Principle 11 Negation of Opposites – Week 2 – 2024

November 8, 2024 

Principle 11. Negation of Opposites. Week 2 

“It does not matter in what faction events have placed you what matters is for you to understand that you have not chosen any faction.” 

Last time: My beliefs, your beliefs. 

This time: Various Ducks or Various Rabbits

What if this truly radical and ridiculously simple proposal works? 

It is right here amid all the little joys, and daily crap that we can actually create a practice that can be applied at every moment and in every circumstance. This is a dynamic meditation, requiring neither particular postures, nor special conditions. With time and application these efforts imbue all my activities with a particular tone, mood, and mental direction.  

This Week:

Last week we considered the overall structure and general implications of the principle of the negation of opposites. This week we will consider it in the context of the past. 

As I have mentioned previously, I find the best way to approach these kinds of considerations is concretely — that means that this week I’ll take a look at the principle and try to discover at least one situation where applying the principle made or could have made a difference in the outcome of events, or at least how I felt about that outcome. 

Can I think of such a situation? How did I apply, or not apply this principle? What were the consequences? How might things have played out differently?  Or perhaps reflecting on the principle helped me gain an insight into others, or perhaps a sense of internal freedom I might otherwise not have had. 

To help gain some new perspectives we will also play  

The Game of the Week.

Ask About It!

The basic idea is simple: turn to someone and ask them what they understand this principle to mean.  Asking them may involve the difficult task of taking a little risk and overcoming any initial self-censorship. But, why the hesitation and inhibitions? You’re only asking someone’s opinion. 

Try it out. Simply ask a friend, your neighbour, family member, or some stranger on the street. The point is to solicit their opinion, and then the hard part. You need to listen — whatever they say whether you find it: brilliant, silly, or misguided.

Personal Reflections:

What follows are my reflections. I make no greater claim for them but offer them in the spirit of exchange and dialogue.  

I hope you find these of some use in your own meditations. 

What a timely principle! Perhaps it’s always timely. Maybe it’s just because all the principles are always timely.  But whatever the case this sure seems worth considering in a word with increasingly virulent, violent, and self-righteous factions.

Here’s chapter 4 from Silo’s “The Internal Landscape”. 

2. I know my way in this human landscape, but what will happen if we pass each other going in opposite directions? I renounce every faction that proclaims an ideal higher than life and every cause that, to impose itself, generates suffering. So before you accuse me of not being part of any faction, examine your own hands—you may find on them the blood of complicity. If you believe it valiant to commit yourself to those factions, what will you say of one whom all the murderous bands accuse of being uncommitted? I want a cause worthy of the human landscape: a cause committed to surpassing pain and suffering. 

3. I deny the right to make accusations to any faction that, whether recently or long ago, has figured in the suppression of life.

4. I deny the right to cast suspicion on others to any who conceal their own suspicious faces.

5. I deny that anyone, even someone arguing the extreme urgency of present circumstance, has the right to block the new roads that the human being must travel.

6. Not even the worst of what is criminal is foreign to me, and if I recognize it in the landscape, I recognize it also in myself. So it is that I want to surpass what in me as in everyone fights to suppress life: I want to surpass the abyss!

Remember:

The principles are simply platitudes if you don’t make the effort to transform them into something more. They are only important if they can help you build a more coherent life filled with growing Peace in yourself and around you, internal Force to face life’s difficulties and the Joy of an open future.

Worth Repeating:

Guiding our actions by the internal registers of unity and contradiction we can develop a coherent life increasingly filled with peace, force, and joy.

Coming up:

This week we looked at how principle 11 "the negation of opposites” applied in past situations. Next week we shift from the past to the present. 

Note:

These notes have been posted on our Facebook page (Community of Silo’s Message Toronto Annex), sent to our email list, and are also on my webpage at  www.dzuckerbrot.com

But before we go, are you a rabbit or a duck?

Do you know the image of the rabbit-duck?

Attached you will see a number of versions.

Some people first see it one way, some another.

Which is right?

Depends

It’s often called Jastrow’s “rabbit-duck” named after the psychologist who popularized it. It’s an ambiguous image perhaps you first saw a duck, perhaps a rabbit. It became widely known in some circles through the philosopher Wittgenstein’s use of it in his book “Philosophical Investigations”. He used it as an illustration in a discussion about seeing. 

The question of points of view is obviously related to this month’s meditations.