#51: Tension is the very thing that makes life sing
Heraclitus was an Ancient Greek, pre-Socratic philosopher who lived in the 6th century BC. in the city of Ephesus (now in Turkey), which I had the pleasure of visiting before the pandemic.
Heraclitus was a cosmologist, metaphysician, thinker, empiricist, mystic, and the first genuine philosopher of the Western world. He wrote a single work, On Nature, only fragments of which have survived (hence now called Fragments).
Fragments consist of many Heaclitus’s observations which are acute and still relevant as they were more than two thousand years ago. For example:
Heraclitus claims that tension is the very thing that makes life sing like a guitar string, for example. If you wind it too tight, it will snap. Too slack, and it will buzz and make no note at all.
He also believed in a unity of opposites and harmony in the world. He denied the Law of non-contradiction, which states that contradictory propositions cannot be true in the same sense simultaneously, e. g., the two propositions “p is the case” and “p is not the case” are mutually exclusive. According to him:
In that, he encapsulated the Eastern philosophy of Yin and Yang. The principle of Yin and Yang is that all things exist as an inseparable and contradictory state. Yin and Yang are complementary (rather than opposing) forces that interact to form a dynamic system in which the whole is greater than the assembled parts.
Nature is the biggest example of equilibrium of opposing forces - day and night, heat and cold, pull and push, cations and anions, north and south of magnetism and so on.
Science too has opposites. Niels Bohr, a Danish physicist, and a quantum said, “It is the hallmark of any deep truth that its negation is also a deep truth.”
So it does in life. In Victor Frankl’s words, it is not about finding “a tensionless state” but about finding the right tension.
Rather than ‘tension free life’ our aim should be life of ‘equilibrium’ - something that Buddhism call ‘balance.’ It is not always possible but knowledge that we cannot eliminate ‘tension’ but can only balance it with opposing forces is profound in itself.
Drum roll……
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