Cheesus wrote:Great insight, Bio
Thanks Cheesus, I'm not 100% on everything I wrote, however.
Cheesus wrote:Your argument reminds me of Taoism and, specifically, the necessity of balance in nature. The image of yin/yang, which I am sure we are all familiar with, depicts very well the intricate relationship between good and evil, optimism and pessimism, preservation and change, creation and destruction. An internal imbalance of these opposing forces can lead to personal delusion. As you say, mindfulness is an excellent way to cultivate a greater harmony of these elements as it removes systemic resistance or grasping. It allows them to occur as they are.
I do wonder, however, if the need for personal balance can be directly translated to the social sphere. It is delusional itself to say that war and poverty is healthy. Surely the balance has been diabolically corrupted. That leaves us with the question of what a healthy social balance would look like.
It seems you are saying that good and evil are necessary in equal proportions if we are going to approach things according to a yin/yang balance theory. My statement wasn't really about that kind of balance, but more about harmony and dissolving of this notion labelled 'evil'. It is very culturally and religiously loaded.
In the same vein that mindfulness practices encourage one to drop dualistic judgement, it may be necessary to drop the dividing of things into good and evil. Yin and Yang can be seen as two sides of one coin. In Zen, for example (which was apparently born from Greek philosophy mixing with Zoroastrianism and Buddhism on the Afghan/Pakistan border and then finally being 'tempered' by Daoism after it's arrival in China via the North Silk Road) the yin/yang is often replaced with an empty circle representing wholeness - called 'enso' in Japan - probably having come from the idea of
Wuji - the "primordial universe" prior to the yin/yang. I tend to associate mindfulness and the mindful view of nature more with this Wuji, rather than yin/yang. When one looks at one's DNA, one sees potential rather than discrete outlines. For example, human males apparently have potential reproductive 'programming' to go for a scatter-gun approach and spread their seed as far and wide as possible, or focus on a few well-protected and well-provided-for offspring that they definitely know belong to them. Of course many human males end up doing something somewhere in the middle, and even become so frustrated by their flexible and non-straightforward 'programming' that they avoid the whole minefield altogether. Again, bring mindfulness into the equation with it's just observe and 'go with the flow', and there is no need for definite 'right' action - there is just 'what is'. In the Dao De Jing, the Daoist Sage LaoZi wrote that without laws there are no criminals. Such ideas as criminal humans being just mentally ill due to traumatic childhoods, etc., are commonplace now. Mentally ill people don't think of laws in the same way healthier individuals do. Criminals are often branded evil - a label which carries ideas of 'having a dark soul from birth', or 'having a black heart', or some such condemnation, when if one hears their life stories one often says: "Yep, of course he became a criminal". I watched a documentary about the Roman Emperor Caligula on youtube recently - hearing about his childhood and passage into adulthood was enough for me to put his 'evil-ness' down to nurture. Really messed up stuff.
Anyway, returning to human DNA, I have noted elsewhere on the forum the interesting overlap between the necessary acceptance of the "don't know mind" in mindfulness, and the flexible potential the human genome apparently holds for many different survival scenarios (which can often have potentially conflicting behaviours embedded within them). As Socrates said: "All I know is that I know nothing, and that makes me the sanest man alive". Once we have admitted that we don't have the foggiest about why this universe exists; whether it is finite or not, and whether or limited senses and brains can ever comprehend a truthful answer or not, we can get on with enjoying what is here and now.
One thing I do feel I am understanding more and more, however, is that meeting evil with unconditional compassion transforms it from evil into a stepping stone to goodness, and then the divisive line between what was deemed good and what was deemed evil disappears, and everything becomes just one big perfect awesome 'Dao'.
