Let’s look at duality. Dualism is a slightly misleading term. The intended meaning is not “dual” so much as it is “more than one” or “many.”
Our personal bodily perceptions are a filtered view of reality. Take one thing and separate it into pieces, keep some parts and ignore the other parts.
If we did not filter like this, we couldn’t live in a body. We need to have selective vision and selective hearing. We do not hear the voices of every person alive on the planet – that would be hard to manage – we hear those in our proximity. We do not see microwaves, gamma rays, magnetic fields – we just see things in a narrow colour band.
Our filter is called māyā. She is the reducing lens we place over the whole to have this dualistic life experience. The forms of objects and people, and progressions through time that we experience are fragments of the whole. They are viewpoints, a myopic gaze over a field that is nonetheless nondual and entirely real.
“For only as long as māyā is not clearly understood is this great illusion generated. Once it is understood, it is seen as the infinite, and it becomes the source of happiness and realisation of the absolute”
Yoga Vasiṣṭha III.122
Living this life of filtered perception was and is our choice. The illusion means we can have a physical existence with all of the interesting experiences that come along with it. Without the narrowed view, we would see all things, all people, past and future, the miniscule and the universal, all at once. There would be so sense of time passing, no sense of touch, smell, joy, sadness.
Everything would be immediately obvious and there would be no mystery.
Important note: All wishes come true. In spiritual circles this has been referred to as divine providence. In theoretical physics it takes the form of the “many worlds” multiverse theory.
You cannot imagine something and have it not exist. You imagined it – now it exists. Everything sits in absolute consciousness, as Vasistha said earlier. Our experiences, whether “waking” or “dreaming” all have form in absolute consciousness, they are real.
Therefore, the idea of experiencing a life of duality, sensuality, comparison, discovery, growth, progression of form (prakṛti) was imagined, and has come to pass.
“All the powers that are inherent in the mind and by which the world has been brought into being are found in the infinite consciousness. Hence the sages have declared that the mind is omnipotent.”
Yoga Vasiṣṭha IV.46