And I was pondering in the Tibetan tradition how demons and angels are the same; it is the understanding which differs. And then it occurred to me that when we are presented with demons, it is our job to transform them. They are uncooked. It is our job to cook that experience, which becomes useful and transformative in the process.
I keep my ear to the cultural landscape, and have followed at a small distance the work among others of Nassim Taleb. He has this concept of Anti-Fragility, which I believe was the title of a recent book. The gist of the idea, as I understand it, is that there is a difference between resilience–which might be summarized as “hard to break”–and something which BENEFITS from chaos and assault.
I don’t like negatives. I don’t think it is ever good to include within a word what it is you don’t want. Thus: transformation-capable. Phase shift capable. Informationally absorptive and self organizing.
And I got to thinking about this concept of being emotionally “vulnerable”. We assume being emotionally open makes us vulnerable and we are supposed to simply accept this as the risk of living, of loving.
But what if I open to something which tries to wound or kill me, and I am able to process it, and TRANSFORM myself in the process, accepting both hurt and the following growth? Over time, does my very vulnerability not become a positive virtue? Is it not what pushes me forward, ahead of the winds of chaos and destruction which hang everywhere over the world in which we live?
Within Kum Nye, the task is to take all emotional “sensations” and open them up, and expand them. And I saw that if you take a hard thing, and add space to it, you can imagine it like a blown up toy, filled with air in the middle. You can enter this, and look around. You can see dots of darkness, and dots of open space. No evil is fully continuous. And you can expand this, such that the dots of darkness are very far apart indeed. You can denude the sensation of its impact, its effect. I have in mind here the Buddhist conception of dharmas as dots or points in a discontinuous universe.