The Dualistic Process

Apart from obvious duality as man and woman, black and white, there is an inward psychological duality as the observer and the observed, the one who experiences and the thing experienced. In this division, in which time and space are involved, is the whole process of conflict; you can observe it in yourself. You are violent, that is a fact and you also have the ideological concept of non-violence, so there is duality. Now the observer says “I must become non-violent” and the attempt to become non-violent is conflict, which is a waste of energy; whereas if the observer is totally aware of that violence—without the ideological concept of non-violence—then he is able to deal with it immediately. One must observe this dualistic process at work within oneself—this division of the “I” and the “not-I”, the observer and the observed. Talks with American Students, p 111