Relatable?
The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference. ~Elie Wiesel
Top | Newest First | Oldest First
SUPERVlXEN · F
I believe indifference is more a state of our minds than a direct opposite to those. A love breaking can make me feel numb first and later indifferent towards those who abandoned me, or abused my loyalty. Art in itself is dividing, what some find to be art will be seen as anything but art to others, and the beauty in [some] art isn't necessarily seen by everyone. Is that indifference or maybe more lack in education? Faith, I got such troubles with that concept. I don't believe in faith, I believe in random circumstances. Does this make me feel indifferent tho, I don't think so. Then there's death, it's so ultimate, the end of everything. When another of my loved ones dies, I am anything but indifferent, there'll follow several stages after the death has arrived, after grief comes a time to remember all the memories that was shared while life was there. This goes for loved ones, I'm not sure, but indifference might be how I feel if it was to be someone who treated me badly, but I'd still feel empathy with those left behind who might have had a different experience with this person. When I meet my own death I expect there to simply be no more feelings left in me, there's no more, and no other side in my universe, it's all now and here, on this cursed Earth. Just some morning reflections over my first cup of coffee. Woah, that had me wake up.
CopperCicada · M
I remember having the insight in meditation that it we really understood what living beings were, what their potential was, what their existence signified-- we could never harm them.
That is why hate is not the opposite of love. It's not the negative of love, the inverse of love, the conjugate of love. Love is the natural expression of who we are. The juice or charge of our soul, Buddha nature, consciousness. It is natural to love. If it wasn't we wouldn't be here.
Hate requires not overthrowing love, but rather what we understand sentient beings to be. Hate requires forsaking our natural knowledge of them having gooey cores, wet eyes and lips, fleshy bits. Forsaking our natural knowledge that they feel pain, love, have hopes and fears. It requires that they are mere flesh. Social meat. Pawns to be moved and lost. Gears in a social machine.
I think there are few voices with as much integrity as Wiesel. He could have very honestly worked for his own people and just that. He lived an experience that justified such a commitment. In a time and place when we built ladders of suffering, he called out everyone's indignity. He was speaking against apartheid, for the Kurds, Darfur. Indians in Central America. Desaparecidos.
If he were alive he's being going with any and all politico who would listen to him to US Congress or the UN about Yemen. He was nobody's political cuck, he'd take us to the woodshed about our complicity in Yemen.
The other binary pairs I think come from the same insight. Ugliness isn't the project of being against beauty. Anihillation and destruction of it. It's not anti-art. It really comes from indifference to our human need to create, adorn ourselves and our spaces, to love in beauty. Deeper in that, the need for and impulse to create art and things of beauty comes from the innate beauty of sentient beings.
All the sentences are really the same. Love, beauty, faith (whatever that is), life. All the juice of sentient beings. Their negation and indifference to what sentient beings are, what life is. What it all signifies...
That is why hate is not the opposite of love. It's not the negative of love, the inverse of love, the conjugate of love. Love is the natural expression of who we are. The juice or charge of our soul, Buddha nature, consciousness. It is natural to love. If it wasn't we wouldn't be here.
Hate requires not overthrowing love, but rather what we understand sentient beings to be. Hate requires forsaking our natural knowledge of them having gooey cores, wet eyes and lips, fleshy bits. Forsaking our natural knowledge that they feel pain, love, have hopes and fears. It requires that they are mere flesh. Social meat. Pawns to be moved and lost. Gears in a social machine.
I think there are few voices with as much integrity as Wiesel. He could have very honestly worked for his own people and just that. He lived an experience that justified such a commitment. In a time and place when we built ladders of suffering, he called out everyone's indignity. He was speaking against apartheid, for the Kurds, Darfur. Indians in Central America. Desaparecidos.
If he were alive he's being going with any and all politico who would listen to him to US Congress or the UN about Yemen. He was nobody's political cuck, he'd take us to the woodshed about our complicity in Yemen.
The other binary pairs I think come from the same insight. Ugliness isn't the project of being against beauty. Anihillation and destruction of it. It's not anti-art. It really comes from indifference to our human need to create, adorn ourselves and our spaces, to love in beauty. Deeper in that, the need for and impulse to create art and things of beauty comes from the innate beauty of sentient beings.
All the sentences are really the same. Love, beauty, faith (whatever that is), life. All the juice of sentient beings. Their negation and indifference to what sentient beings are, what life is. What it all signifies...
sarabee1995 · 26-30, F