Give - Receive
Masculine - Feminine
Active - Passive
Assertive - Receptive
Creator - Consumer
Red - Blue
The principle of cause and effect is at work everywhere, and somebody has to receive the results of everybody's doings.
Every sentence or thought or act has an effect on somebody. If someone has a destructive thought or wish, it has to have an effect on someone.
If it doesn't work on someone else, it works back on the person who created it.
[...] There's no need to create any opposing destructive force; that only makes more negative energy and more results and more problems.
If you have a sense of opposition - that is, if you feel contempt for others - you're in a perfect position to receive their contempt. The idea is not to be a receiver.
You people have such anger and fear and contempt for your so-called criminals that your crime rate goes up and up. Your society has a high crime rate because it is in a perfect position to receive crime.
You should be working
with these people, not in opposition to them. The idea is to have contempt for crime, not for people. It's a mistake to think of any group or person as an opponent, because when you do, that's what the group or person will become.
It's more useful to think of every other person as another you - to think of every individual as a representative of the universe.
Every person is plugged into the whole works. Nobody is outside it or affects it any less than anyone else. Every person is a model of life, so the true nature of a person is the nature of life. I don't care how low you fall or how high you climb, economically or academically or anything else, you still represent the whole thing. Even the worst criminal in life imprisonment sitting in his cell - the center of him is the same seed, the seed of the whole creation.
["Mad Bear"]
Rolling Thunder, p. 244-5
Aikido was created by Morihei Ueshiba, referred to by some aikido practitioners as Ōsensei ("Great Teacher").
Ueshiba envisioned aikido not only as the synthesis of his martial training, but also an expression of his personal philosophy of universal peace and reconciliation.
Aikido is performed by blending with the motion of the attacker and redirecting the force of the attack rather than opposing it head-on.
[...] Today aikido is found all over the world in a number of styles, with broad ranges of interpretation and emphasis. However, they all share techniques learned from Ueshiba
[...] most have concern for the well-being of the attacker.
'Aikido',
Wikipedia
In traditional violent and nonviolent conflict, the goal is to defeat the opponent or frustrate the opponent’s objectives, or to meet one’s own objectives despite the efforts of the opponent to obstruct these.
In satyagraha, by contrast, these are not the goals. “The Satyagrahi’s object is to convert, not to coerce, the wrong-doer.”
Success is defined as cooperating with the opponent to meet a just end that the opponent is unwittingly obstructing.
The opponent must be converted, at least as far as to stop obstructing the just end, for this cooperation to take place.
The essence of Satyagraha is that it seeks to eliminate antagonisms without harming the antagonists themselves, as opposed to violent resistance, which is meant to cause harm to the antagonist.
A Satyagrahi therefore does not seek to end or destroy the relationship with the antagonist, but instead seeks to transform or “purify” it to a higher level.
A euphemism sometimes used for Satyagraha is that it is a “silent force” or a “soul force” (a term also used by Martin Luther King Jr. during his famous “I Have a Dream” speech). It arms the individual with moral power rather than physical power.
Satyagraha is also termed a “universal force,” as it essentially “makes no distinction between kinsmen and strangers, young and old, man and woman, friend and foe.”
'Satyagraha',
Wikipedia
"I say unto you," is written in the Gospel, "resist not evil," do not oppose injury with injury, but rather bear repeated injury from the evil doer.
[Leo Tolstoy]
The Kingdom of God is Within You, p. 11
[The]
ד "Dalet"signifies "Dalluth" (poverty) and the
ג "Gimel" beneficence ("Gemul").
The
ג "Gimel" practices charity with the
ד "Dalet".
The lord [said]: "It should suffice you to
remain side by side together, since "the poor will not cease from the land" (Deut., 15:2), who will thus need benevolence [...] Therefore,
do not separate from one another. You must remain close together and
let it suffice you that one maintains the other.
"Why is the foot of the gimmel stretched toward the
daled?"
"Because it is the way of the giving person
to run after the poor.""
"And why is the leg of the daled slanted slightly back toward the
gimmel?"
"Because the poor person must make himself available to those who
can give."
"And why is the face of the daled turned away from the gimmel?"
"So he
can give to him in secret, so the daled won't be embarrassed."
[...] once you have learned understanding, you see that there really is no
hierarchy of givers and getters in this world. It's only on the surface
that it seems that way, but in the understanding view from within, no
one gives without getting, no one gets without giving.
'
The letters 'Dalet' & 'Gimel'' and '
Gimmel & Daled' (adjustments have been made to the original texts)
Ingrid was a woman in her mid-twenties. She had been travelling alone and arrived late one afternoon in a foreign city. She had to cross from one railway station to another.
Suddenly she was accosted in the deserted street by a powerfully built man who forced her into an alleyway, saying he was going to rape and kill her.
Her initial reaction was one of panic, and she tried to fight back. But he was stronger. Then in a flash she saw the situation she was in; she saw the man; she saw herself. She accepted her death, her body relaxed and she looked straight into the man's eyes.
Immediately his fingers loosened on her throat.
"You don't even fight," he stammered. "You're no fun to kill."
"If I'm going to die, I'm going to die," she said quietly, never taking her eyes from his.
He became confused. She put her hands over his and gently took them from her throat. He began to cry, grabbed her by the wrist and yanked her into a nearby pub from which she escaped when he went to the washroom.
[...] So long as he was "rapist" in her mind and she was "victim," her violence mirrored his. Death was constellated. He wanted her to fight so he could kill.
But when she suddenly saw herself as one human being strangling in another human being's clutches, her compassion for herself became at once compassion for him.
She had accepted death; she saw him still in life, still fighting some ludicrous power battle [...] Paradoxically, she became invulnerable through her very vulnerability. He could not kill what had already died. In that instant of surrender she freed them both from the possession. She found herself and gave him back to himself. He was no longer "rapist"; he was simply human.
[Marion Woodman]
Addiction to Perfection, p. 152-3
Non-Indians know how to give, but they don't always know how to receive things properly.
They might say, "Aw, you shouldn't have ..." or "Why?" They put a lot of little blocks up, because they're so used to giving, but not used to receiving.
When someone gives to you, he wants to satisfy himself in some way by doing it, and if you say no, you hurt his feelings.
[Bear Heart]
The Wind is My Mother, p. 38
In Derrida's work, and in that of many cultural and literary critics who followed his ideas, there is always a sense that an opposition is no innocent structural relation but a power relation, in which one term dominates another.
Even in the case of an opposition as apparently rooted in nature as night/day, there is a hierarchy which ascribes privilege, priority and positive value to one term at the expense of the other. Indeed the very idea of otherness comes to signify this power relation, this secondary and derivative position that one sign acquires in relation to another...
Poststructuralist approaches to the binary opposition produce a kind of critique that unmasks power relations, that seeks to oppose hierarchy, that refuses to isolate the sign from the discourse in which it operates, or for that matter that refuses to isolate the opposition from the more general discursive context in which its associative and suggestive potential is formed.
If we take these two developments together, the liberation of difference from opposition on one hand, and a kind of critique that exposes hierarchy as it operates in discourse, we have a useful preliminary account of the characteristics of what came to be known, in the 1970s, as deconstruction.
[Mark Currie]
Quoted in '
Derrida and Jelinek', at Click Opera
"A woman on Gont" can't become an archmage. No woman can be archmage. She'd unmake what she became in becoming it. The Mages of Roke are men - their power is the power of men, their knowledge is the knowledge of men. Both manhood and magery are built on one rock: power belongs to men.
If women had power, what would men be but women who can't bear children? And what would women be but men who can?
'Hah!' went Tenar; and presently, with some cunning, she said, 'Haven't there been queens? Weren't they women of power?'
'A queen's only a she-king,' said Ged.
She snorted.
'I mean, men give her power. They let her use their power. But it isn't hers, is it? It isn't because she's a woman that she's powerful, but despite it.'
[Ursula Le Guin]
E
arthsea: The First Four Books, p. 664
A
closed system is one where interactions occur only among the system components and not with the environment.
An
open system is one that receives input from the environment and/or releases output to the environment.
The basic characteristics of an open system is the dynamic interaction of its components, while the basis of a cybernetic model is the feedback cycle. Open systems can tend toward higher levels of organization (negative entropy), while closed systems can only maintain or decrease in organization.
[David S. Walonick]
General Systems Theory
The will to power […] depends on the fact that for Nietzsche all things in the world are interconnected and that their interconnections are crucial to their very character.
But from these ideas a more radical conclusion seems to follow: “No things remain but only dynamic quanta, in a relation of tension to all other dynamic quanta: their essence lies in their relation to all other quanta, in their ‘effect’ upon the same.”
The will to power is an activity that consists in expanding a particular sphere of influence, physical or mental, as far as it can possibly go. As such, it ranges from the crudest to the most sophisticated, from mere physical resistance and brute subjugation to rational persuasion.
[Alexander Nehamas]
Nietzsche: Life as Literature, p. 79-80
The hand that rocks the cradle erects the play-pen; and, whilst security is given on the one hand, restriction is imposed upon the other, with the result that all parents are bound to be ambivalent figures and to excite both love and hatred in their offspring.
If this historical view of aggression is taken, it will be seen that it can be postulated that aggressiveness is both innate and likely to become progressively less important as development proceeds.
Aggression is necessary for development, for separateness, for the achievement of differentiation from the parents. Competitive aggressiveness, sibling rivalry, is characteristic of immaturity and should diminish as self-realization proceeds.
Aggressiveness is at its maximum when dependence (and hence inequality) is at its maximum; as development proceeds it becomes less important till, at the point of maximum development, only so much aggression exists as is necessary to maintain the personality as a separate entity.
[…] differentiation is essential for individuality; two people who share the same views, hold the same opinions, and have the same interests are not differentiated but identified; and the wish of parents that their children should be like them is a narcissistic one. They want to hold a mirror to themselves and see that what they have created is both good and in their own image.
The notion that it is always wrong or dangerous to oppose anyone else is easily implanted in the child, but the behaviour which such a notion imposes is crippling to the personality as a whole, for individuality implies opposition and differentiation.
A certain opposition to others in adult life is necessary if the personality is to be maintained as a separate entity; and this is clearly connected with the aggressive impulses which are characteristic of childhood; but to use the word 'aggression' in connexion with the dignity and independence of the mature personality is to create a wrong impression.
All affirmation of the personality is 'aggressive' - but there is no word which conveys the idea of aggression without hostility, which is the concept I am trying to convey.
It seems to me that maturity is characterized by assertion and affirmation of the personality without hostility and without competitiveness, both of which characteristics are typical of childhood. The more a man has succeeded in realizing his own personality, the less compulsion will he feel to be competitive and the less hostile will he be to others.
[Anthony Storr]
The Integrity of the Personality, p.56-8
Male aggression and lust are the
energizing factors in culture. They are men’s tools of survival in the pagan vastness of female nature.
[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.25-26
The Spenserian rapist is a savage, churl, or knight who is not “curteous” or “gentle,” who has not, in other words, undergone the feminizing refinement of social life. Due to his failure to incorporate a feminine component, he pursues fleeing, malleable femininity with a headlong ferocity that is a hunger for self-completion. His lust is a semantic error, a selfmisinterpretation, a confession of psychic inadequacy.
But on the other hand, weakness inspires attack. Vulnerability generates its own entrapments, creating a maelstrom of voracity around itself. Nature abhors a vacuum. Into the spiritual emptiness of pure femininity in Spenser rush a storm of masculine forces.
Florimell, for example, is a professional victim. In her mad flight, she is called a “Hynd,” the deer whom fierce Belphoebe pursues at her first entrance [...] Feminine and unarmed, Florimell and Amoret are flagrant targets for attack. Sadism and masochism engender one another in dizzy oscillation. Caught on the swing of the sexual dialectic, the rapist vainly strives to obliterate his opposite.
The Faerie Queene’s savage circular world of rape is transcended by the higher characters, who internally subsume the chastened extremes of masculine and feminine.
[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.186-7
Hierarchy is conceptualized eroticism, which is why, as homely Henry Kissinger said, power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.
[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.144
There are nothing but quantities of force in mutual "relations of tension". Every force is related to others and it either obeys or commands.
What defines a body is this relation between dominant and dominated forces. Every relationship of forces constitutes a body - whether it is chemical, biological, social or political. Any two forces, being unequal, constitute a body as soon as they enter into a relationship.
In a body the superior or dominant forces are known as
active and the inferior or dominated forces are known as
reactive. Active and reactive are precisely the original qualities which express the relation of force with force.
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.40
Related posts:-
Everything is Connected
The Principle of Polarity
Masculine - Feminine
The Sacred Circle
Evil and Us
Projecting a Shadow?
Carry Each Other
Assuming a position
One Love?
Positive Space
Autonomy
Controlling the Frame
In traditional court procedures, the accused is brought before a judge, possibly a jury, and legal counsel seeks to establish guilt or innocence and the appropriate remedy.
The sentencing circle is about “community building,” he says; it is about “healing” those affected by crime, and those who committed it. It is repairing relations; making victims and perpetrators “feel better” with the outcome of a criminal incident.
