Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Quotes: Hear Heraclitus and Alan Watts on Using OppThink to Appreciate Life's Pleasures

He didn't use the term OppThink as far as I know, but he seems to be embracing its usefulness.
He = Heraclitus, ancient smart Greek dude.
Here is a Heraclitus quote I like:

It is by disease that health is pleasant, by evil that good is pleasant, by hunger satiety, by weariness rest.

In other words, by experiencing X (in this case, something of no apparent value)
we can appreciate the opposite of X (something we do value).

Alan Watts is a more recent philosopher who gave many talks in which he too embraced the value of a thing's opposite. A great example he liked to give:
without rests in music, how could we enjoy the notes?

But we can go even further.
Not only can we appreciate musical notes thanks to the rests in between --
the notes cannot exist without the rests!
Without rests, how could we hear notes at all?

In fact, there are many things in our universe which only exist thanks to their opposite.

In the realm of physics, particles can be created only in pairs, with opposite charges.
In other words, one's creation depends on its opposite's creation.

No comments:

Post a Comment