IMO duality is contained in both/either the first and/or the second case since the idea is that consciousness and matter is a feedback loop of some sort you can pick the chicken or the egg as an axiom and derive the other one. But then again this is some serious arm chair philosophizing so I'm sure there's a case that isn't covered by that line of reasoning.

Personally I'm a fan of defining the base of my reality as consciousness or subjective experience but I still like to think that there is Truth and that my experience contains at least a shadow of it.

Edit: I do think duality is a really useful conceptualization since you can think of The World (or what I just called Truth above) as existing and then there is Absurd which is everything that doesn't exist (and you can't disprove because yay category theory!). Then you can say all of Existence can be categorized in some arbitrary way, there are X categories that can be nested to any depth and maybe there are some strange loops or whatever, we then convert that into a binary tree (losing some relations along the way maybe) and call the resulting dualities shadows of the True Pair (of Truth and Absurd).

Now your problem is perceiving the world as it is, i.e. evaluating these 'perspectives', so you need some function to order them and pick the best one, lets call it 'religion'. If your religion function is to be effective we need a good assumption, one idea (suggested by some prior research) is to investigate the True Pair and assume that every other duality will have a part that corresponds to Truth and a part that corresponds to Absurd (or yin-yang, submissive-dominant, sender-receiver... whatever you prefer). A perspective that pairs things that cannot be interpreted as opposites becomes muddled and unsure about the nature of the information being evaluated.

Anyway, you can investigate the assumptions famous researchers like Jesus, Muhammed, The Buddha and others have come up with and maybe concoct your own view from theirs or you can ignore the problem and use the default perspectives of your culture / language.

Defining the base of reality as consciousness doesn't have to exclude universal truth if consciousness exists beyond the perception of your individual self. The way I see it is that the physical world is a model of consciousness as created by the consciousness itself. The model draws an illusory line between your body and the rest of the world, but the underlying fields are not actually separate, even in the model, e.g. magnetic and electrical fields, let alone the consciousness. One way I heard it out, I think by Alan Watts, is that seeing your true self is like trying to bite your own teeth.