Contradiction is the key to all development of self-consciousness. The tension between contradictions makes self-consciousness possible. There is contradiction or opposition between idea and idea, feeling and feeling and will and will, between inside intent and outside action, between these in oneself and in other people who have their own inner equivalents of all these.
There is complexity in every situation, and an infinity of dialectical oppositions on all planes of being, in all directions of possible and impossible development.
Out of the complex of contradictions the self becomes self-aware as the centre of all these, the intersection point of all these contradictions, on which they play, as the various threads pull at the centre.
The self as centre of contradictions is the centre of decision, in which the contradictory elements oppose each other, reinforce and inhibit each other. The self is progressively equilibrated until it is finally able to hold all its functions in balance, or allow any one of its functions to become operative according to the needs of the situation.
One must be in love with the contradictions in life, for they are the stuff of the evolution of freedom. One must think and counter-think, feel and counter-feel, will and counter-will, act and counter-act. All these affirmatively in the presence of negative inertias, psychic and somatic.
It is possible to be happy in the moment of suffering these contradictions by remembering the virtue which must arise from them, the growth of freedom in self-awareness. To contradict oneself happily in the full knowledge of the benefits to be derived. This is the Key.
‘The world is a fiction,’ says William Blake, ‘made up of contradiction.’ The whole world is a system of contradictory forces. Only this contradictory activity can hold a world or a thing, or a self, in being. There must be centripetal action, there must be the opposition of centrifugal action; only in both can the world come to be. Saturn and Jupiter ( as modalities of power) must oppose each other in order that Mercury may appear. The Devil and God must come into opposition so that the Messiah may arise in their zone of conflict. no opposiation between God and the Anti-God, no mediating Saviour. The conscious self is a product of free spirit and bound body. This is freedom . Free spirit without bound body is objectless awareness, a consciousness of nothing. Bound body without free spirit is a mindless piece of world mechanism.
Psyche solves the opposition between Pneuma and Soma by embodying both in itself.”
The thoughts contained in these notes presuppose and all possible responses.
“There is no escape from the basic law which says that love conquers all opposition…persistent love is finally unbeatable. ‘Love conquers all’ is not a stement of sentimentality but of effective power.”
- Eugene Halliday
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