Tag Archives: good

The Good and The Evil

I was sitting on my dragon hovering near our wall thinking “they found me, somehow they did”. Dragons and other flying creatures were popping into the space around me, most carrying warriors on their back. They were quite a distance away yet but they will be closing in soon. I wondered how long our defense shield would contain them … It will… For a while it will but the battle is unavoidable.

“Blow them”,- said the voice of our great wizard in my head. It sounded a lot like the voice of Dumbledore from “Harry Potter” or Gandalf from “Hobbit”, I thought. “The more you manage to blow up now, the less we will have to fight later”. And I thought that was a pretty good idea. And it may also slow them down a bit and give our guys more time to gather, perhaps.

I thought all that in a split second and did exactly like the voice suggested. An explosion of magic light rippled the surface of the wall and rushed out, destroying and blowing away everything in its path.

And our dragons arrived popping out of the wall, both them and warriors on their backs sparkling bright in the cool light of the morning. We rushed all together down the wall to the foot of the mountain where the battle was starting.

I watched in amazement how every our warrior was matched by an equal warrior on the dark side. How they battled and hanged in balance and I realized something deeply that I thought about before but never felt on such a profound level.

We are bound to a balance. We cannot destroy the dark and the evil. If we were to do that, what would that make us? We would not be good anymore. At least not all of us. The destroying part would be then the dark side, our friends would become the evil ones, the light would be subverted. We were bound to keep a balance, a precarious balance with the dark side forever if we wanted to keep the light of good in the world.

The evil does not have such qualms. They would destroy us and not think twice about it. In fact, if they destroyed the good, the lesser evil would become the good, you know. The evil would split into really evil and less evil, creating this surrogate good somehow.

I walked up the city wall on the hill, watched the battle and wept at this realization. And then I realized also that this, what I just imagined, might have already happened. We may just be the lesser evil. The thought horrified me.

And I woke up.… -->

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John Scalzi, “Old Man’s War”

I happened to come across an interesting title, as it happens to me sometimes, and I did not feel sorry a bit for reading the “Old Man’s War” by Jouh Scalzi. It was so good, I actually went on and read the sequel, “The Ghost Brigades”. Strangely, that did not disappoint me either. The writer is surprisingly good and I was not able to predict the turns of the plot, which makes for a very exciting reading. Well, sometimes you do go “oh, damn, I wish he didn’t do that” but it’s the author’s cruel world and he is the king.

The writing style is very much reminiscent of that of Robert Heinlein, whom I love to read. Author even acknowledges pretty much that Robert Heinlein was an inspiration to him. The last sentence reads “Thank you, Robert A. Heinlein, for debts that have … become obvious.” I have to say John Scalzi lives up to the expectations, albeit being far more cautious and less provocative than Heinlein. All in all, a highly recommended, very entertaining reading in the Sci-Fi genre with plenty of interesting ideas interspersed with action.… -->

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Yoga considered harmful

I have been doing the same yoga exercise for years as a preventive and a cure for my spinal problems. It seems to help well and I think I might have been a stationary patient without those yoga poses. I never went for more than those few basic things that helped me though. Apparently, that was a good thing too.

I came across an article in The New York Times Magazine from 2012 that talks about the dark side of yoga classes. Apparently, we are all too hyped up on the usefulness of yoga and on how great it is to cure practically anything. What we do not know and never think about is that yoga could be extremely harmful.

“…awareness is more important than rushing through a series of postures just to say you’d done them. But then he said something more radical. Black has come to believe that “the vast majority of people” should give up yoga altogether. It’s simply too likely to cause harm.”

The yoga poses are developed in India where the everyday activities are quite different, for example, people customarily sit with their legs crossed under. These poses are not at all natural for the Western people. Another problem is that many teachers provoke students (or stimulate student’s own indulgence) to take more and more strenuous poses, causing eventually serious bodily harm in physically unprepared. The problems are numerous and we should be well aware of them before going too far. Yoga is actually suitable for physically fit and well-stretched people.

Read the article: “How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body“.… -->

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