Okay, so I was giving a lecture today and I briefly presented the Hermetic principle of Duality to todays listeners. I will attempt to type the dialogue for the lesson.
"Okay, so let's go over the concept of duality, duality in my understanding is the dual nature of something, so things like this for example; hot and cold, slow and fast, hate and love, etc. But where does heat begin or end? Where is slow defined?
From personal experience, I can state that I believe the area that I live in is hot, to me it is hot. But for someone who lived in India for example would claim that the weather is mild, or cool. So in this case there is no duality, other than within the limits of mind and illusion. What is hot to one may be cold to the other, and vice versa. But then when we reach the area of love and hate is when it gets rather interesting. We find that not only is there a surreal and overwhelming at times feeling of love, but there is its dual nature, hate. Duality. This is the only time the law of duality (in a non symbolic or metaphysical state) has true pressence. I can say that I love my girlfriend more than I do the idea of segregation (which I hate). So there are the dual states, but the interesting part is that I can not understand where the states begin or even end. Do they even have such restrictions? I say restrictions because if love is to have either a beginning or and end would mean that it is finite, and it does not have an eternal pressence. But with hate I can not say the same, hate comes and goes, it's a naturally low vibrational state, and it simply can not exist within the same reality as love, which is the universes natural resonance within the beings of an earthly and advanced sociological nature. So is hate even the dual nature of love? What is something that has no beginning or end? Where do they end or start if they are not infinite?"
That is all I can share about the nature of duality. But feel free to post your thoughts :)
Often duality is more a representation of a trope or archetype than a literal duality. It is why the elements are described with their natures, but as archetypes. The actual dirt can become warm on a hot day, and in many areas is perpetually moist. But its archetypal description is cool and dry.
Love and hate, as you mentioned, are two polar emotions in many ways. They are opposites as being very different ways to feel about something or someone, and as you said, one ends and one does not (at least in your opinion). This is demonstrating duality in that nature.
But some will describe love and hate a slightly different way: They are both very passionate emotions. A person must think about the object of the emotion in order to experience it. Both emotions are expressed partly in a physical response, some of them similar in nature. But indifference is a lack of emotion, caring neither for good or bad. It does not express a physical response, as there is just nothing there.
I think this is just going to come with a level of understanding. Many people try to insist that everything has an opposite, which is really not the case. Many supposed opposites are very similar. But duality is different than being opposite.
But is polarity not duality? If heat exists, so must coldness, if life exists so must death. Are there such laws like this that pertain to the universe? It had to come into a state of consciousness (beggining) at some point. So must it too cease to be conscious and end?
Please note that I have no intention of turning this into a physics debate with that edgy attitude people get when they recieve a paper congratulating them on the waste of time and misconception that they are fed. Most people know it as a diploma. However, if you do wish to throw anything, let it be purely for the beauty of mutual knowledge and a share for discussion. :)
Polarity can be duality, but duality is not necessarily polarity.
For example, heat and cold are relative, and not opposites. Heat and cold are an expression of how something (an environment, object, whatever) feels. As you said before, someone's frame of reference can determine their interpretation of perceived heat. But that does not mean a duality does not exist.
People love to use cats and dogs as opposites and to represent dualities thanks to their overall typified behaviors. But they are far from opposites in so many ways. They are both animals, both mammals, both carnivores (though dogs are not obligate carnivores as cats are), and so forth. Not to mention they can have a wide variety of personality types, sometimes even similar to each other. But the representative duality remains.
But sometimes the idea of duality becomes a bit misguided, in my opinion. Not everything has a balance. Not every person or situation has an opposite to make it right so to speak. Sometimes a bad thing happens, and it is just a bad thing. There is no good thing to offset it somehow. Sometimes a person is just evil; pursuing all sorts of terrible things, evil. There may not always be a redeeming aspect of the person.
And sometimes the misquoting and terrible misuse of Sr Isaac Newton's Third Law of Motion is used to insist in the existence of a duality for everything. This is false logic. The statement is about interacting bodies of mass, and not about karma or anything else.
"When one body exerts a force on a second body, the second body simultaneously exerts a force equal in magnitude and opposite in direction on the first body."
People try to wedge this into fitting the Butterfly Effect, which also does not work so well for every circumstance, but is not about duality so I will refrain for now.
People attempt to say that every action has an equal and opposite reaction -- that is, that if someone pushes you, then that negative thing done to you will cause a negative thing to happen to the person who pushed you, or will cause some positive thing to happen to you that makes up for it. This is simply not the case. Sometimes a thing happens -- deliberately or otherwise. There is not necessarily some dualistic metaphysical aspect to make it anything other than what it is (or by the time you are contemplating it, what it was).
