J. A. R. said:
The Buddha talked about the dangers of holding on to negative emotions and attempting to use them to hurt others. He compared it to picking up a burning coal with the intention of hurling it at another. You only burn yourself. What the Buddha failed to understand is that it is possible for a person to build up a resistance to negativity. To dwell in it until it's your home, and the darkness become a comforting blanket rather than a frightening void. The ability to pick up the burning coal, and enjoy the sensation of it's warmth, knowing that others can not do the same, is a powerful experience. It also allows you to weaponize your negative feelings.
Michael Goguen said:
Fear leads to anger...
Anger leads to hate
Hate leads to the dark side of the force...
Michael Goguen said:
Power over is certainly one important relationship dynamic - having power over things or people that can hurt me, either due to my own power or skill, or internal qualities that give me ability to manage or thrive in those conditions.
However, the power-over dynamic lends itself to 'arms races' - because you are generally inherently in competition, the energy you are using is usually -against- instead of -with- one another, so some of it cancels each other out, meanwhile, you need to constantly be building and developing more power, lest you face a challenge beyond your ability to have power over... which is basically an unending journey to acquire power, and to control others, whether from the perspective of goodness, and being 'better than', and having to 'help' 'less perfect' beings, or from evil, and a rejection of the worth of something else for its own sake in relation to the defined identity and needs of what is considered 'self' or 'personal needs and goals'.
Power -which often focuses more on the self, containing energy more, being more balanced in terms of what is realistic and useful in the present, and the energy can be summative when there is collaboration sometiems - beings' energy adds together, so you need less of it potentially, to get something done, where interests converge, ie symbiosis can occur and synergy of relationships where beings are able to work together.
power over and with are both important ways of relating, which lend themselves to various relationship techniques.
With power-over, often power of a being is on the ascension, and starts to curve asymtotically upwards, until it reaches a hard limit or collapse- it tends to be unsustainable, as that level of change of power, often the evolutionary adaptation to work with the power available does not evolve on the same curve, so eventually the power one develops becomes... a point of catastrophic failure- a powder keg. You could say humanity is evolving through this stage right now, and has to decide whether it wants to consciously slow down in order to evolve spiritually/ or in awareness and consciousness at a level that can balance the level and capacity for the power available to harm the self, and the other. This is the parable of the double edged sword- the power we use to harm others, can come back to harm us, through our own actions; one does not need to understand this in terms of some esoteric idea of karma, either. Martial arts like aikido give good examples of a being with lesser power, but more awareness/insight, being able to redirect the greater power of a less aware being against itself, so that it ends up destroying itself, the more violent and less restrained it becomes. this is a good thing, because sometimes a being lacks an awareness of how harms they are causing to others may also be harming their own interests, because they haven't deeply examined what is truly in their own best interests.
so you could say, that spiritual beings often have an 'inner gate' that seals off certain levels of power, until the proper awareness, restraint, and often qualities like compassion, are developed enough, so that that being will not cause itself great emotional suffering and regret by taking actions in a state of a lack of awareness, when great power is available, that later it would not have wanted.
so in the example of holding a coal of hate to wield against others, that is burning the self while being held, the idea is a little bit that channelling our energy into something negative which is actually against our own best interests, naturally causes us regret and suffering, and sometimes a feeling of incompetence and ignorance when we realize that much of this was caused by our own actions and power and lack of awareness.
Imagine you have a martial arts partner that you train with, that sometimes you have real fights with, but you also gain an emotionaly attachment and love for, and become romantic partners with. But you have a disagreement, and do not want to give up many valuable things that you receive from the relationship. But this partner is close to as powerful as you, and one time nearly kills you for disagreeing with them or trying to coerce them into something they didn't want to do. But you are stronger enough than them at this moment, that you can break them permanently, to gain an advantage, in order to continually be able to leverage power over them to get what you want by power over, instead of trying to negotiate. So you break their spine and they are in a wheel chair now, and you continue as partners, but you have the power now to beat them whenever you want to. But now, it turns out, that if you don't exert considerable time and energy of your own into taking care of them, that they may die in difficult circumstances; they've become dependent on YOU and YOUR power; but if at any moment you divest yourself of responsibility, you may now lose this thing you supposedly wanted. So by using your power DESTRUCTIVELY, you may have actually caused yourself more work in getting what you actually want. Were there other ways to solve this problem? Probably. But when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail- if you want to not have to use a hammer on all of your problems, you need to diversify your tool set- like learning other ways to deal with problems.
Certain unpleasant emotions can actually act as useful feedback and gates to potential self-harm, through harming others we love or would want to collaborate with. Emotions tend to be temporary, passing discomfort, rather than permanent injury, at least in some cases, or I guess it is something depending more on internal skillfulness to heal it.
Some say, that we cannot help but to feel the suffering of those around us, because of things like empathy and mirror neurons; and that sometimes people become numb to these things, because the suffering around them is too great. But unfortunately, a side effect is usually that there is also a numbness to positive emotions as well- that you cannot truly numb the negative, without numbing the positive as well... this is sort of like a spiritual safety gate as well, to prevent things from becoming too polarized in a harmful way. I say spiritual, but one could say that it could be an integrated habit that got incorporated into the design through billions of years of evolution, which is not always necessary to be understood explicitly, in order to have a useful experience in life.
I feel like I am getting ramblie and preachie.
thank you for letting me share my thoughts and feelings with you, this has been useful for me as well.
peace.
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