Open Lecture, October 13, 2026 – Lecture #143: Unity and Duality (Part 1)

From duality toward unity:
The path of humankind and of the individual
 

In today’s world, it could be very useful to have a spiritual roadmap — something to remind us of where we are, where we want to go, and how to get there. Understanding what we humans are truly longing for, how much we can realistically hope to fulfill that longing in our lifetime, and what are first steps to go about doing that — those are fundamental touchstones to ground ourselves in, time and again.
 
Over the coming months, the Ottawa Pathwork community is offering a series of free lecture presentations and discussions aimed at offering such a basic ‘roadmap’.
 
Along this journey, we’ll explore the following areas:

• How we all long for the unitive state, but usually try to achieve it on the dualistic plane, which is a doomed endeavour;
• How humanity has evolved up until now, what stage it is in, and what direction it is evolving toward;
• The levels of consciousness we operate on, and how to identify what level we’re identifying with in any given moment;
• Why we need relationships with others in order to grow;
• How we unconsciously affect each other through our hidden destructiveness;
• How we can step out of a fundamental vicious circle that reinforces our feelings of guilt, self-rejection and loneliness, and step into a benign circle of self-acceptance, humility, self-respect and real connection with others.

Deep within ourselves, we all harbour a sense of a different state of mind and a different way of experiencing life than the one we know. We yearn for this state and for all that it would afford us: a sense of freedom, blissfulness, mastery of life.

This state already exists in all of us. It is the unified consciousness — our divine substance, our Real Self.

But we humans live predominantly on the dualistic plane of consciousness. So we mostly misunderstand our longing, and strive to fulfill it from dualistic consciousness, which is impossible to accomplish. Because on the dualistic plane, we perceive everything in opposites: either/or, good or bad, right or wrong, ‘life’ or ‘death’. Thus conflict is inevitable, both within ourselves and with others.

On the unified plane of consciousness, there are no opposites. In the unified state of mind, no conflict exists because the dualism is combined and the opposites no longer conflict with one another. There is “only good, only right, only life.”