resistance

What you resist, persists....Let go and your life will flow.

To paraphrase Hannah Arendt__s portrayed in the recently released movie of the same name__he Nazi war criminal__ actions stemmed from her well-known phrase __anality of evil,_ not as a result of mental illness but as a result of a lack of thinking. Their greatest error was delegating the process of thinking and decision-making to their higher ups. In Rudolf Höss__ case, this would have been his superiors, particularly Heinrich Himmler. To many this conclusion is troubling, for it suggests that if everyday, __ormal,_ sane men and women are capable of evil, then the atrocities perpetrated during the Holocaust and other genocides could be repeated today and into the future.Yet, this is exactly the lesson we must learn from the war criminals at Nuremberg. We must be ever wary of those who do not take responsibility for their actions. And we ourselves must be extra vigilant, particularly in this day of accelerated technological power, heightened state surveillance, and global corporate reach, that we do not delegate our thinking to others.

...guilt is deserved only when the effort to resist evil is never made.

If someone slaps you on one cheek, offer the other cheek also...but of course if you were able to stand soberly after the first slap.

Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable.

There are many things to resist, but disease is not one of them.

You see, the point is that the strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.

Resistance is the subtlest form of attachment.

The blessing of resistance lies in its power to illuminate those aspects of ourselves which have eluded our appreciation.

What you hate, you re-create; and what you bless, you put to rest.

Like a magnetized needle floating on a surface of oil, Resistance will unfailingly point to true North - meaning that calling or action it most wants to stop us from doing.We can use this. We can use it as a compass. We can navigate by Resistance, letting it guide us to that calling or action that we must follow before all others.

Maybe that was one of the problems with these men who lived forever, they'd built up an immunity or resistance to affection. Perhaps because when everyone they knew and loved continued to die, they realized the value of distance, of not losing one's self completely to love.

The only people who experience no resistance are the unambitious and the dead. If you feel no resistance in your life, you need greater goals or you need to check your pulse. Life and movement come with resistance. Don__ be discouraged by it, be strengthened by it.

Sometimes we may seem to be resisting letting go, when really, we just can't see a way to move forward _ believing things can never change for someone as unworthy as us.

Resistance makes a man think new thoughts he never considered before. It makes a man ask questions he never asked before. It makes a man seek answers he never sought before. It makes a man beg God for help that he never before realized he needed. These quests, quests of the heart and soul, eventually make a man deeper, wider, taller.

To yield to Resistance deforms our spirit. It stunts us and makes us less than we are and were born to be.

John Locke, called the Father of Liberalism, made the argument that the individual instead of the community was the foundation of society. He believed that government existed by the consent of the governed, not by divine right. But the reason government is necessary is to defend private property, to keep people from stealing from each other. This idea appealed to the wealthy for an obvious reason: they wanted to keep their wealth. From the perspective of the poor, things look decidedly different. The rich are able to accumulate wealth by taking the labor of the poor and by turning the commons into privately owned commodities; therefore, defending the accumulation of wealth in a system that has no other moral constraints is in effect defending theft, not protecting against it.

It would be an instructive exercise for the skeptical reader to try to frame a definition of taxation which does not also include theft. Like the robber, the State demands money at the equivalent of gunpoint; if the taxpayer refuses to pay, his assets are seized by force, and if he should resist such depredation, he will be arrested or shot if he should continue to resist.