A pacifist is not really a pacifist if he is unable to make a choice between violence and non-violence. A true pacifist is able to kill or maim in the blink of an eye, but at the moment of impending destruction of the enemy he chooses non-violence.
Takamura Yukiyoshi, founder of Takamura-ha Shindo Yoshin-ryu
Takamura Yukiyoshi, founder of Takamura-ha Shindo Yoshin-ryu
Labels: martial arts
posted by Ammie at 10:35 PM
4 Comments:
You know what I love here? The implied link between delicious ice-cream and the split-seccond decision regarding violence. These feel as if they are related, somehow--could you be a pacifist if someone were to try and steal your Ici Ice cream I wonder? Could anyone?
Anger is a vestigial remnant, like a tail, or a female mustache.
So I don't know. I coulda punched him in the teeth, but I'm a pacifist.
Sounds a little like the nuclear armament theory of pacifism- seems that a sort of short sighted macho outlook yet lurking around in the idea of "armed pacifism".. As well as a bit of self stylized martyr-dom-ery.
and, ps, hey! How are yah!?
I'm fine!
-C
I get what you're saying about martyrish tendencies, but I think the path to enlightenment is paved with ideas that sound like they're martyrish but are instead ways of dealing with our humanity.
I've met people who cannot imagine killing another human being, which I think is a) weak when I am having a bad day, or b) misguided on a good day.
Pacifism is great, and preferable, but I think to truly understand and gain fluidity of the self we have to choose to accept those things that are crucial to the definition of us as human, and then...choose to accept those things that are crucial to the definition of us as human. You dig?
Good to see you here. I'm fine too!
Violence and such I believe is magic authoritarianism- like religion and politics now is, and a remnant of a more physically threatening order of being.
An essential breakdown of communication and understanding.
Not that some people do not deserve to die- they do, now days.
The thing is, looking ahead, being one of that perhaps we could spawn people, in the distant future, who do not include "murder" and "killing" into the weltanshauung of their conception.. not out of weakness, but out of perception and intelligence.
That would touch on the "definition" of being a human.. being whatever we accept that definition to be.
The nature of human intelligence is that, at the root, and potentially, it is infinitely mutable. That means the permutations of perception are infinite- and as we stand on the "shoulders of giants" in our inherited coneption of reality- I think we need to examine those shoulders a bit closer in some cases.
I could kill- in many different contexts, but the "gestalt" of my perception- that objective "watcher" who does not react to anything, but only "watches", knows that violence is merely evidence that humans are not evolved enough, yet, to sustain any other moral and ethical system, as a whole, than those we have inherited.
I'll have to moulder over this a bit more, though, to have a workable, "vector" principle to relate.
-C
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