What is karmic duality? Karmic duality is a type of duality between all sorts of mental processes and human actions. Each basic type of human endeavor and thought process has its dual, and one must seek out a balance between a process and its dual to achieve balance in life.
It is impossible to truly understand karmic duality via analytic or scientific means. Duality goes beyond science, and it must be understood through our basic connection with nature and through the creative force of the universe. Therefore, the only way to perceive duality is through naturalistic practice.
All creatures are born with an innate sense of duality. All nonhuman creatures are in balance, but human beings are out of balance due to our relationship with technology and our unusual ability of what some call “intelligence”. But, we all still have some sparkle of an understanding of duality, and we must build upon that initial kindling to re-establish a karmic balance in life.
Let’s talk about some examples of duality.
In life, we have typically automated many tasks due to our innate ability to use tools. But the dual of automation is careful work with our hands. To seek too much automation is to seek a karmic imbalance.
Therefore, if you use automation in life, you should seek out and enjoy the balance of working without tools. And this must be applied to important tasks in every day life. For example, you should try and wash some of your clothes by hand, or write by hand instead of using a computer for everything. In everything you do, limit the amount of automation because otherwise you will be upsetting the karmic imbalance in your life.
This is why AI is fundamentally a bad thing, and any minor good cannot be reconciled with the bad. Indeed, the very nature of AI is uncontrollable automation. Since its very spirit is uncontrollable machine work, its very nature is imbalanced. Therefore, one cannot make balanced choices in using AI. In fact, according to the law of karmic duality, AI should not exist as it threatens the entire karmic balance of living beings.
In art too, one must seek karmic balance. That applies to automation, but it applies to more than that. It also applies to the use of your art. If you only share your art on the internet, you are upsetting the karmic balance. The karmic dual of long distance communication is in-person communication. Therefore, if you use the internet to share your work, you must redress the balance and share with other in person.
The karmic dual of energy usage is making an effort to be still and conserve energy. The more energy you use, the more you must attempt to conserve. And the same is true of economic activity. The dual of economic activity is helping people outside the economic system. The more you contribute to economic activity, the more you must avoid trade and money, and simply give. Economic activity is especially dangerous because it grows unbounded.
This is one reason why the strategy of the mainstream environmentalists is imbalanced. They seek only to ameliorate our contribution to climate change through economic activity of solar panels and “green” energy. They seek to operate within the system of economics, which will only lead to more destruction. They also seek to increase our energy usage by providing more cheap energy, which is not being balanced by the karmic dual of energy usage, which is conservation.
Rationally or scientifically, one can say that mainstream environmentalists are making the best move within the economic and capitalistic system, but they are only increasing the karmic imbalance of all of humanity. That’s not to say that solar panels are bad. We must pollute less. But only seeking cheaper, cleaner energy cannot be even close to an entire solution.
That is part of the problem, actually. Unfortunately, most typical pathways for human beings in today’s world only increase the karmic imbalance of humanity, and that is why there is immense suffering.
Going to school can also increase our bad karma. Why does school increase our bad karma? Because the highly-developed curricula of modern western education is not balanced by an education one could have by directly experiencing life in harmony with wild nature. In more traditional terms, we can understand education as a tool for furthering destruction by making us into perfect cogs to further technology.
Indeed Jacques Ellul was right when he said, “The more pedagogy becomes technically perfect, and institutional, the more it becomes a political weapon of the government.” School is not only about learning, but about conditioning people to be narrow-minded tools of the technological system. But that is just an effect of the karmic imbalance of seeking too much rationality.
Rationality of course is not itself a bad thing. But the dual of the rational is the naturalistic, and we have rejected the naturalistic. That rejection makes us imbalanced and makes us accumulate bad karma.
This is why science cannot solve the problems of the world today. It’s striking to me why people believe in science so strongly, especially because without advanced science, we would not have the most serious problems we have today: climate change and ecosystem destruction. Science may give us some comfort, but such comfort is immaterial if it means the destruction of our wild biosphere. And the karmic dual of comfort is discomfort, some of which is necessary to be healthy human beings.
There is only one way forward: we must attempt to restore the karmic balance by seeking out the karmic duals of modern human endeavors such as economic progress and technological development. This must be done on an individual and societal level. All other paths, such as a reliance purely on economic and scientific progress, will simply lead to destruction.