No Yin, No Yang.
The majority of people are very stunted, conformist thinkers. It's been said many times in many ways, and it's true. Humans tend toward thinking in the lines of black and white, us against them, heaven and hell, male and female, natural and unnatural, yin and yang, when it is rarely, so rarely, that simple.
There is no black and white. Black is the darkest gray, and white is the palest, but they are both gray. You can always make it darker, you can make it lighter, but it's still the same color - but at the same time, there are many shades of gray, which ARE different, and thus, not the same. Looking at a scale that blends from lightest to darkest, can you pick up where something stops being one thing and starts being another? White and black, which look so stark in contrast, can blend so easily into one another. I've find that to be true with most all, if not all, things.
Let's take male and female, one of the most popular yin and yang examples (anyone here thinking of Ranma 1/2?). There is such a thing as an intersexual - this is not a hermaphrodite, which has both male and female genitals (black and white), but genitals which are tied between male and female (gray). Intersexuals are more common than you would think, and go to both extremes, more male or more female, like darker or lighter gray. Many people are ashamed not to fit into the gender binary, however, and doctors usually remedy such cases shortly after their births. Even males and females are not so rigidly divided.
Now another yin and yang, possibly the most renowned example: good and evil. This should be simple enough to comprehend, and yet most people don't. No one is entirely good, no one is entirely evil - in fact, even good and evil themselves are a little blurry on where exactly they stand. If you just stepped on a bug, was that good or evil? Surely the insect's life mattered, though it may have spread disease; perhaps you didn't intend to kill it, but you did so all the same. Good and evil are philosophical concepts, as nature itself has no real concept of it. A forest fire will have negative and positive effects, but it is not good or evil. And, as much as they would like to deny it, humans are PART of nature.
I'll take a break from good and evil here to discuss natural and unnatural. Manmade items - clocks, telephones, cars - are unnatural, because they didn't occur in nature. But, didn't they? After all, humans are creatures of nature, born of it, surviving on materials also born of it. The materials machines are built with come from nature. The thought process which inspired these inventions came about naturally; there is nothing unnatural about it. There is no such thing as "unnatural".
(As you may have noticed by now, my method has no one topic, though the main centers on yin and yang. I am merely disproving a lot of commonplace theories I have seen in my lifetime.)
Getting back to the topic of good and evil, I will resume where I left off. Indeed, humans ARE a part of nature; and if nature if not good or evil, then neither are humans, right? Not quite. Humans have a thought process which interprets acts as good or evil - you could save a nun from a raging fire, and though that action may be interpreted by others as good, if you did this with a sinister ulterior motive in mind, this act was, to you and those who knew about it, evil. And yet a child who kills an animal and did not mean to was not being evil (their intentions may have been cruel, however). Good and evil are human thought mechanizations, and do apply when dealing with humans.
Now that I've sufficiently muddled the definitions of good and evil (for muddled they truly are) let's get to what it means to be good or evil, as a human. Mother Theresa was predominantly good, after all, but not entirely good. No one is ever entirely good or evil, though we may lean one way or another, as gray may lean toward light or dark. Most killers and villains have plenty of their own good spots, among the evil, that those who know and love them can see very well.
And then there are plenty of people who aren't Mother Theresas or Adolf Hitlers, people who are a medium shade of gray; people who can be good or evil as the need arises. People aren't perfect, and that in itself makes them perfect. This has been said time and again, but no one ever seems to take it to heart, and the good-and-evil view persists.
Good and evil is required for a functional society. The destructive must be eliminated, after all. But take a step away from your black-and-white views you wear on the outside, and see things as YOU truly see them. Your beliefs are your own, and though they should be kept to yourself sometimes, they should exist in you. After all, what you saw here were only my views; what you see most of the time are society's views; do you truly have your own views, or do you see through everyone else's eyes?
There is no black and white. Black is the darkest gray, and white is the palest, but they are both gray. You can always make it darker, you can make it lighter, but it's still the same color - but at the same time, there are many shades of gray, which ARE different, and thus, not the same. Looking at a scale that blends from lightest to darkest, can you pick up where something stops being one thing and starts being another? White and black, which look so stark in contrast, can blend so easily into one another. I've find that to be true with most all, if not all, things.
Let's take male and female, one of the most popular yin and yang examples (anyone here thinking of Ranma 1/2?). There is such a thing as an intersexual - this is not a hermaphrodite, which has both male and female genitals (black and white), but genitals which are tied between male and female (gray). Intersexuals are more common than you would think, and go to both extremes, more male or more female, like darker or lighter gray. Many people are ashamed not to fit into the gender binary, however, and doctors usually remedy such cases shortly after their births. Even males and females are not so rigidly divided.
Now another yin and yang, possibly the most renowned example: good and evil. This should be simple enough to comprehend, and yet most people don't. No one is entirely good, no one is entirely evil - in fact, even good and evil themselves are a little blurry on where exactly they stand. If you just stepped on a bug, was that good or evil? Surely the insect's life mattered, though it may have spread disease; perhaps you didn't intend to kill it, but you did so all the same. Good and evil are philosophical concepts, as nature itself has no real concept of it. A forest fire will have negative and positive effects, but it is not good or evil. And, as much as they would like to deny it, humans are PART of nature.
I'll take a break from good and evil here to discuss natural and unnatural. Manmade items - clocks, telephones, cars - are unnatural, because they didn't occur in nature. But, didn't they? After all, humans are creatures of nature, born of it, surviving on materials also born of it. The materials machines are built with come from nature. The thought process which inspired these inventions came about naturally; there is nothing unnatural about it. There is no such thing as "unnatural".
(As you may have noticed by now, my method has no one topic, though the main centers on yin and yang. I am merely disproving a lot of commonplace theories I have seen in my lifetime.)
Getting back to the topic of good and evil, I will resume where I left off. Indeed, humans ARE a part of nature; and if nature if not good or evil, then neither are humans, right? Not quite. Humans have a thought process which interprets acts as good or evil - you could save a nun from a raging fire, and though that action may be interpreted by others as good, if you did this with a sinister ulterior motive in mind, this act was, to you and those who knew about it, evil. And yet a child who kills an animal and did not mean to was not being evil (their intentions may have been cruel, however). Good and evil are human thought mechanizations, and do apply when dealing with humans.
Now that I've sufficiently muddled the definitions of good and evil (for muddled they truly are) let's get to what it means to be good or evil, as a human. Mother Theresa was predominantly good, after all, but not entirely good. No one is ever entirely good or evil, though we may lean one way or another, as gray may lean toward light or dark. Most killers and villains have plenty of their own good spots, among the evil, that those who know and love them can see very well.
And then there are plenty of people who aren't Mother Theresas or Adolf Hitlers, people who are a medium shade of gray; people who can be good or evil as the need arises. People aren't perfect, and that in itself makes them perfect. This has been said time and again, but no one ever seems to take it to heart, and the good-and-evil view persists.
Good and evil is required for a functional society. The destructive must be eliminated, after all. But take a step away from your black-and-white views you wear on the outside, and see things as YOU truly see them. Your beliefs are your own, and though they should be kept to yourself sometimes, they should exist in you. After all, what you saw here were only my views; what you see most of the time are society's views; do you truly have your own views, or do you see through everyone else's eyes?
posted by Ozark at 8:13 PM
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