Taken from the word, 'wieldan', meaning ‘To govern, subdue, direct’; wieldry is an individual ethical approach that embraces the idea that every single experience we have; bodily, mentally, emotionally and socially, is a potential source of power; and that virtually everything that we experience can be utilized (wielded) with life-enhancing results.
Wieldry is a unique approach that doesn’t seek to simply erase aspects of who we are in order to define who we are; which is the underlying goal of moral dogma. If our dogma tells us that certain passions are “evil” and we accept this, we are now compelled to tame or eliminate that aspect of who we are, as though we are somehow better off without it!
With wieldry, rather than hacking away at aspects of ourselves that we deem undesirable or as some sort of anomaly; we strive to create a more wholesome life by actually experiencing and accepting every part of our life as a whole. Every part of our character is necessary and not to be left to atrophy. Just as we can’t call our right hand ‘good’ and our left hand ‘evil’, we also can’t call compassion good and rage evil. We all possess both of these. They are two polar extremes of a common dynamic, the dynamic of how we all respond to the actions others.
Our hands can heal with compassion, and our hands can kill with rage. So, just as our hands can’t be good one day and evil the next, neither can compassion or rage, they are just tools to be wielded each and every day, by the will of their wielder.
All emotions are fuel, and their potency, as well as their usefulness, is determined to a great extent by how deeply we feel them.
Whether we are talking about love, joy and compassion or about greed, rage or lust, the quality that they offer us as fuel gives them their value and utility, regardless of our moral viewpoint.
So we have to ask ourselves; in our quest to clarify our morality, are we inadvertently stripping ourselves of the power to thrive? Will we allow our sacred thoughts to strip us of our passions, or will our passions serve to clarify and even enhance our sense of the sacred?
Here are the four principals of wieldry.
Every conceivable condition or emotion is a potential source of power, if handled with a clear mind and expediency, not as good or bad, but as useful or not.
Every tool is wrong for some job, but it becomes right when it is used for the purpose for which it was designed.
Every aspect of our lives is either a state of mind, a state of being or a tool for living, or a combination thereof.
Some of the most powerful ideas that have ever served to evolve people’s characters came from the minds of people who lacked those characteristics. In the final analysis, wieldry is all about the gathering and use of physical, emotional and spiritual power. It does not judge or evaluate, because everything is both valuable and useful.
Everyone is valuable and useful as well; and the freer that they are to fully express themselves the more valuable and useful they become.
Self-actualized people are the happiest and most interesting of us all, and the last thing we could want is to suppress or discourage the things that raise that level of happiness in ourselves or in others.
Wielders don’t judge the quality of an emotion, but its utility. For this reason, no emotion need ever cripple us, because, as energy, it’s mutable, and is always going to be useful to us in one way or another. It is no longer necessary for us to filter the ‘good’ from the ‘bad’, or the ‘moral’ from the ‘immoral’. Our passions, our emotions, and our experiences, are nothing more than the fuels and tools that we use to facilitate our journey; where we end up is the result of our choices, not of the tools that we wielded to get there.
