[Bitsy]

Originally Posted by ZenFender

Recently, I've really been looking into buddhism and taoism more closely, and I've been hoping to integrate their teachings into my life.

Me too.

Originally Posted by ZenFender

But the one teaching that I always having trouble grasping is the concept of non-duality. They say don't discriminate between good and bad, beautiful and ugly, pleasure and pain. But how?!?!

I tried to find something I have read recently, but I couldn't find it. What it said, though, was that, in accordance with non-duality, there is nothing bad, only an absence of good, nothing ugly, only absence of beauty, and so on. The following expresses this:

"2. Abstraction

When beauty is abstracted
Then ugliness has been implied;
When good is abstracted
Then evil has been implied.

So alive and dead are abstracted from nature,
Difficult and easy abstracted from progress,
Long and short abstracted from contrast,
High and low abstracted from depth,
Song and speech abstracted from melody,
After and before abstracted from sequence.

The sage experiences without abstraction,
And accomplishes without action;
He accepts the ebb and flow of things,
Nurtures them, but does not own them,
And lives, but does not dwell."

(LaoTze - TaoDeJing)

So, meaning that each pair of opposites has been extracted from a whole entity. It means we are not supposed to extract, or abstract, the two sides from the whole. If you don't judge a thing, or analyze it, it just "is" and the whole is left in tact, I guess.

Originally Posted by ZenFender

If we do not have ugliness, then where will be the beauty?

So, according to that, beauty will be everywhere that there is not an absence of beauty But if you see beauty before you, you are aware in that moment of that beauty, however, if you see in another moment something where there is no beauty, you don't take note of it in particular, but if you do, you might just notice that there is no beauty there, however, there will probably be something else there to observe, so noticing there is no beauty ought not to occur. You observe what it is and you don't become aware of or observe what it isn't.

That's how I understand it.