Strength—we desire it. It enhances our virtuosity. It enables us to achieve other of our desires, or fend off other impositions on us. It really isn't possible not to want it, for even if all we seek is peace and tranquility, we still seek to impose a condition on our environment. When we seek the most humble and sharing of strengths or even seek not to seek at all, we still seek advantage in our particular goals. Recognizing its inevitability, we unabashedly begin our quest for greater strength.
Here we explore an approach to attaining strength that takes advantage of our understanding of life as born from distinction. First we take a moment to define strength and identify a few of its characteristics.
While there are many concrete definitions of strength, we will use the most basic and abstract definition. This will make our investigation easier and yield the most universal and extensive of results. Strength generally refers to a degree of effectiveness controlling the environment, and the essence of control is choice, so we will here take strength to mean access to options—to having choice.
Strength as choice, looked at through the duality lens, points us directly to several other definitions: weakness and exertion. The opposite of choice is limitation, that which is already chosen. So the opposite of strength, weakness, is limitation. And if an unmade choice is a strength and an option already chosen is a limitation, then the act of choosing is exertion. As a brief demonstration that even the more concrete examples of strength boil down to choice, take the weightlifter. The weightlifter certainly has the option of moving large masses off the ground, while most of us have no such choice. And exertion limits even the strongest weightlifter's choices in this same regard.
We will not be surprised that duality has imbued all choice with limitation. As was already pointed out, making a choice clearly removes the degree of freedom held when the option was still available. And though we hope a good choice will introduce more options, having any, let alone more options comes at a price. Keeping options entails not exercising them, and both the maintenance of their availability, say working out to keep our biceps steely, and the restraint from exercising them, say saving our energy before the big competition, are limitations on our lifestyle. In the case of the seeker of tranquility, it is likely that the only tranquility in store for the seeker is contingent on a bit of strife. If tranquility could really be guaranteed to remain uncontested, its incontestability would certainly appear tyrannical from any context in which peace and tranquility was not previously at issue, and some objection would be expected. In general, the maintenance of an option is itself a limitation. And so we again find ourselves seeking proportion, this time in the strength we acquire. With this understanding in mind, let's get on to the business of acquisition.
To the extent we wish to increase our strength—enhance our effect—we first recognize the only options we seek are ones we as of yet do not have. Not having them appears as a limitation imposed on us. In
Conflict it was recommended that when confronted with lack of choice we turn the tables on that which imposes on us. Do we have this choice? In
Virtuosity we said “we” are what we are and “the world” is everything else—that we and our reality are opposites, mirror images in one-to-one correspondence. So, with the usual contradiction attendant, it would seem we do have the choice. By changing ourselves the mirror image that is our world will change in correspondence. Change us, we change it. Change it, we may change its impositions on us, finding we have choice over our seeming lack of choice after all.
The interesting thing here is that in turning the tables on the world and its imposition on us, the fact that the world is our opposite turns out to require that we give up our strengths to remove its strength in limiting us. In this paragraph we'll detail how that happens. We wish to transcend a contradiction. In wishing to increase our strength we wish to end weakness. In other words, we wish to have a choice over not having a choice. Let's not argue over weather this is possible, but observe that to the extent we
can accomplish this, i.e. do have the choice to end this imposition, the limitation must be of our own creation. If we have any influence, the limitation must not actually be externally imposed, but rather the result of a choice of our own. This gives us some power on a case by case basis—w
e may be able to identify the offending choice, and change it. But more importantly, it tells us that the seemingly contradictory advice of gaining strength by relinquishing it actually makes sense. The world is defined in terms of ourselves, including our choices, and when we relinquish our options we relinquish their restraint. Now all that remains are those choices we don't have the option of relinquishing, the existence of which is in clear evidence around us. A person caught in the midst of a natural disaster certainly can't reach safety simply by changing his or her choices. Some limitations certainly seem inevitable, as is exemplified in the paradox that the freedom obtained by relinquishing options and their attendant limitations must have its own set of limitations.
Every once in a while our observations are eerily contradictory. But every now and again they make an eery amount of sense, as does this one. Relinquishing options enhances our inexhaustibility. We wish to maintain strength, so a good approach would be to do away with exertion, or in other words, attain inexhaustibility. The trick here is to do this in a non-defeatist way. Sure, if I give up all desire, I will never fail to fulfill my desires, but there are no new options presented in this situation. We need to relinquish unnecessary desires. We need to save our energy. We need to put ourselves in a position where our decisions do not all require sacrifice. We need to stop working from positions of disadvantage. If that means giving up some strengths we've already achieved, so be it. We should look for ways to give up things that are a struggle to maintain. Not just anything of course. If you're in the midst of a natural disaster, hang on until you can afford to give up your struggle. The point is, a strength that is overly laden with limitations isn't such a great strength, and giving it up with a reasonable plan for achieving strength in its place is actually not so tough to do. And this is exactly what our understanding of strength has given us: the strength to trade what we previously clung to for a greater strength.
Our understanding places new value on our existing strengths and limitations as well as potential ones. Revaluing the options in our lives opens new doors when we recognize the dual benefits of what we once considered weaknesses, and the dual weaknesses in strengths we once desired. Working from a position of calm, of lack of conflict, of sufficient time, of sufficient authority, all have such great benefits that coming to accept what we once considered more meager circumstances will be worthwhile when our new strengths, and possibly, access to new heights of accomplishment are seen to be afforded us by being able to act and choose without conflict. This revaluation shows us not just how struggle-laden strengths are less valuable than we thought, but shows us how much can be achieved with very little effort.
By doing the easy, and recognizing the reach of the easy is just as far as the reach of the difficult, we are really enhancing our strength. It might not appear so because the allegedly weaker person next to us has the option of using the easy too. But we truly are stronger because our neighbor has many more options to maintain and this cannot be done with easy maneuvers only so these easy maneuvers really aren't options of his. He doesn't share our strength. Unless we want to tip him off, which quite possibly could enhance our own strength too.
tags: strength virtuosity inexhaustibility choice