Owledge

Fear vs. love is the profound duality that motivates the human psyche. The other terms like hate and confidence are situational derivatives of them. Yes, confidence has a fear-countering function. Confidence makes you feel more able to handle the obstacles thrown at you by life, so that means less food for the egoic mind that's busy protecting your mortal shell from outside threats. Of course other fears can operate way deeper and utilize the confidence to work for them. People like rich bankers who are causing suffering for humankind on a grand scale are quite confident in attaining their goals. But when you dig deep enough, you find the profound fears driving them; the ones explaining why they set themselves those goals in the first place.

We can only see in others what we allow into ourselves. If you don't seek for higher virtue, you will not be ready to see or understand it, but instead subject it to your set of moral codes (=beliefs). This is very nicely reflected in the fact that your comment was not at all inquisitive, but a pure statement of your preferred perception. And because I won't chew people's food for them, I won't engage in disclaimer orgies and keep explaining what I don't mean. That would be fear-based behavior. If I had an agenda of playing wise guy and having people believe me to boost my ego, I'd not have Pinkie Pie jump around up there ↑ and down there ↙.

The term "false flag" taken as-is is quite clear, yet in praxis this is a fuzzy matter. Where do you draw the line? Willful acceptance of an event occuring? Provocation? Helping along indirectly? Staging it? How self-righteous the shooters are we might not know (at least I don't). That the works of Charlie Hebdo were a factor in the events is clear. You seem to still try and weigh blame here. Try to transcend the virtue of justice. The idea of justice seems dominant in our world. If we don't aspire to move up, we will tend to move down. And that's happening. The memory of justice remains, while the reality hosts righteousness and fanaticism. Just look at what factors are at hand, what they caused, how they came to be, and then seek to apply the most virtuous approach possible to allay the fears that led to it, ideally practicing humility, because that can help you to find challenges small enough to yield success. If your inner crusader is allowed to set the pace, then you would take on greater tasks with higher likeliness for failure, and that could become a self-amplifying fanaticism. The fears that drive you want to be validated. Don't give them that satisfaction. And it is also a valuable luxury to not be personally affected by the events, because when one is, it is naturally very emotionally overwhelming, in most cases (yet not all) rendering such a person unable to practice high virtue. That, too, should just be accepted as a fact of nature. This is the basis of healthy friendship, too: When one person is weak, the other person needs to be strong for them ... not join the opera of pain in order to gain sympathies, which would lead to issue-pamper circles. If one of my relatives had been killed in the incident, I wouldn't be able to be this calm. But this pain was not mine. I got some of my own, so I'll definitely not become a vehicle for yet another one. Fear clouds the mind and prevents skillful action.

The fearless here is (of course) a hypothetical persona, since one could always ask: "Really, completely fearless?" It has to be taken in a philosopher's sense, because that's where the mind begins to open. (Art can do that.) Not unlike the idea behind koans. But the character of fear is definitely meant to be pure. Where there is no fear, there is no reason not to love. I would even say there has to be love, because it's a profound duality. You can only overcome fear if you open yourself to love, and then once you have overcome fear, it's inevitably there. It's also, of course, not a yes/no thing. There are all kinds of fears at work in the psyche and they all have different intensities and levels of control. When you say you haven't gotten confirmation for it in your life, I need to distinguish: 1) Responding to violence against YOU with love. That's exceptionally rare. 2) Responding to violence against no one in particular with love. That one is not at all rare, yet not that easy to recognize, since it's tendentially an internal process.

Why are you still talking to me against your statements just minutes before?

Almost seven years on an excellent Taoist forum. More than 7800 posts. Still a righteous crusader. Makes it easy for me to let that one go. The journey begins with an intention.

There is a reason for everything. Did you get the message from my question that you cut away in your quote? Doesn't look that way, but if you believe differently, tell me.

Those things will be understood when you can live them. There are several misconceptions right now. Would you like me to point them out, or would you like to ponder some more on it yourself?

That depends. Do you equate my initial remark with dissing someone's sacred beliefs?

Distress is what I see you in. Calling my comment a personal attack reflects why you have the reactions to the events that you have. I don't need to figure out what to do with my emotions (while you certainly are channeling them here), since the events don't touch me emotionally, at least not by triggering fears. I could point out that my other thread is exactly the kind of teaching that you could benefit from, but since you have already created a convenient opinion about it, that might not be of help. If life has indeed confronted you with things worse than death, then maybe that is what you are still dealing with, but what is necessary to gain empathy (if you choose to venture there and feel strong enough to do so) is to acknowledge other people's similar experiences. When you look at how you considered my remark a "personal attack" and became defensive, you might just begin to understand how a muslim could react with violence when seeing their holy prophet dragged into the dirt. ... An overreaction? Yes. But it could happen to anyone.

Then it is good that you are "only a student". Life might eventually give you a taste of things worse than death, and then you can appreciate the empathy gained.

They don't. They have much more basic problems to deal with. Hey, can I wish a painful death upon all those who actively supported a government's illegal war, inflicting grand scale pain and suffering for the benefit of the rich elite? I mean, if we're talking about vengeance, this seems legit, no?

Common faulty line of thought fueled by incitement-propaganda. It is just to put the murderers on trial, but only with humility and regret (as a short-term mesaure to prevent too much upheaval), for there were unjust conditions that led to this incident.

You don't understand the difference between having a freedom and being wise enough to know when to make use of it and when not. If you feel compelled to prove you have that freedom by making unrestrained use of it whenever it pleases you, then you are in fact not free, but a slave to your mind. You quote Ben Franklin, yet you might remember another idea(l) about being free to do what you want as long as it doesn't harm others. And that is the difference between righteousness and compassion. Without the heart, the mind is a monster. Tao Te Ching: If you're not in touch with Tao, at least you can still have integrity. If you don't have integrity, there's always kindness. If you don't have kindness, there's always justice. If you don't have justice, all you have left is righteousness. Since justice is severely lacking in our world, naturally righteousness will pop up as the escapism of the meager.

Yet they are involved in a business that manages to systematically trample on people's sensitivities. Righteousness is not a desirable level of spiritual evolution, because we have been there for a long time already. (I kinda have already expressed all that in my OP. The rest is history.)

This worked for me, too.

Commendable. Thanks for sharing your findings. What I've heard so far seemed relatively unconvincing; just probabilities.

@Rara Much of it I can relate to. I envy your lucky parts. That you have a place to go to where you can be totally inhibited, where you can fight. That you have people whose presence fill you with purpose, who are on the level you need for nourishment. One thing is confirmed again: For mental health, we need to be able and allowed to openly and freely express our emotions.

Only read maybe 30% of the OP, but it's like with great crises that can give you the impulse to turn things around, while when you're trapped in an average, you never can reach breakout velocity in either way. Likely also related to when people face death and then have more appreciation for life.

I've had a peculiar encounter a while ago and am wondering what might have been going on and whether it was something about me, the other person, or both, and what. So imagine this: There's a public speaker. She's answering questions by the audience, talking to people directly, all very natural. Then you approach her and ask her a (normal, harmless, on-topic) question. She apparently doesn't properly focus on the question and gives an answer based on misunderstanding it. Her eyes and head are wandering/jerking all around the place. It's like her eyes are drawing a jaggy circle around you. At no moment is she able/willing to look at you directly. It is borderline comedical. Afterwards, when talking to other people, she's back to normal again.

Well, I checked your first posting again and because I don't want to write an essay and already wrote more thoughts on the event, I can only say it wasn't like that. Her response style was confident in speech, natural, relaxed, pleasant. She might have misunderstood my question, but based on that her response was still proper. Only her eyes and head didn't match that. As for a brony's core values: Many don't want to see the fandom that way; consider it imposing. Like any other fandom, you have very different people with very different motivations, and thus also more or less hypocrisy. Personally I assumed someone calling themselves a fan of a show that clearly conveys certain high virtues and stands out that way should at least make an effort to live up to them, but then I learned the painful lesson that that's often not the case. Condemnation of bullying for example is a big and public matter in the fandom, since brony kids have faced death because of it, yet there are people calling themselves bronies who are bullies. The signature... yes, it indeed is very nice (obviously) and it's only the fact of the motion itself that some take issue with, but since this is The Tao Bums, I would consider it one of the nicest possible offerings of a lesson to find to inner peace and acceptance. Bronies who cannot stand Pinkie Pie usually feel that way for the same reason (hyper, annoying), but she conveys so much goodness that it would be a shame to avert your view because of technicalities. This problem might be an analogy for how lively, cheerful, active kids are diagnosed as ADHD and declared problem cases, while not taking a look at the structure of school organisation, designed by adults with a desire for rigid order and such, and talking about how that might be the problem, might be backwards, outdated, and shown as such by new generations of people born into these times. Pinkie bothered me for maybe 15 minutes, then my heart opened, pushed the mind out of the way, and gave way for laughter and appreciation of childlike joy and healthy chaos. I am very thankful to her for reminding me so powerfully of who I have always been and how valuable that is. In fact, I invite anyone to watch the first episode of the show because of your reaction to the first encounter of the pink kind. ^^ It can be like a litmus test.

Oh man, that must be so funny, knowing that due to ancient instinct, the cat thinks it's a tiger. ^^ Although I would totally not exclude the possibility that there are plenty of cat owners who would actually lose the stare game. Even a cat might sometimes be able to upset people's insecurities, especially the subconscious ones.

I only know about dogs; Among them it's kind of a dominance-establishing action. (Who averts the look first?) But yeah, it's something you can translate to humans. The one with the insecurities looks away first. I once had an related encounter with a butch lesbian. I was fascinated by what she was telling, but her whole self-identity was (naturally) based around opposing men, so she had to give me the weirdo-judgment look. Kinda sad, although, seeing the tattoos on her arms made it so damn easy to be understanding, haha.

You're either STILL trolling or the whole thing is really beyond your comprehension. Either way, it's for you to make an effort here.

Well, then Arturo restored some faith in humanity for me. Your second paragraph destroyed it again.