Open Question: Must You Fight To Have Peace?

23 Responses to “Open Question: Must You Fight To Have Peace?”

1. Charlotte says on 2/14/08 at 7:31 am:
   

   This could warrant a very interesting discussion. In my case, I am very glad I have Mars in a fire sign (Sadge), if I didn’t, I might never assert any kind of “fuck you” attitude. I have so much “passive” energy I just might have become the epitome of the human doormat were it not for my Mars. If someone ever tries to bring me down, I react quicker and with more anger than I usually think I possess. I think that’s important if you respect yourself at all and want others to respect you.

   There is this old philosophy that Nietzsche wrote about called amor fati, the love of one’s fate. The theory being that whatever happens to you happens as a way of destiny reaching an ultimate goal. Because of this, amor fati instructs us to accept anything that happens to us with joy, good or bad. It’s kinda new age-y. And if EVERYONE just accepted all the crap that came their way I don’t think anything would ever get done! It’s a total cop out; if someone were physically beating you up you wouldn’t say “oh well, this must be part of the plan, I’ll just lay here and take it.” No, you’d fight back! It’s just human nature.

2. kashmiri says on 2/14/08 at 7:47 am:
   

   I think part of that new-age philosophy is that ‘acceptance’ is less about taking other people’s crap and more about taking responsibility about yours.
   At least, that’s how I interpret it, but I always assume I have the right to interpret a philosophy in the way that I choose.

   I’m very easy-going when it comes to most things, and I am a big believer of turning the other cheek–mostly because if I fought everyone that came my way I’d be a busy gal and also I fight to eliminate, so battles must be chosen very carefully.

   (Aries Mars opposed Pluto)

3. Twilight says on 2/14/08 at 8:05 am:
   

   I want to respond to this, but it’s really difficult to get the right tone.

   Mars in Scorpio ensures that I defend myself - in a personal way, verbally, and I guess if it came to necessity, in a physical way too (I’ve never experienced that, but I’m pretty sure I’d react).
   But I’m avidly anti-war. That’s a different matter altogether.

   The trouble is that the self-defense mechanism most of us have, built-in, can so easily mushroom into something very ugly if unchecked.

   War was a necessity in the case of World War 2.
   Wars such as Vietnam, Falklands, Iraq and various others were not, and I see them as wrong, wrong wrong.

4. Valkyrie says on 2/14/08 at 9:35 am:
   

   Mars in Leo, conjunct Venus and square Neptune; little Pluto to speak of. I can’t recall a single fight that made me feel better. I’m fine when I assert myself in a dignified way, though.

   Being peaceful doesn’t mean you are ignorant of human nature. The meditators’ mistake was in not having some security guards on the field checking for bombs.

5. jamie says on 2/14/08 at 9:45 am:
   

   I love open forums and discourse for it allows for edumacation on a massive scale.

   As a matter of fact if it were NOT for such forums I would still be stupid.

   “War was a necessity in the case of World War 2.”

   I strongly suggest reading ‘Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor’. I think we all need to realize that the “pancake has two sides”.

   Mars in Leo here…on the Midheaven conjunct my NN, opposite Saturn in Aquarius. I use my Mars very dramatically (as I am intended)when I feel the need to defend myself or others. Like telling a bus full of bullies that I hated them and wished they’d die. That’s drama! Or beating the hell out of my bestest friend in the whole wide world when she bullied me. (she didn’t eff with me after that. As a matter of fact I recall her pleading with me to stop. I figured since she asked for it I might as well give it to her GOOD…no? :D) She may have not felt better after I finished with her but boy did my Mars feel fabulous after taking that Goliath down! (She WAS bigger than me.)

   I like my Mars because she is valiant and loving. So if she is kicking someone’s ass then it is out of pure love for them.

   This is the only way to kick ass; With pure, unadulturated l-o-v-e for each other!

   So, if I kick your ass it is BECAUSE I love you…not from lack of it.

6. jamie says on 2/14/08 at 9:48 am:
   

   Oh, I mean both metaphorically and literally of course…”ass kicking” that is.

7. Twilight says on 2/14/08 at 9:52 am:
   

   jamie:

   you said”I strongly suggest reading ‘Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor’. I think we all need to realize that the “pancake has two sides”.’

   From the USA’s point of view, you may be correct, I don’t know - but I lived through WW2 as a small child in the UK. German bombing raids over our home on a regular basis. Believe me, you had to be there to know whether it was necessary or not!

8. jamie says on 2/14/08 at 10:18 am:
   

   Twilight, I am sorry to hear that you had to go through something so traumatic. I cannot imagine what it was like for you as a child to have to endure utter destruction and chaos.

   There are always victims (especially children) when we allow those in power to choose our collective destiny. You were a victim of your own government as we are presently here in the US. This was my only point. I just do not see bombing children as “necessary” under any circumstance.

   I’m certainly glad that you made it through to tell your story.

9. Amber says on 2/14/08 at 11:02 am:
   

   I’m all for healthy boundary setting. But I still think that a million meditating people and 1 bomb makes less mess than a fullblown war. I doubt the ‘bad guy’ would gain power in the meditative situation (that is - if people practice what they preach). The reactivity in war is what does the most harm.

10. goddess says on 2/14/08 at 11:09 am:
    

    i believe fight is necessary and important. the problem usually comes in with choosing the battles.

    some fight to preserve their own freedom or space or peace, while others fight to impose their viewpoints and will on others. fighting to safeguard vs, fighting to control are two different animals.

    i’m all new-age hippie and everything, and anger is not my natural state of being. but my mars in scorp has served me well on the right occassion.

11. Daeshii says on 2/14/08 at 11:10 am:
    

    I agree with you 110%, E. Due to the nature of, well, human nature, the idea of utopia is impossible in the long term. I mean, look at Star Trek. They’ve pretty much cured disease, famine, etc. but there is constantly conflict.

    Observing and choosing peace only makes you weak if you refuse to fight for it, IMO. If it’s worth preserving, then it’s worth fighting for.

12. Alma says on 2/14/08 at 11:37 am:
    

    I once trashed a man’s apartment when I broke up with him. I did this because he owed me money, not because I was upset about breaking up with him. It wasn’t a lot of money, it was the principle. If I had let him get away with it, I would have been walking around with “SUCKER” stamped on my forehead. Word might have spread. I had to stand up for myself. I admit, it was fun to break the television, and to write in lipstick all over the pristine white walls.
    He called me out of the blue a couple years ago. I didn’t recognize his voice. He said, “remember me? You trashed my place. What are you doing tonight?”

13. Neith says on 2/14/08 at 11:45 am:
    

    I do believe in standing up for one’s self and my Libra says “fight fair” and my Scorpio says “fight to win”. In general I am a very peaceable sort . . .

14. eva says on 2/14/08 at 12:56 pm:
    

    The point is everything starts and ends with you. You interpret peoples’ actions as hostile, threatening, peaceful or neutral — you project your dramas onto a blank, meaningless array of external stimuli.

    Even when you are being attacked, it’s not really you being attacked — you are the receptacle of another persons’ projections and dramas and fantasies; you are interpreting actions, words and phenomena to be an attack. What’s really going on is you are putting your stuff out there and deciding what conditions qualify as an attack — and then you have to identify an enemy, and then you have to vanquish the enemy, thus proving to yourself that you’re competent, or strong, or brave. Who knows if this is true — what is true is that you somehow need this interaction with yourself and the world to prove that you are right about reality.

    The point is not to *stand up for yourself* but to investigate where the “attack” is coming from. One’s “power” is an idea to counter another idea — powerlessness. How do you use your “power”? You create situations, look for opportunities to prove, within your internal drama, that you are “powerful”. This is a story of the ego and is not spiritual at all.

    A soul that wants peace beyond the ego…will find it. You don’t have to fight for it, actually, you have to stop fighting. And a soul that wants war…gets war. That’s all.

    So if you hit back, and don’t reinterpret that strike across your cheek as an opportunity to turn war to peace, then you will have used the opportunity to perpetuate war. The outcome is dependent entirely on what you *really* want. I’ve watched myself do both.

    These things start with you, the minute they cross the threshold of your consciousness.

15. ewinbee says on 2/14/08 at 3:02 pm:
    

    Defending oneself is one of those things that I advise other people to do if necessary, but I never can seem to make it work for myself.

    If I lash out in any kind of anger, the consequences end up being so catastrophic that I just… try not to do so anymore. Some people work very well that way, though. Just not me. When I fight back, everybody around me behaves as though the mountains have flung themselves into the sea resulting in the death of millions.

    Probably just as well. Anger distresses me.

    It’s odd, because politically, I am far from pacifist, but personally I am. I can see the benefits from political combat now and then (or at least see where it’s unavoidable). For me… it’s never worth the cost.

    I do much better with setting and defending boundaries, though. For instance: I have my own private blog. And I am the God of my comments. If someone says something nasty to me on their own blog, I have no control over that, so I’m not about to engage, but if they say something nasty in my comment section, it’s getting deleted. I don’t have to fight it. Nor do I have to tolerate it. I’ve gotten good at variations on “This stops now, because I refuse to let it escalate to a fight.”

    Oddly, I find myself more aggressive in the interest of addressing disagreements than most people, because I’m SO desperate to avoid all-out fights. I never ever let a conflict just sit…

16. liz says on 2/14/08 at 4:53 pm:
    

    This is VERY interesting to me as within the last week or so I finally understood the misuse and also misinterpretation of my libra energy. Peace for peace sake isn’t going to cut it anymore. It turns out that when I get frustrated it is sometimes interpreted as getting angry at someone else. My sister experienced this. She all of a sudden accused me of yelling at her. I wasn’t so I withheld apologizing - something that has been our longterm habit as she is my older sister. I did come to understand what she was experiencing and told her I’d be more mindful of how my frustration manifests as raising my voice even though it wasn’t at her, it was at myself.

    Then this morning I was chatting online with a crush and I pushed past his boundary and he made it clear. My bad. So I was the one to apologize.

    I’m still not sure what to do about all this when most of the time I’m not feeling particularly negatively aggressive, but it’s nice to be more conscious of it and to start looking at how it’s affecting my relationships.. or lack thereof.

    I think it’s part of the left-overs from when pluto opposed my moon. And now pluto is egging up to square my venus/pluto - which of course is natally a square to my moon. All of a sudden I’m very conscious of how I use my pluto to defend my moon and how it affects relationships.

17. Marc says on 2/14/08 at 5:52 pm:
    

    I’m with kashmiri & eva - I think reducing spirituality to passivity and getting stepped on is a gross and misleading oversimplification. True spirituality, in my opinion, all comes down to taking responsibility for yourself. The people and situations you manifest in your life really ARE a mirror of what you think and believe about yourself and the world around you — the energy you send out.

    The whole idea that power is all about conflict and that the person who wins is powerful is a misconception. Conflict arises because people feel powerless. Why do we manifest situations where people are stepped on over and over? (I’ve done this plenty myself) Because at a core level we believe that we’re weak/undeserving/powerless. Whether you choose to play out the perpetrator or victim role, they’re just different ends of the same stick. Eva describes it really well.

18. wyrdling says on 2/14/08 at 7:20 pm:
    

    …unless they happen to be shaolin monks meditating in a field. in which case it’s just a clearing so the mars can come out all pure and unfiltered at need

    “Turn the other cheek while they put people in the gas chamber? I don’t think so.”

    exactly. the aries/pisces in me has conversations like this all the time. i let people move in until something snaps in my head and i’ve realized i’ve given too much and i push them out again. i’ve become better at attuning myself to these things and recognizing what sorts of behaviours suggest that someone might turn out to be a problem so i can be on my guard. but i don’t want to judge too soon. so it’s always a balance.

19. CynO says on 2/14/08 at 9:52 pm:
    

    Eva, what you’ve described is the way i try to think, and live. But Elsa’s point about the holocaust is the example i always think of, when i have trouble maintaining my ideal of non-aggression. SO I’m just interested in what you think would be the elightened, or ego-less way to respond to the holocaust?

20. eva says on 2/15/08 at 1:54 am:
    

    Well…

    I only know what I think about it, so I will tell you how I composted this down in my own mind.

    First, consider what we are actually in charge of. At this moment, you are you, in your body, living your life. You are not in charge of the holocaust. Additionally, you did not experience the holocaust; you very likely have no contact with the holocaust except as a Story. I am not denying that it is a terrible, terrifying, and true story — but for you personally, it is a Story.

    In human consciousness, Stories of this type are somewhat common. What they represent in consciousness is the very worst possible, the most soulshattering, pain-inducing, loss and abandonment fears inside the collective soul. They are all over the Bible; they exist in History, in common vernacular, and in the psyche. A Story like this as it is processed by the psyche means only one thing: our deepest fears of total annihilation.

    The level of suffering in all of humanity at any given moment is intense. The practice of egolessness from the Masters was not designed to get us through a long line at Starbucks or menstrual cramps. It was developed in response to the most unendurable types of suffering imaginable in the history of our civilization. The holocaust sits in our imagination the way it does because for some reason our culture likes this annihilation story a lot. But there are others. There are untold others, going way way way back.

    However, we personally are not History. Our own suffering is enough. Our own suffering will teach us what we want to know about it. Our own suffering brings us back into our own bodies, in our own time, which is what we are in charge of. Denying this in favor of something that is not inside our own experience is denial of our own existence, which is what we have to work with here.

    The people who lived then and who died then walked through suffering moment by moment, maybe not the way you and I do, but the way prisoners did in Abu Ghraib or the way the Afghani refugees do; the way they do in Darfur, they way they do in the drowned city of New Orleans. It’s all the same, do you see? Terrorism, genocide, disaster. Is a sudden dramatic death harder than a slow, dull one? Is it more painful to lose a limb or your certainty you will become a rockstar? We really don’t know the answer, do we? We only know that in our lives loss is guaranteed.

    Finally the only suffering we know anything about is our own.

    When genuine external circumstances cause suffering, it is what it is. You walk through it, and live or not. When it is a Story, it is another fantasy, another projection. In your imagination you can swoop around and lop off Hitler’s head, round up the Nazis and Save Everyone. In reality, if such a situation presented itself to you, you would do your best to survive. You could not lop off Hitler’s head or round up Nazis, because you would only be one person with one life to spend.

    Not to be sacrosanct, but if that were the case, how would you really spend it? I’ve wondered about this. Would I decide that I was going to take on the role of beaten prisoner or would I save something inside that could not be killed? Were there prisoners in those camps who felt liberated by the fact that all they were expected to do was survive?

    So in essence, my opinion is that any response to the holocaust as a single individual is really an ego response. It suggests that you have any sort of control at all over what people do. It also suggests that you have control over things people already did. You are responding to a map, a set of artful graphics, a museum exhibit, a snatch of old film. There really is nothing there. The only way to have a relationship with such a story is in a mythical realm, where you are also a mythological being.

    The Story of Annihilation is always presented in such a way as to engender an emotional call to action. It is the kneejerk response, because annihilation is our deepest primal fear. ” We should never bargain with terrorism!” ” We should eradicate prejudice!” ” We should be tolerant of all races, creeds and religions!”

    These are all good ideas. We should! The thing is we have to start somewhere and really our only jurisdiction is ourselves, right now, in this body, in this time.

    So, how do you, inside yourself, eradicate prejudice? I only know one way that works.

21. CynO says on 2/15/08 at 12:44 pm:
    

    Eva,

    Thanks so much for responding, it’s been very interesting to see your point of view. And I agree that the holocaust is one story among many that reflect (or have been created by) our collective fear of annihilation.

    However, in this story, (let’s say the holocaust is happening right now), I have been afforded some power, because I live in a part of the world that allows me to speak out against such annihilation– on behalf of the people who are suffering in the story. I know that I cannot tuly knowwhat these people are experiencing. But I know whatit feel like to SUFFER, period. I also know that aggression is not REAL power. How can you have true power in a world that is made up of a collection of illusions, or halls of mirrors? But we DO feel suffering in this story. There are people– and children, who are suffering without understanding why. Unimaginable physical and emotional suffering.

    Aggression is the kind of power that works when immediacy is required. I cannot imagine telling children and their parents while they’re dying slowly in gas chambers, and being killed in other horrific ways, that they are just part of a terrible story created by our collective ego (which, by this logic, they have contributed to). I also really can’t imagine this being something that the Nazi regime could respond to. To me, it would make sense to show them that they don’t even have “false” power– that they cannot aggress against people who have not provoked them– without being aggressed against in return. THEN when the violence and physical suffering has subsided, we can deal with trying to REALLY heal as a collective.

    This discussion reminds me of a very insightful video, that was made in response to the shootings at Virgina Tech:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZ0DK7r8WKU

22. satori says on 2/15/08 at 4:27 pm:
    

    I just refuse to acknowledge the incursions until they break through my crust– then I disappear. so pisces.

    you won’t generally find me fighting for peace, tho I can’t say that’s such a bad thing. I’ll generally be too busy fucking for virginity, as they say.

23. satori says on 2/15/08 at 4:28 pm:
    

    and: neeeeeeeeeeeeeed me that ring!

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