Balance




An excess of anything is pathological.




Essential to Jung's conception of personality is the idea of unity or wholeness.

For Jung this wholeness is represented by the psyche, which includes all thoughts, feelings, and behaviours, both conscious and unconscious. Throughout their lives, individuals strive to develop their own wholeness.

Jung viewed the self as both the center and totality of the whole personality.

[Richard S. Scharf]
Theories of Psychotherapy and Counseling: Concepts and Cases (2nd Edition), p.90






Everything flows out and in; everything has its tides; all things rise and fall; the pendulum-swing manifests in everything; the measure of the swing to the right, is the measure of the swing to the left; rhythm compensates.

This Principle embodies the truth that in everything there is manifested a measured motion, to and fro; a flow and inflow; a swing backward and forward; a pendulum-like movement; a tide-like ebb and flow; a high-tide and low-tide; between the two poles which exist in accordance with the Principle of Polarity [...]

There is always an action and a reaction; an advance and a retreat a rising and a sinking. This is in the affairs of the Universe, suns, worlds, men, animals, mind, energy, and matter. This law is manifest in the creation and destruction of worlds; in the rise and fall of nations; in the life of all things; and finally in the mental states of Man [...]

It will be noticed that one generally "pays the price" of anything he possesses or lacks. If he has one thing, he lacks another the balance is struck. No one can "keep his penny and have the bit of cake" at the same time.

Everything has its pleasant and unpleasant sides. The things that one gains are always paid for by the things that one loses. The rich possess much that the poor lack, while the poor often possess things that are beyond the reach of the rich.

The Law of Compensation is ever in operation, striving to balance and counter-balance, and always succeeding in time, even though several lives may be required for the return swing of the Pendulum of Rhythm.

 The Kybalion, Chapter XI: "Rhythm" Chapter 2: "The Seven Hermetic Principles"




'[...] any extreme is liable to produce a violent reaction; this is as true of the weather and plants and animals as of political societies.'

'Yes, I have noticed that,' he broke in; 'excessive emphasis on athletics produces an excessively uncivilized type, while a purely literary training leaves men indecently soft.'

'It is the energy and initiative in their nature that may make them uncivilized,' I said; 'if you treat it properly it should make them brave, but if you overstrain it it turns them tough and uncouth, as you would expect.

[...] The philosophic temperament, on the other hand, is gentle; too much relaxation may produce an excessive softness, but if it is treated properly the result should be humane and civilized.

[...] must not these two elements be harmoniously adjusted?

[...] What I should say therefore is that these two branches of education seem to have been given by some god to men to train these two parts of us - the one to train our philosophic part the other our energy and initiative. They are not intended the one to train body, the other mind, except incidentally, but to ensure a proper harmony between energy and initiative on the one hand and reason on the other, by tuning each to the right pitch.

And so we may venture to assert that anyone who can produce the perfect blend of the physical and intellectual sides of education and apply them to the training of character, is producing music and harmony of far more importance than any mere musician tuning strings.'

[Plato]
The Republic (Penguin Classics Edition), p.109-10, 301




'Healthy activities produce health, and unhealthy activities produce sickness.

[...] [and] don't just actions produce justice, and unjust actions injustice?

[...] And health is produced by establishing a natural relation of control and subordination among the constituents of the body, disease by establishing an unnatural relation.

[...] So justice is produced by establishing in the mind a similar natural relation of control and subordination among its constituents, and injustice by establishing an unnatural one.'

[Plato]
The Republic (Penguin Classics Edition), p.154




[...] as soon as you make a clear unequivocal statement doubts rush in, and the opposite begins to seem appealing.

[Momus]
Conversation from Click Opera, see here.




Tinku is a form of ritual conflict practiced by local people in Potosí, Bolivia.

Tinkus occur "between different communities, moieties, or kin groups." They are prearranged and usually take place in the small towns of southern Bolivia. Tinkus are very festive, with an audience of men, women, and children, who bring food and drink. Alcohol is also brought and sold along with food during the tinku.

The tinkus can become very violent, and people do get injured and even die. But, the deaths can be seen as good omens for good harvests.

Tinkus have been a tradition of Andean culture since before they first had contact with Europeans. Some anthropologists hypothesize that Ancient Andes culture would have tinkus instead of battles.

This would help curb aggression between different groups, and allow for entertainment, similar to football games in the United States.

There are some anthropologists that believe the tradition of the Tinku dates back to the time of the Moche culture, where neighboring tribes would annually fight one another.

Taken from the Wikipedia entry on Tinku.





In New Guinea, Bateson had been observing the different behaviour patterns of men and women among the local people.

The more the men were exhibitionist and boastful, the more the women became quiet and contemplative. It was clear that this reciprocal process was potentially dangerous: competing with each other to show off, the men became extremely aggressive, while it sometimes seemed that the women risked sinking into catatonia.

Bateson called his book Naven after the series of bizarre rituals that he came to see as "correcting" this behavioural process and guaranteeing stability.

In these complex ceremonies men dressed up as women and vice versa. The women assumed the traditional behaviour of the men while the men were abject and passive, even submitting to simulated rape.

Crucially, Bateson observed, no one was conscious of what the social function of the ceremonies might be. For the participants, the rituals had religious significance and that was that.  

Where competing behaviour patterns could push people to extremes, Bateson concluded - and he mentioned such things as the arms race and sadomasochism - corrective influences would very probably be doing their work unacknowledged. 

It might in fact be important that people remained unaware of what was happening.

[Tim Parks]
Everything is connected, article about Gregory Bateson published in The Guardian. Can be found here.




Q: I thought that sound was the opposite of stillness - that unbalance is the opposite of balance and that discomfort is the opposite of comfort. Am I wrong?

A: Yes, you are wrong, but the whole world thinks that way also. Balance, equilibrium, love, truth, rest, stillness, silence and zero belong to the unchanging and indivisible CAUSE, and cause of motion is not motion.

Motion is effect of cause, and effect alone is changing and divisible. Effect springs from cause in pairs of opposite effects - such as male and female, hot and cold, compression and expansion or positive and negative. These effects are wave levers of changing motion which swing upon their unchanging fulcrums.

The universal fulcrum of creation cannot be divided, but it can be extended into pairs of opposite unbalance effects which can void their unbalances in each other, but the fulcrum of CAUSE is as indivisible as it is unchanging.

[...] Stillness has no opposite, not has comfort, nor balance. Stillness belongs to the unchanging universe of the spirit, which is vibrationless.

[Walter Russell]
The Message of the Divine Iliad, Vol. II, p. 80




The action of this principle is exactly like that of the centrifugal govenor of the steam engine, which checks and corrects any irregularities almost before they become evident;

and in like manner no unbalanced deficiency in the animal kingdom can ever reach any conspicuous magnitude, because it would make itself felt at the very first step, by rendering existence difficult and extinction sure to follow.

[Alfred Russel Wallace]
'On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type', Darwin, A Norton Critical Edition, p. 97



In medical terms, studies have long shown more unequal societies have higher mortality rates than more equal ones.

[Rose Hackman]
'A poor brain is as worthy as a rich brain: psychotherapy faces a privilege problem'





For the nonorganic, noncomplex, say, an object on the table , equilibrium (as traditionally defined) happens in a state of inertia. So for something organic, equilibrium (in that sense) only happens with death.

Consider an example used by Kaufman: in your bathtub, a vortex starts forming and will keep going after that. Such type of situation is permanently “far from equilibrium” - and it looks like organisms and dynamic systems exist in such a a state.

For them a state of normalcy requires a certain degree of volatility, randomness, the continuous swapping of information, and stress, which explains the harm they may be subjected to when deprived of volatility. 

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
Antifragile, p. 60




Perhaps the most striking of his complementary color examples is the peculiar afterimage that occurred when Goethe, Germany's most celebrated womanizer, stared too long at a comely serving wench who was standing in the sunlit doorway of a rathskeller (¶52-¶53 of Theory of Colours). 

In the afterimage that appeared when he looked at a dark wall, he saw her emerald bodice turn scarlet, her black hair become luminous, and her pale skin turn dark (Goethe's faded watercolor, right). Though amusing, the anecdote illustrates Goethe's method of finding analogous patterns or phenomena in the experience of desire as itself the expression of deeper life impulses.

Goethe's infers, from the opposing change in the afterimage colors, a "desire" or effort toward compensation, balance or "filling in the blank" that is induced when a strong color stimulus is encountered by the eye in a situation where color is missing (shadow) or has been withdrawn (afterimage). 

[Bruce MacEvoy]
'j.w. von goethe's "zur farbenlehre"'




The capacity for and the duty of protracted gratitude and protracted revenge - both only among one's equals - subtlety in requittal, a refined conception of friendship, a certain need to have enemies (as conduit systems, as it were, for the emotions of envy, quarrelsomeness, arrogance - fundamentally so as to be able to be a good friend): all these are typical marks of noble morality which, as previously indicated, is not the morality of modern ideas and is therefore hard to enter into today, also hard to unearth and uncover.

[Friedrich Nietzsche]
Beyond Good and Evil, 260




From our Western point of view we speak of a people as vanishing, or a civilization as breaking apart, being overwhelmed by barbarians, or replaced by some other culture. Such descriptions do not seem to work when it comes to the Americas.

Archaeological evidence suggests that the Olmecs were not attacked or destroyed from within, neither did the population die out. Rather, The People seem to have made the deliberate choice to lead their lives in a new way. To this end their great statues were first mutilated, then laid in long lines and buried; in addition, fires were lit and pottery broken.

Again and again a similar pattern can be seen within the Americas, as The People apparently decide that the end to a particular cycle had come and they must voluntarily withdraw from the cities and from the alliance that was their former society in order to partake in a new cycle of being.

And so the mystery of the waxing and waning of societies and civilizations in the Americas is tied to the mystery of spirit and time.

[F. David Peat]
Blackfoot Physics, p.185



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