--- In [email protected], "Patrick Gillam" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > TurquoiseB wrote: > > > > The London terrorists and > > the old rich men who make up Bush & Co. are NOT > > enemies. They are PARTNERS. They NEED each other > > I'd like to tie this thought to something you said > a few days ago, Unc, about how debaters in spiritual > forums argue not so much to determine truth as to > reinforce their egos -- to reinforce their ignorance. > > I've encountered a school of thought that all opposition > derives from the need to reinforce one's place in this > relative creation. Good requires evil to exist as good. > Otherwise, it's like white paint on a white ground -- > there's no contrast to make the white stand out.
I can see this, with one additional monkey wrench thrown into the works. It seems to me that there is, in fact, an interdependency between "good" and "evil," but that this interdependency is based more on fundamentalism than any "laws of nature." The more a self is fundamentalist -- that is, convinced it knows the "truth" -- the more it seems to require opposition to that "truth," or "untruth." Just look at the historical religious and political traditions that have emphasized this eternal struggle between good and evil. The nastiest of them were all completely convinced that they knew the "truth." Therefore, they were the good guys in the white hats, and those who didn't know the "truth" were the bad guys in the black hats. In the most horrible relig- ious wars on this planet, *both* sides felt this way. "God is on our side," was said, and believed, by both. The need for "contrast," the black background "to make the white stand out" seems to me to be tied to this paradigm that "we already know the 'truth.'" Religions and spiritual traditions that don't claim to know the "truth" -- or that don't feel that there is a fixed "truth" TO know -- rarely develop a con- frontational, good-vs.-evil, us-vs.-them relation- ship with the world in their conceptual models of the universe. Taoism and Buddhism spring to mind. The universe tends to be perceived and modeled more as an eternal interplay of energies, none of them "good" or "bad," light or dark -- just energies, dancing, eternally. I haven't really thought about this before, but I'd be willing to bet that the more convinced one is that he or she knows the "truth," the more you'll find in that person's belief system a need for there to be something opposing that "truth." It's almost as if the self that fixates on one POV and tells itself that it's got everything figured out *at the same time* manifests a situation in the world around it whose purpose is to dissolve this "truth" and reveal it as merely the latest in an infinite number of relative truths, just another thought to be ignored on the way to transcendence. > From this perspective, so much of our conflict is just > an exercise to give meaning to our lives. Or, in my model above, to give meaning and importance to our selves. > I, for one, > love having meaning in my life. It was one of the big > attractions to being in the TM movement. It comes now > from having a family. Imagine how fulfilled the jihadists > must feel, having a mission they're willing to die for. There is a certain hopelessness and lack of ability to enjoy life implicit in the fanatical martyr, yup. > A while back, L B Shriver posted links to a BBC production > that examined the symbiotic relationship between our > Western religious fundamentalists and those in the Middle > East. Aside from the political insights that series provided, > it really illustrated how we create our enemies to give > meaning to our goodness. Or just to give *existence* to our supposed goodness. If you had a belief system (such as Tantra) in which nothing was inherently either good or evil, would you need an "enemy" to reinforce that belief system or lend it "credibility?" Possibly not. But the minute you have a belief system that positions itself as "good" or "holy," you have a need for there to be something to be "bad" or "unholy" to provide contrast to it. Interesting subject. I don't really have a clue here; I'm just rappin', off the top of my head. But it's certainly an interesting subject. As the planet- buster AI bomb in the movie "Dark Star" said, "I must think on this further..." :-) Unc To subscribe, send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Or go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ and click 'Join This Group!' Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
