Good and Evil Shaking Hands. The following is from the MUM website: Resilience and the Coexistence of Opposites
Resilience is most powerful when opposites are harmonized in a system. Peters and Waterman expressed this idea in their seminal book In Search of Excellence (1982) as the concept of simultaneous loose/tightcoupling. It is also central in Maharishi’s teaching about the coexistence of opposites, which is a characteristic of Creative Intelligence, which grows as consciousness expands due to the practice of Transcendental Meditation (SCI Manual, 1972). What do I mean? In this blog post I will explain. This post is somewhat abstract, so I will try to make it accessible. Whenever we have a personal quality, say being very stable, if we do not also have its opposite there is a lack of resilience. Stability without adaptability creates a situation of stubbornness and inflexibility, thus resistance to change. On the other hand adaptability without stability yields frazzled, frenzied change without apparent direction. Individuals and companies can display this unintegrated weakness. Or they can be resilient and successful. Resilience means robustness. It implies both core stability and the openness to innovate. This is the simultaneous loose/ tight that is referred to in the book In Search of Excellence as the last of their eight principles and in many ways the summary point. A firm’s accounting department represents tight controls, and the creative advertising and R&D departments are loose and innovative. But this quality is engendered in all employees in excellent companies. This co-existence is explained by Peters and Waterman as follows: It is in essence the co-existence of firm central direction and maximum individual autonomy−what we have called “having one’s cake and eating it too.” Organizations that live by the loose-tight principle are on the one hand rigidly controlled, yet at the same time allow (indeed, insist on) autonomy, entrepreneurship, and innovation, from the rank and file. (p. 318). The reason that opposites have to be present for resilience is found in ecological and social systems. Traditions and instinctive behavior represent stability, and innovation and adaptation, adaptability, are both essential for resilience. Maharishi has described other opposites, such as the absolute never changing and the relative always changing poles of our lives. Other ways of stating this are silence and dynamism, heart and intellect, mind and body. We know that we are connected to the universe. In truth our essence, the Self, is the basic constituent of the universe in the same way as the sap is the essential constituent of a plant or tree, and in truth sap is everywhere present in the plant or tree. When we are competent to connect our individual consciousness to the unbounded quality of inner wakefulness, the Self, we gain true resilience, true coexistence of opposites. This expansion of consciousness attunes us to the cosmic intelligence of the universe, of which we are. The result is inner peace and fulfillment. (There is something good in this, but we don't have to agree with it all, there might be a better explanation put forward.)
