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Old 06-13-2012, 09:55 AM   #22
C. David Henderson
Location: Santa Fe New Mexico
Join Date: Sep 2008
Posts: 606
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Re: My Spiritual Aikido.

A preference to "hug life" is, from a buddhist perspective, a classic example of dualistic thinking. For those who might be interested:

Quote:
For Buddhism, the dualism between life and death is only one instance of a more general problem, dualistic thinking. Why is dualistic thinking a problem? We differentiate between good and evil, success and failure, life and death, and so forth because we want to keep the one and reject the other. But we cannot have one without the other because they are interdependent: affirming one half also maintains the other. Living a "pure" life thus requires a preoccupation with impurity, and our hope for success will be proportional to our fear of failure. We discriminate between life and death in order to affirm one and deny the other, and, as we have seen, our tragedy lies in the paradox that these two opposites are so interdependent: there is no life without death and -- what we are more likely to overlook -- there is no death without life. This means our problem is not death but life-and-death.
The Nonduality of Life and Death: A Buddhist View of Repression, page 164, David Loy (2000,University of Hawaii Press) from http://ccbs.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/JR-PHIL/davloy.htm

From the Gospel of Phillip, something markedly similar:

Quote:
Light and Darkness, life and death, right and left, are brothers of one another. They are inseparable. Because of this neither are the good good, nor evil evil, nor is life life, nor death death. For this reason each one will dissolve into its earliest origin. But those who are exalted above the world are indissoluble, eternal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-dualism

David Henderson