015
• ISBN: 9781491782750

Dorothy I. Riddle

Dorothy I. Riddle, Ph.D., CMC, psychologist and economic development specialist, has worked and taught in more than 85 countries. Her engagement in her community and the world focuses on building bridges of understanding among persons from different cultural, socioeconomic, and faith communities while working compassionately for justice and equity. Moving Beyond Duality reflects the breadth of her awareness and her ability to integrate disparate fields into a meaningful whole and provide practical strategies for shifting from scarcity to abundance, from fear to joy.

Book preview

MOVING BEYOND DUALITY

ENOUGH FOR US ALL

VOLUME THREE

Copyright © 2015 Dorothy I. Riddle.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-4917-8274-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-8275-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2010902808

iUniverse rev. date: 12/08/2015

TABLE OF CONTENTS

License Notes

Dedication

Preface

Part One: The Habit of Duality

Chapter 1: Creating the Illusion of Duality

Chapter 2: Perpetuating the Illusion of Duality

Chapter 3: Avoiding Disconfirmation of Duality

Part Two: Recognizing Depersonalization in Action

Chapter 4: They’re Not Like Us: Hostile Bigotry

Chapter 5: They Need Protection: Benevolent Bigotry

Chapter 6: They’re All the Same: Stereotyping

Chapter 7: They Can Be Ignored: Invisibility

Chapter 8: They’re Ours to Use: Objectification

Part Three: Moving Beyond the Dualistic Model

Chapter 9: Remembering Who We Are

Appendix A: The Effects of Gendered Language

Appendix B: Scientific Findings on Nonhuman Persons

Appendix C: Statement on Race

About the Author

About the Enough for Us All Trilogy

LICENSE NOTES

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Please note that the following have been omitted from this abridged version: (a) the application exercises, (b) the research and quotation attributions that are contained in the End Notes of the print version along with over 700 research articles, (c) the list of references, and (d) the index. All of these appear in the print version, which is available from most online retailers.

Dedication

Enough for Us All is dedicated to my mother, Katharine (Kittu) Riddle, whose loving energy and inquiring spirit have brought joy to me and to hundreds of others all around the world.

It is from my mother that I first learned the meaning of abundance, as well as the worth and dignity of all beings, and began to see beyond the confines of our planetary life and to question the assumptions that seem to hold us captive.

PREFACE

The three volumes of the Enough for Us All series are designed to help us expand our vision of what is possible. In 1980, the architect and futurist Buckminster Fuller asserted that we do now have the capacity to take care of everybody at a higher standard of living than any have ever known; however, that possibility is yet to be realized. Each volume explores both the personal and the societal aspects of shifting from a preoccupation with scarcity to participation in a collaborative process, from living in fear to embracing joy. In each volume, there are many practical exercises to help us apply the concepts in daily life.

This third volume, Moving Beyond Duality, focuses on the constraints of assuming outdated Newtonian scientific principles rather than embracing the new principles that flow from quantum physics. It exposes the illusion of duality—have/have not—that underlies our fear of scarcity and attachment to violence, and it helps us recognize opportunities for lasting change.

Those who have read the other two volumes will notice a change in language in this third volume. Previously I had used the term objectification to refer generically to what happens when we treat those around us as other or them However, objectification is most commonly used to mean treating others as objects or commodities to be used, and so I am limiting objectification to that subset of attitudes and behaviors in this volume. Depersonalization seems more appropriate because it refers to the broader concept of divesting others of their individuality or beingness.

Switching to depersonalization has the added advantage of capturing the dynamic underlying a propensity towards violence that applies equally to humans and nonhumans. In the interim since writing Positive Harmlessness in Practice, I have been focused on the issues of nonhuman personhood and moral standing, given the increasing scientific evidence of a range of other species as being highly intelligent, social, and self-aware.

Moving Beyond Duality is without a doubt the most challenging, yet most important, book I have written to date. The complexity of the subject is reflected in the five-year hiatus between the first two volumes in the Enough for Us All series and this third volume.

You will find that many of the examples given have to do with sexism and misogyny. The World Health Organization has repeatedly declared that violence against women and girls is the number one human rights violation globally, yet there are very few community forums in which this issue is addressed. I believe that misogyny is the archetypical form of depersonalization—that all other social ills take their pattern from this most fundamental abuse of power. The United Nations’ resource for speakers on Ending Violence Against Women and Girls indicates that up to 70 percent of women worldwide have experienced violence, usually by someone whom they know. I have been preoccupied for years with how to address the us/them mentality that fuels violence, the dualism or distancing that is essential to justify harming another.

As with the other volumes in the series, Moving Beyond Duality draws on the seven principles that are explored in Volume One, Principles of Abundance for the Cosmic Citizen (listed below)—four that underlie how our reality operates, and three that govern our existence in the cosmos. Each discussion identifies and explores the limiting beliefs that we have acquired over the centuries. Until we are clear about who we actually are and our intended relationship with the rest of life, we are not in a position to actualize our potential and shift from fear to joy as our basic motivation. Accepting our actual reality, rather than the dualistic Newtonian model so familiar to us, is central to reversing the dualism that allows violence to occur.

Principles That Underlie Our Reality

Interconnectivity: We are all interconnected energy waves.

Participation: We create our own reality.

Nonlinearity: Our experience is fundamentally nonlinear.

Nonduality: Our reality is complex and non-dualistic.

Principles That Govern How We Coexist

Interdependence: We are part of an interdependent community of life.

Adaptability: We survive because of our ability to adapt and collaborate.

Cooperation: We evolve through symbiosis and cooperation.

Volume Two, Positive Harmlessness in Practice, explores what it means to do no harm and provides a Harmlessness Scale™ for self-evaluation. In it, we examine the concept of harmlessness and what it would mean for us to live respectfully with each other—i.e., recognizing our connectedness and celebrating our diversity. Harm is so embedded in our everyday lives that we do not yet have a common experience of living harmlessly. Abandoning dualism is fundamental to embracing harmlessness.

This third volume brings us to the tipping point of choice. Will we recognize that duality is an artificial construct that we impose on reality for the sake of convenience and self-glorification? If our answer is yes, then we first need to understand why we have so thoroughly accepted our reality as being dualistic. In Part One of this volume, we examine the perceptual and cognitive patterns, including the use of dichotomies, that reinforce dualistic thinking. We then look at the types of distortions that sustain dualistic thinking and our legacies from patriarchy and Newtonian physics. We recognize the challenge posed by dualistic thinking being habitual so that its dynamics and implications operate at an unconscious level.

Part Two provides us with a framework for becoming aware of the different types of depersonalization that permeate our lives, bringing those dynamics into consciousness so that we can make choices about change. In order to explore nuances, Part Two uses a model of five types of depersonalization: hostile bigotry, benevolent bigotry, stereotyping, invisibility, and objectification. For readers who are familiar with the work of philosophers Martha Nussbaum and Val Plumwood, a comparison of categories is presented in the print version of this book. The specific dynamics of each type of depersonalization are illustrated primarily through analyses of sexism and misogyny, racism, homophobia and heterosexism, ageism, classism and anthropocentrism (the belief that humans are central) in order to help us recognize these dynamics in our everyday lives.

Awareness brings with it responsibility. Part Three turns to how we can move beyond dualistic thinking and depersonalization. It examines strategies such as increasing our cognitive complexity so that we are no longer satisfied with either/or categorization, increasing our empathy so that we acknowledge the connections and commonalities that we share with others, and changing our behavior so that we no longer tolerate the harm to ourselves and others that comes from creating dualities and allowing the consequences of depersonalization to ourselves or others.

I would like to thank all who have helped me in my journey of exploration and questioning. That journey has included the privilege of living and working in over 85 countries, establishing the first degree-granting women’s studies program in 1971 at City University of New York, undertaking the initial research on homophobia in the early 1970s, and studying and working over the years with the School for Esoteric Studies. In celebrating the finalization of these volumes, I would like to thank my various Writer’s Digest instructors, particularly Carolyn Walker who has provided editing commentary and much valued encouragement. I would also like to thank my partner, Valerie Ward, for her continuing and invaluable support for my creative process, as well as Colleen Adair, Gail Gregg Jolley, and Miguel Malagreca for their critical input on this volume, and other friends who have read and commented on earlier volumes.

In the end, Moving Beyond Duality is about boundaries and relationships, about recognizing that nothing exists in discrete entities. It is relationship and connectedness that defines us—whether by their absence or their richness. May we learn together that joy is the keynote of our universe and that there is indeed enough for us all.

Part One: The Habit of Duality

Chapter 1: Creating the Illusion of Duality

Must it all be either less or more?

Either plain or grand?

Is it always ‘or’?

Is it never ‘and’?

– Stephen Sondheim

Why move beyond duality, or the experience of our reality as a contrast of two parts or sides? Isn’t duality a given in our universe? We talk about being right or wrong, being for or against an issue, being in or out of a group. It is easy to divide our lives into two categories. Dualistic thinking is familiar and takes little effort.

Actually, duality is not a given. It is a construct, a low-effort conceptual framework we use to make sense of our experience and of our complex universe. It is an assumption that we make, a habit of thinking or perceiving that we have collectively accepted as reality. It feels true because we create two-category distinctions (either/or) so frequently. We forget that we are the ones who create the categories. We are the ones who choose to limit those categories to two.

Managing Working Memory

Every minute we are bombarded by hundreds of stimuli—sensory input from visual cues, verbal chat, electronic messaging, various sounds, a range of odors, being touched, and so forth. We immediately capture many of these stimuli (known as pre-attentive processing) before our brain has a chance to filter out what it will pay attention to. It is not physically possible for us to pay attention to all stimuli at once, and besides they are not all equally important to us. So we have a reflexive way of managing this deluge of data so that we don’t become overwhelmed.

As humans, we come equipped with two basic storage capacities for stimuli: short-term or working memory and long-term memory. While our long-term memory can store an almost infinite amount of information once we place it there, our working memory is similar to the random access memory (RAM) in computers. It has a limited active focus capacity of around five to nine items and a brief time frame of 10-15 seconds in which those items are first available.

We can think of the way we process stimuli as having two automatic sorting points in relation to our working memory: First we ask, Do we need to process this at all? We are continuously operating an initial yes/no decision-making program—yes, I will process it or no, I will ignore it. If we choose no, then we ignore it completely and have no memory of it at all (known as inattentional blindness). For example, if you walk into an unfamiliar room specifically to meet someone and are immediately engaged in conversation with them, you may fail to register details such as pictures on the wall or even other people in the room. In fact, there is recent evidence that being focused on a task that requires a lot of concentration can induce inattentional blindness—that is, we are so focused on remembering the task that we literally do not see what is right in front of us.

Choosing yes (known as attentional capture) leads to the second sorting point: Do we need to pay active, mindful attention? Again we sort into two categories—what we need to be conscious or mindful of and what can be stored passively as part of a habitual (mindless) response. So while we may remain mindful of certain details, we absorb all the rest of the data mindlessly and without critical evaluation. In other words, while we sort or filter data based on what is important to us—what we value—we don’t examine the passively-processed data critically because they are not part of our immediate focus. This is important to remember when we examine why attitudes and beliefs become so difficult to change.

The difference in mindless and mindful processing explains, for example, how we can drive home along a familiar route and arrive safely without any conscious memory of the journey. While the data we observed were relevant to the drive (yes, I will process it), we were able to award it implicit or mindless attention. It also explains why experienced drivers can carry on an in-depth conversation while driving over familiar routes but need to stop the conversation in order to concentrate when following complex directions to a new destination.

Details do not have to be in our mindful awareness in order for us to be able to recall them later. The careful questioning of a witness often elicits data of which the witness was initially unaware. As early as the 1940s, there were public outcries over advertising with subliminal images below the level of our awareness because of not wanting to be unconsciously influenced—with good reason, as we are less able to resist subliminal messages.

This process of automatic either/or sorting becomes even more important as the amount of data increases. The rise in social media has had a potentially profound effect on how we manage our working memory. Not only has it dramatically increased the data flooding our senses every minute, but it has introduced new patterns of sensory engagement.

Many of us are finding it difficult to ignore social media input, even when we are engaged in an important conversation with a person who matters to us. That buzz or ding goes off signaling that we have a message and—oops—we look away to glance at it. In fact, there is now a growth industry in providing camps or retreats to help us go offline and interact with each other and the world of nature!

We experience overload if we try to hold and process too much information in our working memory. When that happens, we become confused, disoriented, overwhelmed, and irritable. It is in our best interest to process incoming data as quickly as possible to avoid overload and free up the loading dock of our working memory, so to speak, so quick methods work best.

What are the implications of this