While meditating -- in a definitely non-transcendental way -- over the recent "meditation" threads, the following idea came to my mind:
Meditation as often advocated here rightly questions the hierarchical dualities generated by mental activity, such as (or, perhaps, all boiling down to) "good vs. bad" -- hierarchical inasmuch as -- would you have guessed? -- one is supposed to be better, more valuable than the other; one is definitely to be pursued and the other shunned. Always.
But in doing so it creates another hierarchical duality: the enlightened self, at one with the essence of Being or Awareness itself, vs. the separate self lost in its delusional dichotomies. Now the enlightened would never call the former "good" and the latter "bad". We have become sooo subtler. But there is still one better than the other. Always. The hierarchy subsists and the duality has been displaced -- not suppressed.
Western thought for all its naïvetés tends to offer a more elaborate structure. Instead of 1 (or 0, cf. Buddhism and Taoism) vs. 2 it tends to develop (as early as Plato) into a 3-level hierarchical construction. To Hegel's dialectic of thesis, antithesis and synthesis in the Phenomenology of the (collective) Mind (which consciously builds on the Trinitarian structure) Kierkegaard responds with a structurally similar, although opposite in intent, topology of the individual subject. Three stages of life, aesthetical, ethical and religious. The middle stage problematises the original oneness of the aesthetical approach into moral duality ("good and bad"). The last, upper stage is supposed to restore the original oneness at a superior level -- that of eternity. Where, of course, both the aesthetical oneness and the moral duality are supposed to be finally reconciled. What we have is a permanent construct of dualities meant to surpass duality.
So what shall we do with the dreaded 2? Try to repent from it "back" into 1, or 0, in the mystical way of Eastern wisdom? Or surpass it onto the broader fullness of 3 (or more), in the speculative way of Western metaphysics?
I suggest that instead of questioning duality itself we rather question the hierarchy ascribed to it. Or more exactly its permanence, by acknowledging that it can be reversed, and reversed again and again. The borders which our thinking draws within the real can be crossed, over and over again, if they cannot be blotted out. As in the famous Chinese story of the peasant and the horse, what seemed "good" from one perspective can turn "bad" from another, and "good" again from still another. In Hesse's Siddhartha he prince learns something by crossing the river to become a beggar, and the prince beggar learns something else by crossing the river again to engage in the city's activities. That doesn't mean that "good" and "bad" are meaningless -- to the contrary, they are completely true in their relative own place and time. What we have to dispense with is the absolute -- the perspective from everywhere or nowhere, from always or never -- because it does not exist.
The first will be the last is the very principle of walking. Duality in motion.
That should be enough for a start...