Viewpoints

[Owledge]

http://dowlphin.deviantart.com/art/Viewpoints-507270977

(Please share if you like it.)

 

 

The crazed responds to violence with more violence.
The righteous responds to violence with equal violence.
The just responds to violence with less violence.
The tired responds to violence with no violence.
The fearless responds to violence with love.


The crazed views the righteous as pompous, the just as foolish, the tired as scum and the fearless as lunatics.
The righteous views the crazed as competition, the just as dangerous, the tired as irrelevant and the fearless as offensive.
The just views the crazed as dangerous, the righteous as extremist, the tired as naive and the fearless as delusional.
The tired views the crazed as hopeless, the righteous as saddening, the just as disappointing and the fearless as powerless.
The fearless views the crazed, the righteous, the just and the tired as in need of love.

Edited January 16, 2015 by Owledge

[Aetherous]

The fearless views the crazed, the righteous, the just and the tired as in need of love.

 

In Buddhist teachings of compassion, they make clear that true compassion is never about looking down on others in this way...it's felt and acted upon from a place of equal footing, in that we all suffer and at our core, we all want others not to suffer in any way. There's a wide gap between that and judgment of others...even if one is using the flowery word, "love".

[Owledge]

In Buddhist teachings of compassion, they make clear that true compassion is never about looking down on others in this way...it's felt and acted upon from a place of equal footing, in that we all suffer and at our core, we all want others not to suffer in any way. There's a wide gap between that and judgment of others...even if one is using the flowery word, "love".

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?

[Aetherous]

Those things will be understood when you can live them.

 

It's true that I don't live them, but I do understand the teaching clearly. In order to practice as a beginning student, one must be taught clearly to differentiate between false forms of love and compassion (such as pitying others, looking down upon them) and true forms (such as simply wishing that the other wouldn't be suffering).

[Owledge]

It's true that I don't live them, but I do understand the teaching clearly. In order to practice as a beginning student, one must be taught clearly to differentiate between false forms of love and compassion (such as pitying others, looking down upon them) and true forms (such as simply wishing that the other wouldn't be suffering).

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

[Marblehead]

The fearless responds to violence with love.

Are you sure about that? That is book philosophy. I have never seen it to be true in "real" life.

[Owledge]

Are you sure about that? That is book philosophy. I have never seen it to be true in "real" life.

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.

[Marblehead]

I will speak to only this at the moment.

But the character of fear is definitely meant to be pure.

Where there is no fear, there is no reason not to love.

Fear is the opposite of confidence. Confidence is definitely meant to be pure. (But not fear.)

 

And it is true, with confidence there is no reason to not love. And there is no reason to hate. Or is there?

 

Can we say that fear breeds hate and confidence breeds love? I don't know.

 

It has so often been said that violence breeds violence. This has been proven true more often than not.

 

Can we say that fear breeds violence? I think that would be a fairly accurate statement.

 

Confidence need not resort to violence because confidence is itself a sort of shield against most violence.

[Owledge]

I will speak to only this at the moment.

Fear is the opposite of confidence. Confidence is definitely meant to be pure. (But not fear.)

 

And it is true, with confidence there is no reason to not love. And there is no reason to hate. Or is there?

 

Can we say that fear breeds hate and confidence breeds love? I don't know.

 

It has so often been said that violence breeds violence. This has been proven true more often than not.

 

Can we say that fear breeds violence? I think that would be a fairly accurate statement.

 

Confidence need not resort to violence because confidence is itself a sort of shield against most violence.

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.

[thelerner]

http://dowlphin.deviantart.com/art/Viewpoints-507270977

(Please share if you like it.)

 

 

The crazed responds to violence with more violence.

The righteous responds to violence with equal violence.

The just responds to violence with less violence.

The tired responds to violence with no violence.

The fearless responds to violence with love.

That's an important statement and we need it in civilization. Too much of it though, and your civilization is wiped out. When loving meets the murderous, they die just like everyone else, maybe fearless dead but thats not a whole lot of consolation. There may have been hundreds of Gandhi's and MLK's that we'll never know of (and some we do) who met evil with love and were promptly killed. Beyond philosophy there's a survival mechanism only available with being willing to defend oneself.

 

In the real world love and fearlessness are great, but they don't conquer all. Without a soldier and policemen to protect them they get destroyed by evil. Course I'm talking history, not philosophy.

Edited January 16, 2015 by thelerner

[Marblehead]

Fear vs. love is the profound duality that motivates the human psyche.

Well, I have no problem with the rest of your post but we will have to agree to disagree regarding the parallels of:

 

Love <-> Hate

Confidence <-> Fear

 

And never confuse aggression with confidence. More often than not we will see fear as the motivator of aggression, not confidence.

[Marblehead]

Course I'm talking history, not philosophy.

Hehehe. Yeah, you did that, didn't you?

[Owledge]

That's an important statement and we need it in civilization. Too much of it though, and your civilization is wiped out. When loving meets the murderous, they die just like everyone else, maybe fearless dead but thats not a whole lot of consolation. There may have been hundreds of Gandhi's and MLK's that we'll never know of (and some we do) who met evil with love and were promptly killed. Beyond philosophy there's a survival mechanism only available with being willing to defend oneself.

 

In the real world love and fearlessness are great, but they don't conquer all. Without a soldier and policemen to protect them they get destroyed by evil. Course I'm talking history, not philosophy.

Don't choose challenges too great for you to handle, but don't indoctrinate yourself into not giving your best trying. Where attention goes, energy flows. Explore your inner psyche to find out what fear motivates you to go "yes, but...".

[Owledge]

Well, I have no problem with the rest of your post but we will have to agree to disagree regarding the parallels of:

 

Love <-> Hate

Confidence <-> Fear

 

And never confuse aggression with confidence. More often than not we will see fear as the motivator of aggression, not confidence.

Hate is just an emotional prepping of a defense reaction to a perceived fear. Hate is aggression not yet acted out. You can never hate someone if you have no fears, because there is nothing you could hate them for. No matter what they do, if it causes you to hate them for it, it means you are afraid of the things they do. If you are invulnerable, then it could still happen that you are afraid of having to live with the memory. If you hate a child munderer for what he did, it means you saw your moral values violated, without which you feel you could not maintain what you have.

Confidence and fear cannot be a duality if you accept the rest of what I wrote.

 

That love and fear are at the root is also indicated by the fact that fear of death is the ultimate motivator, death being a defining spiritual threshold, and love is something that can transcend self-preservation.

[thelerner]

Since you bring it up, how do you relate to the child murderer? How do you relate before they murder, while they murder and after they kill?

 

I've found your past arguments to be flawed and unrealistic. Perhaps a real life example would be more instructive to me.

[Owledge]

What do you mean, how I relate?

I certainly don't make a temporal difference.

People do bad things because they're controlled by fear; have pain buried deep because they didn't want to deal with it. When the pain is resolved, they stop doing bad things.

When an electrical razor stops, do you condemn it for being weak or do you recharge its batteries?

It's so easy to act skillfully when all that judgmental emo junk isn't in the way.

[Marblehead]

... if you accept the rest of what I wrote.

Yep, like I said, we will just have to agree to disagree and leave it at that.

[Nungali]

And never confuse aggression with confidence. More often than not we will see fear as the motivator of aggression, not confidence.

 

 

Too right! If I had ever tried to use anything but 'radiating confidence' ( in myself) to do the 'orderly' part of my orderlies job at the hospital * (like having any fear or aggression in myself) ... I would have been mincemeat !

 

* " Nungali, go in there and stop that huge giant Islander guy that is on drugs and alcohol from smashing up the emergency ward containment room - the police will be here ....... 'sometime' soon . "