How to gain liberation from duality?

The following is an excerpt from a samvaad (dialogue) session with Acharya Prashant.

Questioner: Acharya Ji, how to gain liberation from duality?

Acharya Prashant: By knowing that it is duality. Right now you are calling the ‘self-world relationship’ as dual but only right now. Ordinarily, you do not see it as a dual relationship.

Ordinarily when you are walking through the street, when you look at the hill, do you realize that it is not the hill but you and the hill together?

Then you totally forget that it is nothing but duality dancing within and around.

Right now you are saying, “How do I approach the duality?” But you have not probably yet come to the situation where you see duality as duality. You do not need to approach duality.

Once duality is seen as duality, there is no need to approach.

You approach duality with interest and temptation and identification

only when you do not see duality as duality.

Once duality is realized as duality then who is left to approach it?

North Pole has a fascination for the South Pole. Gold has no fascination for the North Pole or South Pole. You have a magnet and the magnetic field runs from one pole to the other. Keep gold beside the magnet. Does the gold piece bother for the magnetic field?

The practice, the sadhana lies in continuously seeing and remembering that, “Duality is duality.”

And then there is no need to have any method to approach.

You walk through the market, you look at something that appears tempting. A piece of cake or a samosa. At that very moment, do you realize that it’s not the samosa that is attracting you? That it is an entire mind ‘object-subject-object system’ operating to which you are an unnecessary addition.

At that moment, does that realization hit you? If it doesn’t, then you aren’t seeing duality at all. At that moment, when the piece of cake appeals to you, you say, “The cake is outside of me and the cake will come to me and satisfy me.” Now that is no appreciation of duality. That is not at all a realization of duality.