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~ Art as self defense

Monthly Archives: January 2024

Essentially Good

08 Monday Jan 2024

Posted by S/O in Jewish wisdom, Jewishness, La justice des hommes

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As long as one does not believe that he is good, he cannot believe that another is good. Only a person that believes that his own essence is good, and accustoms himself to give and not take (thereby removing the veil of the “I”) will be able to expand the light outward toward another. A person who has worked on himself to see himself as good, but still has a habit of taking and not giving, will find a barrier created by his desire to take. Such a person might think of himself as good, with a bad garment, but of another individual as inherently bad. Why? Because he has set up a barrier between himself and another. His desire to take makes him a distinct entity, so although he knows that he is good with an evil garment, he will not be able to apply that attitude toward others. The desire to take is a barrier, and he wants to keep the goodness for himself. His eye will be like that of Bilaam, “an evil eye”. Only if he has also developed a desire to give can he expand the good found in him to another, and by doing so, he will see the entire creation as good. This expansion of goodness to the whole world will bring out in him the world of inner, true love that unifies all of the creations.

(Rabbi Itamar Schwartz)

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Dualisms

08 Monday Jan 2024

Posted by S/O in Uncategorized

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bell hooks

Everywhere we learn that love is important, and yet we are bombarded by its failure… This bleak picture in no way alters the nature of our longing. We still hope that love will prevail. We still believe in love’s promise… Our hope lies in the reality that so many of us continue to believe in love’s power. We believe it is important to know love. We believe it is important to search for love’s truths… To open our hearts more fully to love’s power and grace we must dare to acknowledge how little we know of love in both theory and practice.

[…]

To know love we have to tell the truth to ourselves and to others… Commitment to truth telling lays the groundwork for the openness and honesty that is the heartbeat of love. To commit to love is fundamentally to commit to a life beyond dualism. That’s why love is so sacred in a culture of domination, because it simply begins to erode your dualisms: dualisms of black and white, male and female, right and wrong.

bell hooks

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Rashomon effect

05 Friday Jan 2024

Posted by S/O in Cinema

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Akira Kurosawa, Rashomon

Human beings are unable to be honest with themselves about themselves. They cannot talk about themselves without embellishing. The script portrays such human beings—the kind who cannot survive without lies to make them feel they are better people than they really are. It even shows this sinful need for flattering falsehood going beyond the grave—even the character who dies cannot give up his lies when he speaks to the living through a medium. Egoism is a sin the human being carries with him from birth; it is the most difficult to redeem. This film is like a strange picture scroll that is unrolled and displayed by the ago. You say that you can’t understand this script at all, but that is because the human heart itself is impossible to understand. If you focus on the impossibility of truly understanding human psychology and read the script one more time, I think you will grasp the point of it.”—Akira Kurosawa

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