“I don’t want it, you don’t want it. Let us leave wickedness to walk
alone”
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- Ifá proverb
Opinions, they be informed or not, makes part of the human interaction and
we tend to share these opinions in the shape of advices and counsel if it is warranted
or called for or not. An opinion is little more than a conjecture, a judgment, a
synthesis of what is observed leading to a form of belief. Hence an opinion
should never be presented to state truth, but be presented in the spirit of
sharing, to avoid the act of stating truisms. None of us owns the truth and the
truth will always look cross-eyed to any interpretation of what it might be.
We have all witnessed the atheist argument against the believer’s belief
in a God, the battle between creationism and evolution and the polemic presented
against opposing points of views aiming towards affirming objective truths
rooted in opinions. Opinions is not only a conjecture, it is also an expression
of a point of view formed by an individual with a particular experience and history
that causes this person to view the world from a given angle. In this way, opinion
tends to be a form of solipsism and arrogance. Opinions and advices are often
given in response to a disagreement, an activity that is in itself useful to achieve
a Hegelian synthesis, but it is rarely presented to arrive to a widen landscape;
rather it is often given to prove a point and the error of truth in an opinion.
It is kind of fascinating to see how so many chooses to be occupied with
what they disagree in and challenge this with an opinion.
Ideally an exchange of opinions takes the shape of a debate. A debate is
the word we use to give a format to the exchange of opinions, so that quarrels
and disagreements can be subject for a decent format of exchange, as is done in
the defence for an academic dissertation. The dissertation is presented to
peers that will judge you and challenge you – bound by rules of formal
presentation and response that aims towards challenging the argument – and in
this the argument stay solid or it dies. If the argument dies it can be due to
holes and lack in the work done or because of diverging opinions between the candidate
and the peers elected to judge. No matter, form and design, we do like to entertain
the exchange of opinions and quite often it takes the form of a quarrel. The difference
between a quarrel and a debate is its format and the prepositions that is laid
as base for the exchange of opinions.
We humans like to quarrel. We are quarrelsome specie and the quarrels
are always about one of three dimensions, horizon, belief or duty and any
quarrel is born from a conviction or a burden. The burden and the conviction
can at times merge in falsity leading us to exercise our falsity to see how
strong or weak it is. These phenomena’s happens all the time, in domestic and
professional life. Promises are made, appointments are failed and defences are
made in the wake of anticipated accusations. The factors present in a debate or
an argument is present in your social interactions, your domestic and
professional life.
It all goes down to a premise, request, promise or statement being met
in acceptance from another party. Failure to honour the promise stated will
eventually lead to a debate. If this debate is about your domestic, spiritual
of professional life is quite irrelevant for your sphere of being. We all
instinctively act in the same way; if challenged we enter into defence and the defence
can be an attack or a submission. It still doesn’t matter, the fact that we act
upon it is what matters. In the moment we act upon something, it be negative or
positive, we become a part of it.
Some examples might make this more salient. Let’s say you are a person
who has decided to end with all forms of superstitions. Yes, I know it is a
grand mission to appoint, but nevertheless some people do engage themselves in
being bothered with is not a part of their point of view. What happens in this
field of accepted mission is that you will be occupied with superstition and
make yourself a part of what you agitate against, because in wicked ways the
thesis and the anti-thesis is what makes the sphere full in its acceptance of
the poles that supports it. It is almost like there is an energy pure and
simple that holds a movement towards what it searches and what challenges it in
such way, that energetically speaking, if you agree or disagree doesn’t matter,
your involvement does.
Giordano Bruno when he spoke of magical bonds in his to little read
treatise about ‘magical bonds’, he was emphasizing exactly the energy between
points and its quality – as well as its polarity – to cause something to
happen. It is about the quality of the energy invested in a thing and not the
opinions that directs the energy. To cut to the chase, if you involve yourself
in something you are a part of it, and the bond is fed by your direction and
energy, not the quality of your opinions. Opinions do not hold any quality as
such, they express convictions from within a personal world of experience,
secret and hidden for all but the one that holds this world under its skin (and
often for the one who possess this intimate world as well).
It is all about ‘feeding’ a current. Let us speak of ‘the cause’. The
cause can be whatever is considered important in a society, it really doesn’t
matter what it is, what matters is that it caught your interest and was judged worthy
of energetic investment. It always starts with an act and the opinions and interpretations
colouring the act, giving the act direction and purpose, often different from
what it had as it became manifest. The quality given by the one stating the
premise is not necessarily the message embedded in the premise stated, and that
is fine, and even better if we become aware of this mundane magic that happens
all the time.
You can never truly know the landscapes of my soul as little as I can
know the towers and dark corners of your soul in the way you feel them and
intend to communicate them.
When one person meets another we are in the field of mystery – and we
can stay there in wonder and admiration – or we can judge and ask the debate.
No matter what we do, if we do something or don’t do anything we are still a
part of what we are within in the meeting with the other.
In the moment I see you and feel you and you do the same we share
something, even if it was a microscopic second of a field of being, we shared
something. I believe The Now happens all the time and all we can do is
retrospection and retrospection is a form of contemplation and philosophical
digestion of being. It is in this field we form opinions, an opinion is always
rooted in a retrospective analysis, faulty or not, about an occurrence that
then is chained one after the other in an attempt to make sense of what
happened. But these explanations we give from our self to our self make part of
a subjective world and not a shared reality, hence an opinion will always be a
point of view presented on basis of some form of digestion of what has been
experienced. This is very different from being in the Now.
To be in the Now is a good thing; because it invites wonder and not
judgment, but even the wonder is participation, but a form of participation that
generates distance and horizon. And in this a shared landscape where one world touches
the other, before judgment and opinion happens, is opened up in a spirit of
curious acceptance where one soul is turned towards another in interest.
The Now is difficult to stay in, because staying in the Now means to let
go of making sense and shape opinions of everything that happens and just let
it be. We are not so good in doing this. It is something we need to train and
the best way of training this is to become aware of our reactions to what we
experience.
So in this field of becoming aware of our presence and what circuits we entertain
in passing a judgment let us say you have been entertaining the beliefs of a
conclave of votaries aimed towards a given ethos, doctrine and belief that you
at some point feel is a lie to your soul.
At some point you decide it is in error, and what happens in this
realization is that you can leave it or stay with it.
What usually happens in such equation is that the one feeling deceived
will still be there feeding what is with a negative current, the energy that
feeds what is from the negative pole is no different from the energy fed from the
positive pole. If you exchange resentment with love or opposite doesn’t matter,
what matters is the energetic intensity. It is all about direction, no matter
the cause or debate, the quarrel or sodality; it is all about your investment,
and not the direction of your investment. If you invest something, it is love
or hatred you define yourself as a part of what you love or hate, so if you
don’t want it, leave it to walk alone, so you don’t take the role of the
cowherd, wicked or benign...
Illustration: Santiago Caruso