The Middle Path

Thesis                     Synthesis                Antithesis
Birth                           Life                       Death
Being                       Becoming                Nothing
Apollo                     Hermes                   Dionysus
Centripetal               Static                    Centrifugal
Active                     Neutral                   Passive
Positive                  Ambivalent              Negative
Left                           Centre                    Right
Upper                       Middle                   Lower
Manic                      Normal                   Depressive
Excessive                 Balanced                Deficient
Hot                          Warm                      Cold
Acid                        Neutral                    Alkali
Red                           Purple                    Blue
White                         Gray                      Black

1 + 2 = 3

[...] every tension of opposites culminates in a release, out of which comes the "third." In the third, the tension is resolved and the lost unity is restored.

It presents itself in a form that is neither a straight “yes” nor a straight “no.”

[C. G. Jung]
'A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity' (CW 11)
and, Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (CW 9), par. 285

In Hegel, the term Aufhebung has the apparently contradictory implications of both preserving and changing, and eventually advancement (the German verb aufheben means "to cancel", "to keep" and "to pick up").

The tension between these senses suits what Hegel is trying to talk about. In sublation, a term or concept is both preserved and changed through its dialectical interplay with another term or concept. Sublation is the motor by which the dialectic functions.

Sublation can be seen at work at the most basic level of Hegel's system of logic. The two concepts Being and Nothing are each both preserved and changed through sublation in the concept Becoming. Similarly, determinateness, or quality, and magnitude, or quantity, are each both preserved and sublated in the concept measure.

'Aufheben'


A thought is affirmed which on reflection proves itself unsatisfactory, incomplete or contradictory, which propels the affirmation of its negation, the antithesis, which also on reflection proves inadequate, and so is again negated.

In classical logic, this double negation ("A is not non-A") would simply reinstate the original thesis. The synthesis does not do this.

It has "overcome and preserved" (or sublated) the stages of the thesis and antithesis to emerge as a higher rational unity.

[Lloyd Spencer and Andrzej Krauze]
Hegel for Beginners

Hegel's overriding impulse was to comprehend all dimensions of existence as dialectically integrated in one unitary whole. 

In Hegel's view, all human thought and all reality is pervaded by contradiction, which alone makes possible the development of higher states of consciousness and higher states of being. Each phase of being contains within itself a self-contradiction, and it is this that serves as the motor of its movement to a higher and more complete phase. 

Through a continuing dialectical process of opposition and synthesis, the world is always in the process of completing itself. Whereas for most of the history of Western philosophy from Aristotle onward, the defining essence of opposites was that they were logically contradictory and mutually exclusive, for Hegel all opposites are logically necessary and mutually implicated elements in a larger truth. 

Truth is thus radically paradoxical.

[Richard Tarnas]

The Passion of the Western Mind, p. 379

Since "one" and "two" were considered by ancient mathematical philosophers to be the parents of numbers, then their firstborn, "three," the Greek Triad, is the first and eldest number. 

The birth of the number 3 and triangle enables opposites to balance and transcend to a new wholeness they couldn't achieve by themselves.  

A third leg makes a tripod stable, and a third strand of hair allows a braid to knot as one whole, just as neutral judges balance opposing parties, neutrons balance atoms, and the Supreme Court plays the role of the balancing, transcendent third force between the Executive and Legislative branches. The triangle is the strongest and most stable of shapes and so appears in the constructions of humans and nature.  

Speak aloud the word "three" in English [...] and you'll hear its relation to words like "through" and "threshold" and the prefix trans ("across," "penetrate"). The leap to "three," as its linguistic root tells us, takes us over a threshold and through past polarized limits of the Dyad.

[Michael S. Schneider]
A Beginner's Guide to Constructing the Universe, p. 39
and 'Number and Shapes: The Timeless Alphabet of Art and Life'

Homeostasis is the property of a system in which a variable (for example, the concentration of a substance in solution, or its temperature) is actively regulated to remain very nearly constant.

'Homeostasis'

Maimonides [taught] that an intelligent person should live a life based on reality, on what is true and false, while the average person who lacks the ability to do so should live according to “necessary truths,” morality.

Maimonides makes it clear in his Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot De’ot 1:4 and 5, that the moral “middle path” is the “necessary truth,” the guidance given to the general public who are not capable of evaluating every occurrence in their lives and making decisions each time how they should act based on reason, on what is true and false.

[He] introduces the concept of the “golden mean” and advises people to live a life in which they behave according to a middle path between two extremes.

For example, people should not be overly stingy nor should they be spendthrifts; they should not laugh excessively nor be sad and dispirited. He calls this derekh hachakhamim, “the path of the wise.”

[On the other hand] the ideal path, the method for the intellectual, is “the virtuous way,” the carefully considered rational behavior beyond the middle path, when reason dictates the need for such behavior.

An individual who is very careful about himself deviates somewhat from the mean to either side, and is called 'virtuous'. For example, the individual who distances himself from pride and turns to the other extreme and becomes very humble – this is the virtuous quality. If he only moves toward the middle and is humble, [whilst this is] not the best behavior, it is still considered wise behavior, [thus the individual] is called 'wise.' 

The virtuous people of old would arrange their behaviors away from the middle path toward the two extremes. There were times when the behavior would veer toward one extreme, while there were times when the behavior would veer toward the other. This is behavior that is beyond the legal requirement. We are required to take the middle paths.

Both the essential truth of morality and the real truth advocate proper conduct. However, the essential truth focuses only on what the average person is capable of doing, morality. The difference between the two can be seen in the example presented by Maimonides in his Hilkhot De’ot.

The average person following morality is advised to follow the middle path for it is easier than having to analyze every situation independently, while intellectuals, who are capable of using reason and considering the “true” results of their behavior, are told to deviate when advisable from the middle path.

[Israel Drazin]
'An Intelligent Person is not Moral' (minor adjustments have been made to the original text)

I feel I’ve been very fortunate in life and I think I have about the most even temperament of anyone I know.

I literally don’t have unhappy days. I’ve always felt pretty happy. I suspect my peak happiness is well below that of most people. When I see people very, very happy it’s quite strange to me - I feel I’ve never felt this. The same when people are depressed.

I think my range is compressed.

[Tyler Cowen]
'Tyler Cowen on Rationality, COVID-19, Talismans, and Life on the Margins | The Tim Ferriss Show'

Baker Roshi, during a little talk one day, remarked that ordinarily in our culture we have only two ideas: either we express or we repress. Either one represses anger, or one expresses it. For example, it could be said that Richard Strauss is repressing certain negative emotions, whereas punk rock is expressing them.

But expressing is not any more admirable than repressing. The Western man or woman lives in a typical pairing of opposites that destroys the soul. Either we defeat Communism or we are defeated by it. Either a man dominates women or he is dominated by them.

Joseph Campbell describes the two opposites as two horns; and if we get hooked on either, we die.

[Robert Bly]
A Little Book on the Human Shadow, p. 56

[...] living beauty spreads her golden shimmer only when soaring above a reality full of misery, pain, and squalor [...] all experience goes to show that beauty needs her opposite as a condition of her existence.

"Whenever we turn our gaze in the the ancient world, we find taste and freedom mutually avoiding each other, and Beauty establishing her sway only on the ruins of heroic virtues.

If then we keep solely to what experience has taught us hitherto about the influence of Beauty, we cannot certainly be much encouraged in the development of feelings which are so dangerous to the true culture of mankind; and we should rather dispense with the melting power of Beauty, even at the risk of coarseness and austerity, than see ourselves, for all the advantages of refinement, consigned to her enervating influence."

[...] under no circumstances can the initial value of the higher form of energy be attained by the lower forms as well or be resumed by the superior function: an equilization at some intermediate level must inevitably result. For every individual who identifies with his one differentiated function, this entails a descent to a lower value as compared with the initial value.

This conclusion is unavoidable. All education that aspires to the unity and harmony of man's nature has to reckon with this fact.

[C. G. Jung, also Friedrich Schiller (in quotations)]
Psychological Types, p. 84-6

If development proceeds well the individual becomes able to deceive, to lie, to compromise, to accept conflict as a fact and to abandon the extreme ideas of perfection and an opposite to perfection that make existence intolerable.

Capacity for compromise is not a characteristic of the insane.

The mature human being is neither so nice nor so nasty as the immature. The water in the glass is muddy, but is not mud.

[D.W. Winnicott]
Human Nature, p. 138

Iphigenia sees her role in life as that of “making men mild.” 

She is always encouraging people to calm down and be merciful. She is committed to love, but a love marked not by wild passion, but by understanding, sympathy and a desire for harmony [...]

Goethe's first audiences, brought up on Romanticism, were slow to get the message. Was Goethe turning his back on Romantic love? Where was all the passion? They described the story of Iphigenia as like “watching grey mist.”

Goethe, now in middle-age, was undaunted. He’d had enough of Werther and expressed his own view emphatically – “Romanticism is sickness, Classicism is health.” 

But he encountered an elemental cultural problem: Romanticism feels more exciting. Goethe pinpointed one of the central problems of culture: how to make things that are good for us compete successfully for attention with the thrilling passionate stuff?

'Johann Wolfgang von Goethe'

 

Taoists believe that a meaningful life, the optimally meaningful life, is to be found on the border between chaos and order. 

And I would say that your nervous system tells you exactly when you are there and it’s a kind of place and you can tell when you’re there because you’re secure enough to be confident, but not so secure that you’re bored and you’re interested enough to be awake but not so interested that you’re terrified. 

And when you’re in a state like that, you find things interesting and meaningful, time slips by you and you’re no longer self-conscious.

[Jordan Peterson]
'Reality and the Sacred'

The thing is, when I'm balanced I'm not here, and I don't like not being here. I like to feel myself rubbing against things.

In the revisional concept of psychoanalysis in his first book, Perls called Friedlaender's polar philosophy "differential thinking" and considered it to be a "mental precision tool", since it can find the point of "predifference", as he also refers to creative indifference, as well as the zero-point, the center from which balancing equilibrium is possible and

"we could find a point from which the observer could gain the most comprehensive and undistorted view [...]

By remaining alert in the centre, we can acquire a creative ability of seeing both sides of an occurence and completing an incomplete half. By avoiding a one-sided outlook we gain a much deeper insight into the structure and function of the organism"

The center is a "magical" word for Friedlaender; likewise, for Perls, "to center one's existence", or centering, is the most basic goal of therapy, because we "acquire a creative ability of seeing both sides of an occurence" [...]

[Ludwig Frambach, quoting Fritz Perls]
Creative License: The Art of Gestalt Therapy, p. 121

Friedlaender's “creative indifference" [...] became for Fritz Perls the “fertile void” [...] the usual meaning-making process of polar differentiation is set aside in a state of pure being, through a deliberate act of polar indifferentiation. The closer we come to simply being, the more we open a space in which fresh possibilities can arise.

The fertile void or place of creative indifference is the ground. The goal of Gestalt process is to “lead increasingly from the one-sided fixation [on] that which is in the foreground to the ground, from the periphery to the middle and center, by way of integrating rigid dualities into flexible polarities” 

Poles such as rage and gentleness "should not be isolated from each other as mutually exclusive contradictions, but should be experienced as a unit of opposites" [...]

It is possible to achieve this perspective by being "flexibly centered in [one's own] indifferent center." In this way, one can react freely and appropriately, either angrily or with gentleness, to the demands of the situation from a totality of experience.

Friedlaender’s goal, as Perls saw it, was the achievement of this lovely neutrality in which one no longer feels pulled toward one extreme or the other and is no longer the prisoner of one way of seeing the world, which inevitably blinds one to other possibilities.

[Herb Stevenson, quoting Ludwig Frambach]
'Paradox: A Gestalt Theory of Change'

Self

As an empirical concept, the self designates the whole range of psychic phenomena in man.

Just as conscious as well as unconscious phenomena are to be met with in practice, the self as psychic totality also has a conscious as well as an unconscious aspect.

Empirically, the self appears in dreams, myths, and fairytales in the figure of the "supraordinate personality", such as king, hero, prophet, saviour, etc., or in the form of a totality symbol, such as the circle, square, quadratura circuli, cross, etc.

When it represents a complexio oppositorum, a union of opposites, it can also appear as a united duality, in the form, for instance, of tao as the interplay of yang and yin, or of the hostile brothers, or of the hero and his adversary [...]

Empirically, therefore, the self appears as a play of light and shadow, although conceived as a totality and unity in which the opposites are united. Since such a concept is irrepresentable - tertium non datur - it is transcendental on this account also.

[C.G. Jung]
Psychological Types (CW 6, 1991), p. 460

Equilibration

This is the force which moves development along. Piaget believed that cognitive development did not progress at a steady rate, but rather in leaps and bounds.

When a child's existing schemas are capable of explaining what it can perceive around it, it is said to be in a state of equilibrium, i.e. a state of cognitive (i.e. mental) balance. 

However, an unpleasant state of disequilibrium occurs when new information cannot be fitted into existing schemas (assimilation).

Equilibration is the force which drives the learning process as we do not like to be frustrated and will seek to restore balance by mastering the new challenge (accommodation). Once the new information is acquired the process of assimilation with the new schema will continue until the next time we need to make an adjustment to it.

[Saul McLeod]
'Jean Piaget'


Assimilate - will fit into existing order - no change - dominate (change other)
Accommodate - will not fit into existing order - change - capitulate (change self)

Popper envisioned science as progressing by the successive rejection of falsified theories, rather than falsified statements. Falsified theories are to be replaced by theories that can account for the phenomena that falsified the prior theory, that is, with greater explanatory power. 

For example, Aristotelian mechanics explained observations of everyday situations, but were falsified by Galileo's experiments, and were replaced by Newtonian mechanics, which accounted for the phenomena noted by Galileo (and others). Newtonian mechanics' reach included the observed motion of the planets and the mechanics of gases. The Youngian wave theory of light (i.e., waves carried by the luminiferous aether) replaced Newton's (and many of the Classical Greeks') particles of light but in turn was falsified by the Michelson-Morley experiment and was superseded by Maxwell's electrodynamics and Einstein's special relativity, which did account for the newly observed phenomena.

At each stage, experimental observation made a theory untenable (i.e., falsified it) and a new theory was found that had greater explanatory power (i.e., could account for the previously unexplained phenomena), and as a result, provided greater opportunity for its own falsification.

'Falsifiability'

Unqualified freedom, like unqualified tolerance, is not only self-destructive but bound to produce its opposite - for if all restraints were removed there would be nothing whatever to stop the strong enslaving the weak (or meek).

So complete freedom would bring about the end of freedom, and therefore proponents of complete freedom are in actuality, whatever their intentions, enemies of freedom.

[...] the maximum possible tolerance or freedom is an optimum, not an absolute, for it has to be restricted if it is to exist at all. 

The government intervention which alone can guarantee it is a dangerous weapon: without it, or with too little, freedom dies; but with too much of it freedom dies also. We are brought back to the inescapability of control [...] the maximum freedom is a qualified one [...]

[...] the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

[Brian Magee]
Popper, p. 80-2

[Derrida's] essay on Levinas [...] takes an epigraph from Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy.

'Hebraism and Hellenism - between these two points of influence moves our world. At one time it feels more powerfully the attraction of one of them, at another time of the other; and it ought to be, although it never is, evenly and happily balanced between them' [...]

It is the desire to reconcile oppositions and differences through a movement of thought that would finally reduce them to aspects of a single, comprehensive vision.

[...] Derrida's epigraph from Arnold carries a considerable weight of implied ideology.

It stands for that power of logocentric thinking to absorb all differences into itself by viewing them as mere stages or signposts on the way to some grand conceptual synthesis.

[Christopher Norris]
Derrida, p. 230-1

There is no 2D slice of a 3D object that gives a real sense of what it is. Neither is any 2D negotiation of slices going to yield something in 3D.

[A] cylinder is not somewhere between the two reductionistic views: 50% circle, 50% rectangle… It is 100% of both descriptions…which are only mutually exclusive and paradoxical if they are trying to be reconciled in the same plane, which is the essential mistake.

In the higher dimensional reality the object actually lives in, the simultaneous full truth of both partial descriptions is obvious and non-paradoxical…as is the seamless way they fit together as parts of a congruent whole.

The key insight is recognizing these differing perspectives as orthogonal to each other rather than opposite ends of a gradient spectrum. The gradient view leads to a middle path that in this case is the rounded rectangle (or a continual maddening flip flop between circle and rectangle) … completely failing to recognize the simultaneous fullness of each truth and the irreconcilability of them within the same level of dimensionality/ complexity.

The recognition of orthogonality…gives us the cylinder, recognizes both lower dimensional perspectives as 100% true from their limited vantage point, and forces the recognition that a congruent picture is possible but requires a fundamentally more complex kind of perspective.

Looking at some of what have often been thought of as existential dualities:

- Loving what is or working to make things better…
- Accepting ourselves as we are unconditionally or aspiring to grow and express more of our full potential…
- Maximizing intentionality or following the flow of life…
- Bettering our individual ego or transcending it…
- Free will or determinism…
- Being in the now or planning for the future…
- Increasing witness consciousness or losing oneself in experience…
- Open mindedness or critical thinking…
- Persistence or surrender…
- Boundaries or allowing…
- Being or becoming…
- Freedom or structure…
- Gratitude or desire…
- Rights or responsibilities…
- Agency or communion…
- Particle or wave descriptions of the quantum…
- The fundamentality of subject or object…

All of these, commonly seen as paradoxes to be embraced or extremes to find a middle path between…are indeed orthogonal and equally fundamental partial truths…to be simultaneously optimized…fully reconciled in a congruent understanding of the higher dimensional (eg, more complex) nature of reality.

[Daniel Schmachtenberger]
'Higher Dimensional Thinking, the End of Paradox, and a More Adequate Understanding of Reality'

[…] in the total accounting the hitherto sovereign religions are among the main reasons the type 'man' has been kept on a lower level - they have preserved too much of that which ought to perish. 

And yet, when they gave comfort to the suffering, courage to the oppressed and despairing, a staff and stay to the irresolute, and lured those who were inwardly shattered and had become savage away from society into monasteries and houses of correction for the soul: what did they have to do in addition so as thus, with a good conscience, as a matter of principle, to work at the preservation of everything sick and suffering, which means in fact and truth at the corruption of the European race? 

Stand all evaluations on their head - that is what they had to do! And smash the strong, contaminate great hopes, cast suspicion on joy in beauty, break down everything autocratic, manly, conquering, tyrannical, all the instincts proper to the highest and most successful of the type man', into uncertainty, remorse of conscience, self-destruction, indeed reverse the whole love of the earthly and of dominion over the earth into hatred of the earth and the earthly - that is the fact the church set itself and had to set itself, until in its evaluation ‘unworldliness', 'unsensuality', and 'higher man' were finally fused together into one feeling. 

[Friedrich Nietzsche]

Beyond Good and Evil, 62

In the romantic, the "organic” conception of the state rests on [an] inability to make a normative evaluation.

This conception repudiates the “juridical” as narrow and mechanical, and it searches for the state that is above right and wrong: that is, a point of reference for feelings, which at the same time is a projection of the romantic subject into the domain of the political.

The root of romantic sublimity is the inability to decide, the "higher third” factor they are always talking about, which is not a higher factor but a different third factor: in other words, it is always a way out of the either-or.

[…] the antitheses themselves are not antitheses, but merely occasions […] The antitheses are immediately mediated and reconciled, and an agreement invariably follows.

In the absence of the occasionalistic displacement into the higher, subjective creativity that resolves all antitheses in a harmonious unity, there is no romanticism.

[Carl Schmitt]
Political Romanticism, p. 117, 140, 148

From this examination of the tradition of the West, we can formulate the pattern of outlook on which this tradition is based. It has six parts:

1. There is a truth, a reality. (Thus the West rejects skepticism, solipsism, and nihilism.)

2. No person, group, or organization has the whole picture of the truth. (Thus there is no absolute or final authority)

3. Every person of goodwill has some aspect of the truth, some vision of it from the angle of his own experience. (Thus each has something to contribute)

4. Through discussion, the aspects of the truth held by many can be pooled and arranged to form a consensus closer to the truth than any of the sources that contributed to it.

5. This consensus is a temporary approximation of the truth, which is no sooner made than new experiences and additional information make it possible for it to be reformulated in a closer approximation of the truth by continued discussion.

6. Thus Western man’s picture of the truth advances, by successive approximations, closer and closer to the whole truth without ever reaching it.

This method has basically been the method of operation in Western religious history, despite the many lapses of Western religion into authoritarian, absolute, rigid, and partial affirmations.

[…] Throughout Western religious history, in spite of the frequent outbursts by dissident groups insisting that the truth was available—total, explicit, final, and authoritative—in God’s revelation, Western religious thought has continued to believe that revelation itself is never final, total, complete, or literal, but is a continuous symbolic process that must be interpreted and reinterpreted by discussion.

The method of the West, even in religion, has been this: The truth unfolds in time by a cooperative process of discussion that creates a temporary consensus which we hope will form successive approximations growing closer and closer to the final truth, to be reached only in some final stage of eternity.

Because this is the tradition of the West, the West is liberal. Most historians see liberalism as a political outlook and practice found in the nineteenth century. But nineteenth-century liberalism was simply a temporary organizational manifestation of what has always been the underlying Western outlook.

That organizational manifestation is now largely dead, killed as much by twentieth-century liberals as by conservatives or reactionaries. It was killed because liberals took applications of that manifestation of the Western outlook and made these applications rigid, ultimate, and inflexible goals. The liberal of 1880 was anti-clerical, anti-militarist, and anti-state because these were, to his immediate experience, authoritarian forces that sought to prevent the operation of the Western way. The same liberal was for freedom of assembly, of speech, and of the press because these were necessary to form the consensus that is so much a part of the Western process of operation.

But by 1900 or so, these dislikes and likes became ends in themselves. The liberal was prepared to force people to associate with those they could not bear, in the name of freedom of assembly, or he was, in the name of freedom of speech, prepared to force people to listen. His anti-clericalism became an effort to prevent people from getting religion, and his anti-militarism took the form of opposing funds for legitimate defense. Most amazing, his earlier opposition to the use of private economic power to restrict individual freedoms took the form of an effort to increase the authority of the state against private economic power and wealth in themselves.

Thus the liberal of 1880 and the liberal of 1940 had reversed themselves on the role and power of the state, the earlier seeking to curtail it, the latter seeking to increase it. In the process, the upholder of the former liberal idea that the power of the state should be curtailed came to be called a conservative. This simply added to the intellectual confusion of the mid-twentieth century, which arose from the Irrational Activist reluctance to define any terms, a disinclination that has now penetrated deeply into all intellectual and academic life.

In this connection we might say that the whole recent controversy between conservatism and liberalism is utterly wrongheaded and ignorant. Since the true role of conservatism must be to conserve the tradition of our society, and since that tradition is a liberal tradition, the two should be closely allied in their aim at common goals. So long as liberals and conservatives have as their primary goals to defend interests and to belabor each other for partisan reasons, they cannot do this.

When they decide to look at the realities beneath the controversies, they might begin with a little book that appeared many years ago (1902) from the hand of a member of the chief family in the English Conservative Party over the past century. The book is Conservatism by Lord Hugh Cecil. This volume defines conservatism very much as I have defined liberalism and the Outlook of the West as tentative, flexible, undogmatic, communal, and moderate.

Its fundamental assumption is that men are imperfect creatures, will probably get further by working together than by blind opposition, and that, since undoubtedly each is wrong to some extent, any extreme or drastic action is inadvisable.

[Carroll Quigley]
Tragedy and Hope, ‘The Future in Perspective,’ p.779-81

[...] we must ask what does the dialectician himself want? What does this will which wills the dialectic want?

It is an exhausted force which does not have the strength to affirm its difference, a force which no longer acts but rather reacts to the forces which dominate it - only such a force brings to the foreground the negative element in its relation to the other. Such a force denies all that it is not and makes this negation its own essence and the principle of its existence.

"While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is 'outside', what is 'different' what is 'not itself and this No is its creative deed".

This is why Nietzsche presents the dialectic as the speculation of the pleb, as the way of thinking of the slave: the abstract thought of contradiction then prevails over the concrete feeling of positive difference, reaction over action, revenge and ressentiment take the place of aggression.

And, conversely, Nietzsche shows that what is negative in the master is always a secondary and derivative product of his existence. Moreover the relation of master and slave is not, in itself, dialectical. Who is the dialectician, who dialectises the relationship? It is the slave, the slave's perspective, the way of thinking belonging to the slave's perspective.

[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.9-10

Related posts:-
Centre / Periphery
Lines, Circles and Spirals
Land and Sea 
Balance
Shades of Gray
In-between
Open Wound
Everything and Nothing 
Searching Without/Searching Within 
Frozen in time 
Forget Your Self
Mono / Poly
Accept / Aspire

Criticality

Opposition

Free Space

Taking the Rough with the Smooth

Rough                      -                    Smooth
Undefined                -                    Defined
Chaos                        -                   Logos
Dionysus                  -                    Apollo
Unsure                     -                     Sure
Liquid                       -                    Solid
Change                     -                    Permanence
Unknown                 -                    Known
Probability               -                    Certainty
Approximate            -                    Exact
Plurality                   -                    Unity
Decentrate                -                    Concentrate
Complex                  -                    Simple
Irregular                   -                    Regular
Impure                      -                    Pure
Heterogenous           -                    Homogenous
Immanent                 -                    Transcendent
Imperfect                  -                    Perfect
Earth                        -                    Heavens
Matter                       -                    Pattern
Mother                      -                    Father
Man                          -                    God

The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.

[Wallace Stevens]
'The Poems of Our Climate'

The gods did not reveal, from the beginning,
All things to us, but in the course of time
Through seeking we may learn and know things better.
But as for certain truth, no man has known it,
Nor shall he know it, neither of the gods
Nor yet of all the things of which I speak.
For even if by chance he were to utter
The final truth, he would himself not know it:
For all is but a woven web of guesses.

[Xenophanes]

The individual may strive after perfection [...] but must suffer from the opposite of his intentions for the sake of his completeness.

[C. G. Jung]
Aion, CW 9ii, par 123

Dr Von Franz: That is where we differ.

You think God has published general rules which He keeps Himself, and we think He is a living spirit appearing in man's psyche who can always create something new.

Remark: Within the framework of what He has already published.

Dr Von Franz: To a theologian God is bound to His own books and is incapable of further publications. That is where we lock horns.

[Marie-Louise von Franz]
Alchemy, p. 142

We must have the courage to live relatively, provisionally, without foundations. Or rather, we must have the candour to confess that this is how we live anyway, allowing our beliefs to catch up with our practices.

Fundamentalism is a textual affair. It is an attempt to render our discourse valid by backing it with the gold standard of the Word of words, seeing God as the final guarantor of meaning.

Literalness of interpretation is of its essence. It means adhering strictly to the script. It is a fear of the unscripted, improvised or indeterminate, as well as a horror of excess and ambiguity.

Fundamentalists do not see that the phrase 'sacred text' is self-contradictory - that no text can be sacred because every piece of writing is profaned by a plurality of meanings. Writing just means meaning which can be handled by anyone, anywhere.

Yet if there is no clarity, if no meaning is free from metaphor and ambiguity, how are we to construct a solid enough basis for our lives in a world too swift and slippery for us to find a foothold?

This is not an anxiety to be scoffed at. There is nothing quaint or red-neck about searching for some terra firma in a world in which men and women are asked to reinvent themselves overnight, in which pensions are abruptly wiped out by corporate greed and deceit, or in which whole ways of life are tossed casually on the scrapheap.

Fundamentalism is a diseased version of this desire. It is a neurotic hunt for solid foundations to our existence, an inability to accept that human life is a matter not of treading on thin air, but of roughness.

The fundamentalist is adrift on the rough ground of social life, nostalgic for the pure ice of absolute certainty where you can think but not walk. He is really a more pathological version of the conservative - for the conservative, too, suspects that if there are not watertight rules and exact limits then there can only be chaos.

The problem for the conservative or fundamentalist is that as soon as you have said 'law' or 'rule', a certain chaos is not kept at bay but actually evoked. Applying a rule is a creative, open-ended affair, more like figuring out the instructions for building the Taj Mahal out of Lego then obeying a traffic signal.

As for law, nothing illustrates its slipperiness more than Portia's legalistic sophistry in The Merchant of Venice [...] Portia gets the doomed Antonio off by pointing out to the court that Shylock's bond for securing a pound of his flesh makes no mention of taking any of his blood along with it.

No actual court, however, would admit such a fatuous argument. No piece of writing can spell out all of its conceivable implications. You might as well claim that Shylock's bond makes no reference to the use of a knife either, or to whether Shylock's hair should be tied back in a rather fetching pony-tail at the moment of incision.

Portia's reading of the bond is false because too faithful: it is a fundamentalist reading, sticking pedantically to the letter of the text and thus flagrantly falsifying its meaning.

To be exact interpretation must be creative. It must draw upon tacit understandings of how life and language work, practical know-how which can never be precisely formulated, which is just what Portia refuses to do. If we want to be as clear as possible, a certain roughness is unavoidable.

[Terry Eagleton]
After Theory, p.198, 202-6

Wabi-sabi  represents Japanese aesthetics and a Japanese world view centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. 

The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of beauty that is "imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete".

Characteristics of the wabi-sabi aesthetic include asymmetry, roughness, simplicity, economy, austerity, modesty, intimacy, and appreciation of the ingenuous integrity of natural objects and processes.

For Richard Powell, "[w]abi-sabi nurtures all that is authentic by acknowledging three simple realities: nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect." Buddhist author Taro Gold describes wabi-sabi as "the wisdom and beauty of imperfection."

Wabi now connotes rustic simplicity, freshness or quietness, and can be applied to both natural and human-made objects, or understated elegance. It can also refer to quirks and anomalies arising from the process of construction, which add uniqueness and elegance to the object.  

Sabi is beauty or serenity that comes with age, when the life of the object and its impermanence are evidenced in its patina and wear, or in any visible repairs.

In art books, it is typically defined as "flawed beauty."

'Wabi-sabi'

Wikipedia  

Uncertainty, in the presence of vivid hopes and fears, is painful, but must be endured if we wish to live without the support of comforting fairy tales.

It is not good either to forget the questions philosophy asks, or to persuade ourselves we have found indubitable answers to them. To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralysed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it.

[Bertrand Russell]
History of Western Philosophy ('Introduction'), p.2




We do not, any of us, achieve rigor. 

 In writing, sometimes, we can take time to check the looseness of thought; but in speaking, hardly ever [...]

I know that I personally, when speaking in conversation and even in lecturing, depart from the epistemology outlined in the previous chapter; and indeed the chapter itself was hard to write without continual lapses into other ways of thinking and may still contain such lapses.

I know that I would not like to be held scientifically responsible for many loose spoken sentences that I have uttered in conversation with scientific colleagues. But I also know that if another person had the task of studying my ways of thought, he would do well to study my loosely spoken words rather than my writing.

[Gregory Bateson]
Steps to an Ecology of Mind ('Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry'), p.230

To a much greater extent than men, women can be said to form their abstractions from personal experience. Interestingly enough, the same can be said of the Ladakhis and many traditional and non-Western cultures.

To understand the complexities of the natural world, theory must be grounded in experience.  

Experiential learning is based in messy reality, with all its paradox and untidiness, its ever-changing pattern, its refusal to conform to our expectations.  

As such, it inevitably leads to humility.

[Helena Norberg-Hodge]
Ancient Futures: Learning From Ladakh, p.190

Often I never really heard what she said - I’d be staring at her legs. They were very comforting.

Because sometimes there’d be little bruises or marks around her ankles from the elastic in her socks. That’s how come I knew she was real.

['Danny Embling']
Dialogue from the film 'Flirting'

If we think of idealists in terms of Jung's speculations about the shadow, it's clear the idealist is a man or woman who does not want to go down. They plan to go to the grave with the shadow still repressed.

The idealists are shadow-haters.

By exclusive interest in "the truth," they exile the shadow, or keep it exiled ...

[Robert Bly]
A Little Book on the Human Shadow, p. 74

Repeatedly a woman may tell me how hurt she is by other people's boorish responses. Her battered sensibilities withdraw from the constant onslaught.

What she does not realise is that she is trying to make everything around her sacred and that other people may not understand that they are treading on her sacred space or moving in her sacred time, and so they are unwittingly desecrating her sacred temple.

[Marion Woodman]
Addiction to Perfection, p. 31

The core problem – as Goethe sees it – is this: Romantic love hopes to ‘freeze’ a beautiful moment. 

It’s a summer’s evening, after dinner, Werther is walking in the woods with his beloved. He wants it to be always like this: so he feel they should get married, have a house together, have children. Though, in reality, marriage will be nothing at all like the lovely June night.  

There’ll be exhaustion, bills to pay, squabbles and a sense of confinement. By comparison with the extreme hopes of Romanticism, real love is always necessarily a terrible disappointment. 

That’s why Goethe gradually moved away from Romanticism towards an ideology of love he termed Classicism – marked by a degree of pessimism, an acceptance of the troubles that afflict all couples over time, and of the need to abandon some of the heady hopes of the early days for the sake of tranquillity and administrative competence. 

Goethe was a critic of Romantic ideology not because he was cold hearted or lacking in imagination but because he so deeply and intimately understood its attractions – and therefore its dangers.

'Johann Wolfgang von Goethe' 

Cathy: Heathcliff, make the world stop right here. Make everything stop and stand still and never move again. Make the moors never change and you and I never change.

Heathcliff: The moors and I will never change. Don't you, Cathy.

Cathy: I can't. I can't. No matter what I ever do or say, Heathcliff, this is me now; standing on this hill with you. This is me forever.

[Emily Brontë]
Wuthering Heights

We are doomed to formulate conceptual structures that are much simpler than the complex phenomena they are attempting to account for.

These simple conceptual structures shield us, pragmatically, from real-world complexity, but also fail, frequently, as some aspect of what we did not take into consideration makes itself manifest.

The failure of our concepts dysregulates our emotions and generates anxiety, necessarily, as the unconstrained world is challenging and dangerous. Such dysregulation can turn us into rigid, totalitarian dogmatists, as we strive to maintain the structure of our no longer valid beliefs.

Alternatively, we can face the underlying complexity of experience, voluntarily, gather new information, and recast and reconfigure the structures that underly our habitable worlds.

[Jordan B. Peterson]
‘Complexity Management Theory: Motivation for Ideological Rigidity and Social Conflict’, in Cortex, December 2002, p. 429

What I call Platonicity, after the ideas (and personality) of the philoso­pher Plato, is our tendency to mistake the map for the territory, to focus on pure and well-defined “forms,” whether objects, like triangles, or social notions, like Utopias […], even nationalities.

When these ideas and crisp constructs inhabit our minds, we privilege them over other less elegant objects, those with messier and less tractable structures.

Platonicity is what makes us think that we understand more than we actually do. 

But this does not happen everywhere. I am not saying that Platonic forms don’t exist. Models and constructions, these intellectual maps of reality, are not always wrong; they are wrong only in some specific applications.

The difficulty is that a) you do not know beforehand (only after the fact) where the map will be wrong, and b) the mistakes can lead to severe consequences. These models are like potentially helpful medicines that carry random but very severe side effects.

The Platonic fold is the explosive boundary where the Platonic mindset enters in contact with messy reality, where the gap between what you know and what you think you know becomes dangerously wide.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
The Black Swan: the impact of the highly improbable, p. xxix, xxx

Play


If the cones are not screwed on far enough, the bearings will have "play" [unwanted movement]: the wheel will be able to shake back and forth on its bearings. This is an unpleasant sensation, and may cause control problems.

'Cone adjustment'


The more freedom, or play, in [the] chain, the more room for a reader to generate his or her own meanings from the text. This term 'play' was a key one for Barthes - he used it to refer to a flexibility or movement in the text, that allowed it to be interpreted in different ways.

He also used it to refer to the act of reading and interpretation, which was playful, like a game; and also creative, active, and virtuosic, like a musician playing a score.

'Animating poststructuralism'

[...] the real reason for discouraging dogma in the criticism of the arts isn’t distaste for elitism but the fact that it puts a stop to conversation. 

Take, for instance, F. R. Leavis’s dismissal of Sterne in his study of the English novel, The Great Tradition, where he refers to Sterne’s ‘irresponsible (and nasty) trifling’. Beyond that phrase, in which even the word ‘and’ sounds dogmatic, the case against Sterne is not made.

What is offensive in the phrase is that Leavis refuses even to discuss the matter: he refuses, by more than implication, the company of anyone who would want to.

[Denis Donoghue]
The Arts Without Mystery, p. 56-7

[...] the notion 'exactly six millimetres', or exactly any other measurement, is not something that can ever be met with in experience. It is a metaphysical notion.

But from this it does not follow that mankind cannot make invaluable and prodigious use of measurement; nor that accuracy in measurement, because it is absolutely unattainable, does not matter; nor that we cannot make progress through ever greater and greater degrees of accuracy.

Popper's notion of 'the truth' is very like this: our concern in the pursuit of knowledge is to get closer and closer to the truth, and we may even know that we have made an advance, but we can never know if we have reached our goal.

[Bryan Magee]
Popper, p. 27-8

The shapes of classical geometry are lines and planes, circles and spheres, triangles and cones. They represent a powerful abstraction of reality, and they inspired a powerful philosophy of Platonic harmony.

Euclid made of them a geometry that lasted two millennia, the only geometry still that most people ever learn. Artists found an ideal beauty in them. Ptolemaic astronomers built a theory of the universe out of them. But for understanding complexity, they turn out to be the wrong kind of abstraction.

Clouds are not spheres, Mandelbrot is fond of saying. Mountains are not cones. Lightning does not travel in a straight line. The new geometry mirrors a universe that is rough, not rounded, scabrous, not smooth. It is a geometry of the pitted, pocked, and broken up, the twisted, tangled and intertwined.

The understanding of nature's complexity awaited a suspicion that the complexity was not just random, not just accident. It required a faith that the interesting feature of a lightning bolt's path, for example, was not its direction, but rather the distribution of zigs and zags.

Mandelbrot's work made a claim about the world, and the claim was that such odd shapes carry meaning. The pits and tangles are more than blemishes distorting the classic shapes of Euclidian geometry. They are often the keys to the essence of a thing.

[James Gleick]
Chaos, p. 94

Over the past twenty-five hundred years of recorded ideas, only fools and Platonists have believed in engineered utopias […] the idea is not to correct mistakes and eliminate randomness from social and economic life through monetary policy, subsidies, and so on.

We cannot make economists more scientific; we cannot make humans more rational (whatever that means); we cannot make fads disappear.

The idea is simply to let human mistakes and miscalculations remain confined, and to prevent their spreading through the system, as Mother Nature does. Reducing volatility and ordinary randomness increases exposure to Black Swans - it creates an artificial quiet. 

My dream is to have a true Epistemocracy - that is, a society robust to expert errors, forecasting errors, and hubris, one that can be resistant to the incompetence of politicians, regulators, economists, central bankers, bankers, policy wonks, and epidemiologists.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
The Black Swan, p. 322

We have been fragilizing the economy, our health, political life, education, almost everything… by suppressing randomness and volatility.

Just as spending a month in bed […] leads to muscle atrophy, complex systems are weakened, even killed, when deprived of stressors. Much of our modern, structured, world has been harming us with top-down policies and contraptions […] which do precisely this: an insult to the antifragility of systems.

Not only are we averse to stressors, and don't understand them, but we are committing crimes against life, the living, science, and wisdom, for the sake of eliminating volatility and variation.

This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
Antifragile, p. 5, 61

[Touristification] is my term for an aspect of modern life that treats humans as washing machines, with simplified mechanical responses - and a detailed user’s manual.

It is the systematic removal of uncertainty and randomness from things, trying to make matters highly predictable in their smaller details. All that for the sake of comfort, convenience, and efficiency.

What a tourist is in relation to an adventurer, or a flaneur, touristification is to life; it consists in converting activities, and not just travel, into the equivalent of a script like those followed by actors. We will see how touristification castrates systems and organisms that like uncertainty by sucking randomness out of them to the last drop - while providing them with the illusion of benefit.

But the worst touristification is the life we moderns have to lead in captivity, during our leisure hours: Friday night opera, scheduled parties, scheduled laughs. Again, golden jail.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
Antifragile, p. 62-3

To refrain from mutual injury, mutual violence, mutual exploitation, to equate one's own will with that of another this may in a certain rough sense become good manners between individuals if the conditions for it are present (namely if their strength and value standards are in fact similar and they both belong to one body). 

As soon as there is a desire to take this principle further, however, and if possible even as the fundamental principle of society, it at once reveals itself for what it is: as the will to the denial of life, as the principle of dissolution and decay. 

One has to think this matter thoroughly through to the bottom and resist all sentimental weakness: life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of the strange and weaker, suppression, severity, imposition of one's own forms, incorporation and, at the least and mildest, exploitation - but why should one always have to employ precisely those words which have from of old been stamped with a slanderous intention? 

Even that body within which, as was previously assumed, individuals treat one another as equals - this happens in every healthy aristocracy - must, if it is a living and not a decaying body, itself do all that to other bodies which the individuals within it refrain from doing to one another: it will have to be the will to power incarnate, it will want to grow, expand, draw to itself, gain ascendancy - not out of any morality or immorality, but because it lives, and because life is will to power. 

On no point, however, is the common European consciousness more reluctant to learn than it is here; everywhere one enthuses, even under scientific disguises, about coming states of society in which there will be ‘no more exploitation' - that sounds to my ears like promising a life in which there will be no organic functions. 

'Exploitation’ does not pertain to a corrupt or imperfect or primitive society: it pertains to the essence of the living thing as a fundamental organic function, it is a consequence of the intrinsic will to power which is precisely the will of life. - Granted this is a novelty as a theory - as a reality it is the primordial fact of all history: let us be at least that honest with ourselves! -

[Friedrich Nietzsche]

Beyond Good and Evil, 259

The beginning of wisdom, I believe, is our ability to accept an inherent messiness in our explanation of what's going on.

Nowhere is it written that human minds should be able to give a full accounting of creation in all dimensions and on all levels. Ludwig Wittgenstein had the idea that philosophy should be what he called "true enough." I think that's a great idea.

True enough is as true as can be gotten.

[Rupert Sheldrake]

[…] if the lessons of complex dynamical systems apply to human beings, attempting to design fail-safe social systems (whether legal, educational, penal, or other type) that never go wrong is a hopeless task, for several reasons. 

First, since we carry our history on our backs we can never begin from scratch, either personally or as societies. Second, perfection allows no room for improvement. Plato was one of the few thinkers who understood that if a freshly minted utopia were ever to be successfully established, the only direction in which it could change would be downhill. 

Stasis and isolation are therefore essential to maintaining the alleged perfection, not only of Plato's Republic, but of most other utopias as well. The noumenal self that Kant postulates as the seat of moral choice and free will is likewise not part of this world. The possibility of perfection requires isolation and has nowhere to go but downward.

[Alicia Juarrero]

Dynamics in Action, p. 257

In Russian we have the saying, ‘the правда is not право.' It’s very difficult to say in English. ‘The law is not the truth.’

If you go directly the law way and accomplish all the demands, you can be not right, you can be evil, being completely strict in following the law, because the law and the truth are separate.

[Aleksandr Dugin]

Related posts:-
Land and Sea 
Solid Ground
Everything and Nothing 
All is Change 
You laugh at my back, and I'll laugh at yours
Where language ends and art begins
Playing the Art Game | Art as In-between
A Familiar Story | Post-script
Short Cuts
Frozen in time
Still Waters
Citizens of the Universe
Certain / Uncertain
Top Down / Bottom Up 
The Real Thing 
Inflation / Deflation
Rational / Irrational 
Only Playing
Collaborative Communication
Living in Hazard

A Safe Distance

Problem Solving

One True Path

Growing down

Roots                                 -                       Branches 
Deflation                            -                       Inflation
Tethered                             -                       Free
Earth                                   -                      Sky
Real                                    -                      Ideal

Flawed                                -                      Perfect

Plato's tale of descent is the Myth of Er which I shall condense from the last chapter of his Republic:

The souls are all hanging around in a mythical world, having arrived there from previous lives, and each has a lot to fulfill. This lot is also called a portion of fate (Moira) that is somehow representative of the character of that particular soul.

For instance, the myth says the soul of Ajax, the intemperate and mighty warrior, chose the life of a lion, while Atalanta, the fleet young woman runner, chose the lot of an athlete, and another soul chose the lot of a skillful workman.

"When all the souls had chosen their lives according to their lots, they went before Lachesis [lachos = one's special lot or portion of fate]. And she sent with each, as the guardian of his life and the fulfiller of his choice, the genius [daimon] that had been chosen."

Lachesis leads the soul to the second of the three personifications of destiny, Klotho (klotho = to twist by spinning). "Under her hand and her turning of the spindle, the destiny of the chosen lot is ratified." (Given its particular twist?) "Then the genius [daimon] again led the soul to the spinning of Atropos [atropos = not to be turned, inflexible] to make the web of its destiny irreversible.

"And then without a backward glance the soul passes beneath the throne of Necessity," sometimes translated as the "lap" of Necessity.

The Platonic myth says the soul descends in four modes - via the body, the parents, place, and circumstances. These four ways can be instructions for completing the image you brought with you on arrival.

First, your body: Growing down means going with the sag of gravity that accompanies aging. ([Josephine] Baker told people she was sixty-four while she was still in her mid-fifties; she wore old clothes and gave up covering her baldness.)

Second, admitting yourself to be one among your people and a member of the family tree, including its twisted and rotten branches.

Third, living in a place that suits your soul and that ties you down with duties and customs.

Last, giving back what circumstances gave you by means of gestures that declare your full attachment to this world.

[James Hillman]
The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling, p.44, 45, 62

If we began with Saturn, we would be far more reconciled with our givens, including everything that doesn't work and is imagined to be a trauma, a curse and bad luck, and we would be far less impatient about our growth.

As I've grown older, I've come to realise that the curses, the frustrations, and the character faults visited on me by Saturn mean something completely different than what I thought when I was younger. 

I took them literally as curses, and I cursed my stars for not giving me what I believed I needed and wanted. That is, I cursed Saturn, to use the old language.

But it isn't Saturn who curses us; we curse him. We make him into that poor, shunned, limping old God because we don't understand his mode of blessing. What a curse it must be to keep giving gifts that are received as punishments!

The faults and frustrations he visits on us are his way of keeping us true to our particular image. No way out.

The old lore attributed the last years of life to Saturn. That makes sense. Only now can I begin to reconcile myself with and not rebel against what I am and what I am not.

[James Hillman]
with Michael Ventura
We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy - And the World's Getting Worse

We remember the Baal Shem Tov, that genius of the spirit in the early eighteenth century in Poland, would not let his young men read certain spiritual texts until they were thirty-five. 

Some say that the man's task in the first half of his life is to become bonded to matter: to learn a craft, become friends with wood, earth, wind, or fire.

[Robert Bly]
Iron John, p.60

By the expression asceticism, which I have already used so often, I understand in the narrower sense this deliberate breaking of the will by refusing the agreeable and looking for the disagreeable, the voluntarily chosen way of life of penance and self-chastisement, for the constant mortification of the will.

[...] suffering in general, as it is inflicted by fate, is also a second way of attaining to that denial.

Indeed, we may assume that most men can reach it only in this way, and that it is the suffering personally felt, not the suffering merely known, which most frequently produces complete resignation, often only at the approach of death.

For only in the case of a few is mere knowledge sufficient to bring about the denial of the will, the knowledge namely that sees through the principium individuationis, first producing perfect goodness of disposition and universal love of mankind, and finally enabling them to recognize as their own all the sufferings of the world.

We always picture a very noble character to ourselves as having a certain trace of silent sadness that is anything but constant peevishness over daily annoyances [...] It is a consciousness that has resulted from knowledge of the vanity of all possessions and the suffering of all life, not merely one's own.

Such knowledge, however, may first of all be awakened by suffering personally experienced, especially by a single great suffering, just as a single wish incapable of fulfilment brought Petrarch to that resigned sadness concerning the whole of life which appeals to us so pathetically in his works; for the Daphne he pursued had to vanish from his hands, in order to leave behind for him the immortal laurel instead of herself.

If the will is to a certain extent broken by such a great and irrevocable denial of fate, then practically nothing more is desired, and the character shows itself as mild, sad, noble, and resigned.

We cannot help but regard every suffering, both those felt by ourselves and those felt by others, as at least a possible advance towards virtue and holiness, and pleasures and worldly satisfactions, on the other hand, as a departure therefrom.

This goes so far that every man who undergoes great bodily or mental suffering, indeed everyone who performs a physical labour demanding the greatest exertion in the sweat of his brow and with evident exhaustion, yet does all this with patience and without grumbling, appears, when we consider him with close attention, somewhat like a sick man who applies a painful cure.

Willingly, and even with satisfaction, he endures the pain caused by the cure, since he knows that the more he suffers, the more is the substance of the disease destroyed; and thus the present pain is the measure of his cure.

[Arthur Schopenhauer]
The World as Will and Representation, p.392, 395-7

Adulthood, one could say, is when it begins to occur to you that you may not be leading a charmed life.

[Adam Phillips]
On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, p.82

The way my people take care of something that we're not happy with is to honor it and say, "Thank you, you've taught me a lesson." If it's anger, if it's hate, if it's a drinking problem: "Boy, you've been with me for a long time. Now I'm going to try something else. But I want to thank you for teaching me something about myself."

Never try to just get rid of it. You can't, it's too strong, it's too embedded. Instead, honor it and say, "Thank you."

[Bear Heart]
The Wind is My Mother: The Life and Teaching of a Native American Shaman, p.113

Time To Leave (2005)

Becoming vulnerable, and 'giving in.'

His illness becomes a spiritual experience, his head-shaving a form of tonsure; a symbolic act signaling an inner shift.

In 'giving in' to a higher power, the ego is finally, mercifully, put in perspective. It has taken this illness to remind Romain that there are things bigger than he, things that are out of his control; but from his forced surrender he is able to discover a new way of relating to the world, one not so dominated by the self-aggrandising concerns of his ego.

His illness unites him with his vulnerability, allows him to "grow down" into the earth. He becomes a part of things, connected in a way that he wasn't previously; his ego in its place, no longer pulling at the leash.

From the position of surrender he is able to experience things anew; to smile, to listen, to look.

No doubt about it, the things that once had been natural and a relief, a jubilant cry to the birds in a tree, a marching song chanted aloud, swinging along the road in a light, rhythmical dance-step - these would not do any more.

They would have come out stiff and forced, would have been foolish and childish.

He felt that he was a man, young in feelings and youthful in strength, but no longer used to surrendering to the mood of the moment, no longer free, instead kept on his mettle, tied down and duty-bound [...]

As he engaged in this sudden self-analysis, he realised that he had incomprehensibly grown into the hierarchy, become part of its structure. His constraint came from the responsibility, from belonging to the higher collectivity.

This it was that made many young men old and many old men appear young, that held you, supported you,  and at the same time deprived you of your freedom like the stake to which a sapling is tied. This is was that took away your innocence even while it demanded ever more limpid purity.

[Hermann Hesse]
The Glass Bead Game, p. 179

Stefania, mother and woman, you’re 53, with a life in tatters, like the rest of us.

Instead of acting superior and treating us with contempt, you should look at us with affection. We’re all on the brink of despair. All we can do is look each other in the face, keep each other company, joke a little. Don't you agree?

['Jep Gambardella']
Dialogue from 'The Great Beauty' ('La grande bellezza')

If you’re walking down the street judging everyone - “I don’t like that person’s skin colour … she’s not attractive, that guy’s fat, this person’s a loser, who put this in my way…” - the more you judge the more you’re going to separate yourself.

You’ll feel good for an instant - “I’m better than that” - but then you’ll feel lonely. You’re going to see negativity everywhere. The world reflects your own feelings back at you - reality is neutral, it has no judgements.

[Naval Ravikant]
‘Joe Rogan Experience #1309 - Naval Ravikant’

Living by principles is not living your own life. It is easier to try to be better than you are than to be who you are.

If you are trying to live by ideals, you are constantly plagued by a sense of unreality. Somewhere you think there must be some joy; it can't be all "must," "ought to," "have to."

And when the crunch comes, you have to recognize the truth: you weren't there.

[Marion Woodman]
Addiction to Perfection, p. 61

All stages in the acquisition of important ritual status seem to be accompanied by the novice undergoing an ordeal and pain, as a kind of payment.

This process makes ritual knowledge, as some Pintupi say, "dear." The right to make sacred objects follows on having fingernails pulled out and holes stabbed in one's palms and inside one's elbows. In this way, older men "give" knowledge.

An instructee, returns this prestation with pain, meat, and obedience, but he cannot offer the genuine equivalent of what he is given. He becomes more than he was, now having the right to make sacred objects himself.

Throughout the seclusion period, novices are expected to subordinate themselves to those who look after them. Talking, inattention, misbehavior, or insolence can result in beatings and threats of dire consequences.

Over time, the combination of discipline, physical ordeals (tooth evulsion, nose-piercing, circumcision, subincision, fire ordeals), and revelation of sacred knowledge produces marked changes in personality.

[Fred R. Myers]
Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self, p.174, 238

Once liberals might have favored working-class realism over the middle class conception of the body as a machine requiring "perpetual treatment." The authors, however, drew the opposite conclusion.

A stoic acceptance of bodily decline, they argued, reflected a "damaged self-image."

[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.463

Self-realization, so far as anyone ever achieves it, is manifested by the widest exercise of the individual's potentialities combined with the attainment of a mature relationship with others.

Subjectively, it seems to be attended by a sense of being fully adapted to, rather than attempting entirely to direct, the course of one's own development. This latter attitude is, in the wide sense in which Jung uses the word, religious: for it implies that the individual is acknowledging his ultimate dependence upon forces which may be depicted as either inside or outside himself, but which are nevertheless not of his making.

[Anthony Storr]
The Integrity of the Personality, p.174

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