09-27-2016, 04:30 PM
First off, i love this thread. Lots of fun concepts bubbling up here. i especially loved several of the exchanges between anagogy & Minyatur (hope you two enjoyed having them as much as i enjoyed reading them), but to participants all 'round: good game!
Hitting on everything i found interesting would take too long, so i'll just pick one from the hat.
My problem with 'good' and 'evil' is that the terms are steeped in judgment. It's difficult to even think of them without associations to "right and wrong."
Draw a circle in the sand. Call its insides "What Is." Draw a line compartmentalizing it. Brand one of those sections as lesser / wrong / cosmically accidental ... or even worse (using whatever criteria you please), judge it as having no right to exist. Congratulations, you've just created your own opposition. Having fun meeting it continually as it tries to weasel its way back into its rightful place (or exact vengeance on you-who-have-wronged it).
My baptists parents did this with "God's creation." There were parts of my being that, without question, did not fall into their ideas of what God approved of. I was a child. They convinced me.
It's actually amazing how far reality will bend in the name of love in order to conform to our judgements, almost as if it wants to please us. I embodied this for them. Unable to deny what i knew of my nature, and still accepting my parents' conceptual division of creation ... i assumed they must be right: I was inherently flawed ('evil'). For years i did my best to comply.
I loved them. I believed them. I identified with my own conception of evil ... which was their conception of evil. So ... i hated them (and tormented them to the best of my ability) BECAUSE i loved them. I completely denied that i loved them, because that is how their cartoons of evil were drawn, but Love was still the root. Love is still what creates it ... ALL.
Be careful with judgement.
Hitting on everything i found interesting would take too long, so i'll just pick one from the hat.
My problem with 'good' and 'evil' is that the terms are steeped in judgment. It's difficult to even think of them without associations to "right and wrong."
Draw a circle in the sand. Call its insides "What Is." Draw a line compartmentalizing it. Brand one of those sections as lesser / wrong / cosmically accidental ... or even worse (using whatever criteria you please), judge it as having no right to exist. Congratulations, you've just created your own opposition. Having fun meeting it continually as it tries to weasel its way back into its rightful place (or exact vengeance on you-who-have-wronged it).
My baptists parents did this with "God's creation." There were parts of my being that, without question, did not fall into their ideas of what God approved of. I was a child. They convinced me.
It's actually amazing how far reality will bend in the name of love in order to conform to our judgements, almost as if it wants to please us. I embodied this for them. Unable to deny what i knew of my nature, and still accepting my parents' conceptual division of creation ... i assumed they must be right: I was inherently flawed ('evil'). For years i did my best to comply.
I loved them. I believed them. I identified with my own conception of evil ... which was their conception of evil. So ... i hated them (and tormented them to the best of my ability) BECAUSE i loved them. I completely denied that i loved them, because that is how their cartoons of evil were drawn, but Love was still the root. Love is still what creates it ... ALL.
Be careful with judgement.
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