My Own Writing
Yin and Yang, light and dark, masculine and feminine, mind and body, thinking and feeling, creation and destruction, action and rest–there is a duality to all things which must be kept in balance if they are to be sustained.
Must balance the outer world and the inner world. The outer world consists of sensory perception and sensation, the inner world consists of thought, ideas, emotions, dreams, and fantasies.
Things to Keep in Balance
Thinking vs. Feeling
Action vs. Rest
Action vs. Thought
Work vs. Play
Breadth vs. Depth
Openness vs. Skepticism
Trying to Control Events vs. Letting Events Unfold
Concern for self vs. Concern for others
Intellectual development vs. Physical development
Logical thought vs. Intuitive thought
Self-discipline vs. Self-leniency
Seriousness vs. Lightheartedness
Self-reliance vs. Reliance on others
Contentment vs. Constructive discontent
Forethought vs. Afterthought
Acquiring information vs. Using information
Acquiring skills vs. Using skills
Spontaneity vs. Planning
Speech vs. Silence
Learning from the past vs. Experiencing the present vs. Planning for the future
Sacrificing the present for future gratification vs. Sacrificing the future for present gratification
Familiarity vs. Novelty
Life Sustainment vs. Life Improvement
Choosing what you’ve liked in the past vs. Experimenting with new things
Introversion vs. Extroversion
Evaluating/Judging vs. Accepting uncritically
Preserving the past vs. Building the future
Introspection vs. Extrospection
Honesty vs. Tactfulness
Conscious thought vs. unconscious thought
From Wikipedia on 07-Apr-2012
URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_(metaphysics)
In the metaphysical or conceptual sense, balance is used to mean a point between two opposite forces that is desirable over purely one state or the other, such as a balance between the metaphysical Law and Chaos — law by itself being overly controlling, chaos being overly unmanageable, balance being the point that minimizes the negatives of both.
In philosophy the concept of moral balance exists in various forms, one of them is the golden mean, which has virtue being between the extreme and the lacking. Greek philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle as well as the Pythagoreans (which related moral excellence with mathematical perfection) applied the principle to ethics as well as politics. Nothing in excess – was one of the three phrases carved into the temple at Delphi.
In Buddhism this concept is known as the middle way, which stated that the way to nirvana led between bodily sexual indulgence and self mortification and asceticism.