The polarity of heaven and earth come together in the heart as the birth of divine eros—a living, breathing, pulsating, exuberant, aliveness that develops in us the personal beingness that has the capacity to be everything or nothing at all; we awaken to the whole, wide range of all possibilities. What seem to be polarity and opposites in the world of duality are, in the world of divine expression, only different expressions of the same thing. There is one love, one desire, one world, one home; and when we know this, we see this world as the face of our Beloved. The world becomes the expression and the body of our Beloved. That is just the appearance, of course, but if we really look, we see the Beloved shining through. It is that, too, in all its majestic radiance. – The Power of Divine Eros: The Illuminating Force of Love in Everyday Life, Ch. 10
When the infant is in homeostasis, when it is not frustrated, mistreated, or sick, but is lovingly and appropriately taken care of, it seems to live not only in absence of duality of soul and essence, but with a great deal of obvious pleasure. This homeostatic baseline can get disrupted, but the soul’s initial harmony is resilient and it reasserts itself spontaneously. However, the fact that disruption is a possibility, combined with the factors we discussed above, leads to a permanent state of disruption. The soul at some point loses her resiliency and the duality becomes impressed on her substance as a permanent structure. In other words, as a result of the soul’s normal development her homeostatic baseline moves from wholesome harmonious unity to a largely conflictual and permanently dissatisfied state of duality. Stated alternately, when the adult soul relaxes and settles down at times of no instinctual or environmental pressures she does not go back to her original harmony, but can only settle into the dualistic ego state that has now become the bedrock of her identity and reality.
The original primary wholeness is not the same as the enlightened state, the completed state of the soul, even though it resembles it in some respects. The mature state of the soul, as we will see later, is also a nondual state, but one characterized by resilience against duality. The original nonduality is not strong enough to withstand the development of identification with ego structures. But it is more accurate to say that the original nonduality is lost as part of the natural evolution of the soul toward a higher level of integration of nonduality. The mature state of nonduality will have characteristics and capacities that either do not exist in infancy or exist in only rudimentary form. They are the result of a higher nonduality where the soul integrates the ego and cognitive capacities listed above with her essential ground. This is the story of the human soul, the mysterious drama that every human being undergoes. – A. H. Almaas, The Inner Journey Home: Soul’s Realization of the Unity of Reality, Ch. 11
One characteristic of dualistic perception is that it contains traces of nonduality. The separateness of subject and object is never total. What I mean is that you never find a subject by itself. A subject always implies an object. And conversely, you can never only have an object; there is always the experiencer of the object. There cannot be an other without somebody saying, “This is an other.” So, in dual experience, there is no experience of a self or a subject by itself, and there is no experience of an other or an object by itself. Subject and object, although distinct, always arise as a unit; they are always connected to each other somehow. – A. H. Almaas, Runaway Realization: Living a Life of Ceaseless Discovery, Ch. 17