(From SWAR OF THE SAINTS -- by the Yogi BruceBane)
Q - How can there be Gotham's urban blight and fear in the presence of your peace?
BruceBane: What else are these horrid, egregious bodily traumas for, the blunting pain of the pit, of class despair, if not the corresponding power of the benevolent acceptance? The worse the pain the deeper the surrender. Brainwashers and mystics alike know this.
What is else is aloneness for, by which compared mere physical pain passes like a distant dream,
and without which true surrender carries insufficient current?
The pain alone's a muffled scream you only recognize as yours too late to truly care, your voice says things, whatever it takes to get the torturer to stop, but you are far away from it, your voice is now someone else's. The dread of pain's the true source of fear, the preliminary hatred,
the fear the judges have of being judged mirrors only the force of their vehemence,
So too surrender in the face of total panic creates a release of equal force.
This is how we inch our way forward, to remembering our infancy, tossed high in the air
does not imagine the sting of falling head-first on the concrete street.
Is fear of falling 'mature' or just cowardly, Batman?
(more)
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(From an interview with Eckhart Tolle)
How do you know whether a feeling you have is coming from your Ego, or from a deeper source?
Eckhart Tolle: Sometimes it’s not so easy to tell. One criterion you can use is to know, if there is any negativity involved, anger, resentment, irritation, then Ego is present there. If there is no negativity but there is an underlying field of peace, then it arises from a deeper place that is not the Ego. For example, you may be in a situation, and you may feel that suddenly the right thing to do is to leave the situation – whether it’s a relationship, or a place, or a job, whatever it is – you can direct attention to the feeling to see where it’s coming from. Is there any reactivity, or anger in the essential part of that feeling? Or is there just a deep knowing that this is what you have to do, and you do it? There’s a peace that comes with that. (more)
In a Kantian way of looking at things, ideas of art, duty and morality share a quality of elevation and separation from the people who undertake them. Art is most successful and beautiful when it is disinterested in satisfying base needs. Acts made in the interest of gratifying the senses or causing pleasure for the agent have a lot of trouble being morally good, because these sensory responses are phenomenological, not part of the thing-in-itself.
These should be familiar moral ideas. You hear them when people complain about music being bad because it is commercial or popular, or people’s good deeds not being praiseworthy because they profited off them. They have value, but in The Dark Knight Rises, they are the Villain.
The intention that turns out to matter is not Bane’s phenomenological revolution, but the intention of the thing-in-itself –Talia’s intention, the true master of the League of Shadows. Talia is nostalgic, but disinterested in Bane’s pleasure or pain (literally suppressing his senses with the tube mask, mostly so he remains useful) and invisible to those looking at the phenomenological world. (...) In this movie, aspiring to a greater purpose separate from yourself and elevated above yourself through logic, institutions and abstractions depends on a lie — the lie that the originator of the Rational Will is disinterested — that there are effective, admirable people who can rise above their self-interest and rule and judge objectively. (more)
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(from Dead Philosopher's Society)
As a privation, evil cannot be understood in isolation. To think meaningfully about an evil act, we must recognize what real or perceived good was the intended object of the act, and how the result failed to achieve the complete good that the act needed. Bane’s acts seem completely incomprehensible at the beginning of the movie, when all we see is the raw evil of their effects, but as the film goes on we learn that even this juggernaut of evil is motivated by a powerful love—one that has gone deeply astray to be sure, but a love that could have been beautiful. Bane is not the incarnation of a pure evil—he is a cruelly broken man searching for a real good that he does not know how to obtain.
This is why the Catechism—and the Church in general—never talks about evil in isolation, and rarely even mentions the subject directly. Satan may tempt us into believing that there is such a thing as pure evil, but the truth about reality is the fullness of perfection towards which God calls it, not its brokenness. Staring at the evil of an evil deed makes it more and more incomprehensible; only by seeing it in the context of the good order God desires for the world can we see the true nature of the deed. Only by knowing and loving what is right can we see how things go wrong.
As we stare in horror at the evil we see Bane do in the film, his deeds threaten to overwhelm us until we see them in the context of the good for which he is brokenly reaching; likewise, no matter how many details we learn about the events of July 20, we will never learn the truth about James Holmes—or the world around us—if we allow ourselves to believe that a pure evil has somehow sprung into being. We may never know exactly what good James Holmes thought he was reaching for, but we nevertheless look with confidence and trust at the God who has “overcome evil with good” (Rm 12:21).
(from Dead Philosopher's Society)
As a privation, evil cannot be understood in isolation. To think meaningfully about an evil act, we must recognize what real or perceived good was the intended object of the act, and how the result failed to achieve the complete good that the act needed. Bane’s acts seem completely incomprehensible at the beginning of the movie, when all we see is the raw evil of their effects, but as the film goes on we learn that even this juggernaut of evil is motivated by a powerful love—one that has gone deeply astray to be sure, but a love that could have been beautiful. Bane is not the incarnation of a pure evil—he is a cruelly broken man searching for a real good that he does not know how to obtain.
This is why the Catechism—and the Church in general—never talks about evil in isolation, and rarely even mentions the subject directly. Satan may tempt us into believing that there is such a thing as pure evil, but the truth about reality is the fullness of perfection towards which God calls it, not its brokenness. Staring at the evil of an evil deed makes it more and more incomprehensible; only by seeing it in the context of the good order God desires for the world can we see the true nature of the deed. Only by knowing and loving what is right can we see how things go wrong.
As we stare in horror at the evil we see Bane do in the film, his deeds threaten to overwhelm us until we see them in the context of the good for which he is brokenly reaching; likewise, no matter how many details we learn about the events of July 20, we will never learn the truth about James Holmes—or the world around us—if we allow ourselves to believe that a pure evil has somehow sprung into being. We may never know exactly what good James Holmes thought he was reaching for, but we nevertheless look with confidence and trust at the God who has “overcome evil with good” (Rm 12:21).
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