Federica wrote: ↑Sat Mar 11, 2023 12:36 pm Ok, now I’m serious again. I still feel the liability-asset metaphor for polarity is a very general one, moreover not as fruitful as your insightful introduction to this thread, and with the additional negative that it could keep one stuck in the polarized idea that one pole is bad (just as liabilities are bad) and the other one is good.
Federica,
I think we should be clear, the liability-asset angle on the polar relation is not mine or some modern invention. It is found implicitly through the Old Testament and much more explicitly through the NT, particularly St. Paul's epistles. When you say it is unhelpful and possibly misleading, I can only imagine this means you are either unfamiliar with that aspect of scripture, and/or you are only referring to my short one paragraph 'addition' which mentioned it on this thread. In the latter case, I take full responsibility for presenting the liability-asset angle in an unhelpful way, and should have elaborated its meaning more before presenting it. The Lucifer-Ahriman synopsis you presented shows clearly why these influences can be viewed as liabilities from one-sided perspectives, but how they can become assets from the Christ-balanced perspective.
Ashvin wrote:I think the liability-asset angle on the polar relation is very helpful because it highlights how all those things we generally consider evil, negative, or otherwise chaining us to the Earthly realm, weighing us down or hanging over our head like the sword of Damocles, has been redeemed through the blood of Christ.
Yeah, the point is exactly this: I don’t think it highlights that redemption. What it says is simply “let’s switch positions for a while and see that liabilities can become assets”. To be honest (and also a little provocative, of course) this reminds me of the self-proclaimed feminists (men and women) whom I’m seeing a lot of, who basically state that everything suppressing that’s been done to women’s disadvantage is now OK to reinstate to men’s disadvantage. They say “what we most strongly want to oppose is actually in itself only fair, as long as it is reoriented in its target. Let’s enforce a switch of positions for a while”. Obviously in so doing they are keeping alive the very essence of the problem, that is to say a polarized (in this case gender-polarized) approach. Similarly, the liability-asset approach - on top of not being anywhere specific to the polarities of human evolution which are in question in this thread - is also maintaining the focus on the extremes. It says that what appears as liability can actually be transmuted into asset, without providing any insights of redemption, I would argue. Because in a balance sheet there’s no real transmutation, there’s no redemption. There is only a matching of opposites (liabilities and assets) that ends up not in a higher-level resolution, or redemption, but in a gap (profit or loss) that remains in itself polarized, like literally - there is still a plus or a minus sign characterizing the final result of a balance sheet, be it a profit or a loss. So this metaphor presents a same-level game that is not elevating, as I feel it. Keeping in mind the otherwise mind-boggling level of insight usually present in your illustrations, I can only make sense of this one in some of the following ways:
- You were trying not to be too ambitious (in the sense you have referred to above)
- You were trying to guard against the risk that one would interpret your words as diminishing of the Buddhist teachings
- You were having your clients too much top of mind
I think the above characterization forgets about the actual living person who has their debts redeemed (transmuted into assets), instead focusing only on the impersonal numbers and calculations involved. In the bankruptcy system, which is rooted in the OT system of debt jubilee, we speak of the 'fresh start' once someone's liabilities have been discharged through the structured process. Ideally, they have a new lease on life. The spiritual burden of conceiving oneself a financial failure is relieved, the psychic burden of feeling constantly pursued by creditors is relieved, the physical burden of working two jobs just to pay the bills, etc. People no longer feel they are unable to provide for themselves and for their families, to struggle to pay rent or mortgage, as they are constantly making payments only towards the interest and penalties which have accrued on their debt, never lowering the principal balance. They can start reorienting themselves towards their higher life goals and ideals, making concrete plans and taking concrete steps for their attainment.
Obviously this is a lower-order example of debt redemption than that which comes from properly trained stages of spiritual awakening, yet it is the same exact underlying principle at work. There will develop a moral hazard in the bankruptcy system when people abuse its offering of a fresh start, treating it as 'get out of jail free' and never learning anything from the experience, but that happens when the spirit of the institution is undermined or circumvented in some way. It is all structured, ideally, to be a harmonious balancing between the needs of the debtors and the needs of the creditors, the needs of the individual and those of society. I tried to elaborate on how this is applicable to the MoG in my previous post. All these modern day cultural institutions only exist because they are (as of yet) dim embodiments of esoteric Christian impulses which have unfolded over the last 2,000 years through the deed of MoG, which are gradually spiritualizing human relations and can gradually radiate into Earthly relations as a whole.
Actually the quote above from Heindel basically outlines various ways in which the MoG gave us the capacity to transmute the liabilities of our instinctive animal life, our habitual tendencies and character flaws, our physical flaws/limitations, etc. into the assets of the purified sentient, intellectual, and consciousness souls, which then become fit vehicles into which the higher spiritual members can incarnate (Manas, Buddhi, Atma). Obviously this will be a gradual and ongoing work for some time to come, but every individual now has the potential to start that work and begin realizing the fruits in their current Earthly life. As Heindel said, we can start putting the desire body to work for our physical stream of becoming, instead of against it (through destructive sensuous desires and dry intellectual thinking), while we are awake and fully conscious. These are ways in which we take conscious hold of the new evolutionary phase Cleric wrote about above, gradually spiritualizing society and the World through our Earthly form.