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petrosianii
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I know what you're thinking: scary title for a I Ching blog, right?
Others of you have just cringed. "Omigod! He's gone religious! He's about to start damning us to hell!"
Not at all.
Actually, I'm going to talk about hexagram #38, Contradiction. A very intriguing hexagram, if you ask me.
Contradiction connotes the idea of two forces held in opposition to one another. The image looks like a person who has two thoughts hovering over her head, arguing with each other. The devil on your left shoulder and angel on your right shoulder image, if you prefer.
I've been exploring this contradiction with respect to addiction - and then tying that in with my understandings of Christian theology. What can I say? I'm a professional philosopher; that's what we do!
I came up with this axiom:
"Between the decision of the will and the execution of the body stands the incorrigible power of sin in the flesh."
(btw, I use the phrase "sin that dwells in the flesh" only because that is the place where biblical writers, and theologians who followed, locate the sin-power, in the "fleshy" parts of the body; too much theology for my own good, right?!).
Now, don't go running away in bristling antagonism because of my free usage of Christian verbiage. I'm simply describing, in religious terms, a very common experience. That is, the experience of willing to do one thing, but actually doing another.
Quitting Smoking: An Everyday Example
Take for example a chronic smoker. If you do a poll, you'll find that the vast majority of smokers actually want to stop. Even more importantly, most have tried to quit, on many occasions, with limited or no success. In others words, they willed (i.e., determined, resolved, or decided) to stop, but couldn't actually stop.
Smokers the world over are given various reasons as to why they were unsuccessful in quitting. All the various explanations really boil down to: "You just don't want it bad enough." Nevertheless, I disagree that this is the chief cause of failure, and argue that the issue of addiction is much more complicated than all that.
As a working theory, my view is just what I said a few paragraphs before:
"Between the decision of the will and the execution of the body stands the incorrigible power of sin in the flesh."
In other words, the smoker willed (decided) to stop, her body then moved to stop, but the power of sin in the flesh prevented her from stopping.
Now, I know this doesn't sound very palatable to the psychiatric community. We no longer like to talk of sin. But I am not a psychologist (yet). I'm a philosophical counselor, and we're not as theoretically straitjacketed as those in the psychiatric profession (yet). I'm not terribly concerned with what the psychiatric community thinks of sin or anything else, for that matter. "To thine own self be true," the saying goes.
You can breathe a sigh of relief now. I'm not using the term "sin" the way you were taught in Catholic catechism. I use the term "sin" as it was sometimes used in the "canonical" Scriptures and as it was often used in the "gnostic" scriptures. "Sin" is simply "falling short," "imperfection."
Strip away the moral and juridical undertones of the word for a moment, will you? Sin just means: I'm not perfect; you're not perfect. I fall short; you fall short. In other words, there is a principle that operates within me (and within you, too) that produces a certain amount of imperfection, a certain amount of falling short, stumbling, slipping up, f-ing up, of necessity. There's no avoiding it; there's no escaping it. As we black folk like to say, "It is what it is and it does what it do."
But there's a freedom, a liberation, in simply just acknowledging this truth. Instead, we run from it, try to hide it from ourselves, try desperately to hide it from others. That makes for a great deal of frustration.
Hexagram #38 Opposition
That sin-principle, as some theologians call it, is the principle of opposition expressed in hexagram #38, I think. Forces "working at cross purposes" to one another. "Antagonistic dualisms found within the Self." "Elements of divers natures working in contradiction to one another." Ambivalence, which literally means "two figures facing one another."
The bible expresses the same idea, just in different terms:
"For the flesh lusts against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh. These two are opposed to one another, so that you do not what you will." (The Letter to the Galatians, Chapter 5, verse 17.)
Others of you have just cringed. "Omigod! He's gone religious! He's about to start damning us to hell!"
Not at all.
Actually, I'm going to talk about hexagram #38, Contradiction. A very intriguing hexagram, if you ask me.
Contradiction connotes the idea of two forces held in opposition to one another. The image looks like a person who has two thoughts hovering over her head, arguing with each other. The devil on your left shoulder and angel on your right shoulder image, if you prefer.
I've been exploring this contradiction with respect to addiction - and then tying that in with my understandings of Christian theology. What can I say? I'm a professional philosopher; that's what we do!
I came up with this axiom:
"Between the decision of the will and the execution of the body stands the incorrigible power of sin in the flesh."
(btw, I use the phrase "sin that dwells in the flesh" only because that is the place where biblical writers, and theologians who followed, locate the sin-power, in the "fleshy" parts of the body; too much theology for my own good, right?!).
Now, don't go running away in bristling antagonism because of my free usage of Christian verbiage. I'm simply describing, in religious terms, a very common experience. That is, the experience of willing to do one thing, but actually doing another.
Quitting Smoking: An Everyday Example
Take for example a chronic smoker. If you do a poll, you'll find that the vast majority of smokers actually want to stop. Even more importantly, most have tried to quit, on many occasions, with limited or no success. In others words, they willed (i.e., determined, resolved, or decided) to stop, but couldn't actually stop.
Smokers the world over are given various reasons as to why they were unsuccessful in quitting. All the various explanations really boil down to: "You just don't want it bad enough." Nevertheless, I disagree that this is the chief cause of failure, and argue that the issue of addiction is much more complicated than all that.
As a working theory, my view is just what I said a few paragraphs before:
"Between the decision of the will and the execution of the body stands the incorrigible power of sin in the flesh."
In other words, the smoker willed (decided) to stop, her body then moved to stop, but the power of sin in the flesh prevented her from stopping.
Now, I know this doesn't sound very palatable to the psychiatric community. We no longer like to talk of sin. But I am not a psychologist (yet). I'm a philosophical counselor, and we're not as theoretically straitjacketed as those in the psychiatric profession (yet). I'm not terribly concerned with what the psychiatric community thinks of sin or anything else, for that matter. "To thine own self be true," the saying goes.
You can breathe a sigh of relief now. I'm not using the term "sin" the way you were taught in Catholic catechism. I use the term "sin" as it was sometimes used in the "canonical" Scriptures and as it was often used in the "gnostic" scriptures. "Sin" is simply "falling short," "imperfection."
Strip away the moral and juridical undertones of the word for a moment, will you? Sin just means: I'm not perfect; you're not perfect. I fall short; you fall short. In other words, there is a principle that operates within me (and within you, too) that produces a certain amount of imperfection, a certain amount of falling short, stumbling, slipping up, f-ing up, of necessity. There's no avoiding it; there's no escaping it. As we black folk like to say, "It is what it is and it does what it do."
But there's a freedom, a liberation, in simply just acknowledging this truth. Instead, we run from it, try to hide it from ourselves, try desperately to hide it from others. That makes for a great deal of frustration.
Hexagram #38 Opposition
That sin-principle, as some theologians call it, is the principle of opposition expressed in hexagram #38, I think. Forces "working at cross purposes" to one another. "Antagonistic dualisms found within the Self." "Elements of divers natures working in contradiction to one another." Ambivalence, which literally means "two figures facing one another."
The bible expresses the same idea, just in different terms:
"For the flesh lusts against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh. These two are opposed to one another, so that you do not what you will." (The Letter to the Galatians, Chapter 5, verse 17.)