Aloneness versus Loneliness

Aloneness is freedom-from-dependence. Loneliness, on the other hand, is the dependent lost child crying as it searches for the parent or baby sitter it has lost and cannot find.
Page 41 of Beyond Success and Failure
Beyond Success and Failure
Willard and Marguerite Beecher
1966
Simon and Schuster Books

Pleasure versus Happiness

Pleasure is a counterfeit invention of the conscious mind, a spurious substitute for happiness Just as counterfeit money tends to drive out sound currency, so does the pursuit of pleasure tend to lead us farther away from the condition of letting go that is basic to happiness. Happiness can exist only when effort, pursuit and grasping fade away.
Page 137 of Beyond Success and Failure

compare “eudomania”…

Eros versus Agape

Eros is the defective love life of the leaning, dependent person, simply because he is incapable of anything more than seeking and taking in his relationships; he is not yet a giver or a doer. Eros is still the child in us that remains at the original nutritional level, using every device- political and physical – to exploit, dominate and possess the object.
Page 70 of Beyond Success and Failure
Willard and Marguerite Beecher 1966 Simon and Schuster Books

and

Love and hate are but two different ways of depending on someone else. Love (eros) is gratified by dependency. Hate is our resentment at being frustrated at being dependent. There is a love(agape) which has no opposite and seeks no favors or return. It exists when we are wholly impartial in our interest and are willing to live-and-let-live in coexistence.
Page 138

agape is (wikipedia)

is one of the Greek words translated into English as love, one which became particularly appropriated in Christian theology as the love of God or Christ for mankind. In the New Testament, [it refers to] the fatherly love of God for humans, as well as the human reciprocal love for God; the term necessarily extends to the love of one’s fellow man[2]. Many have thought that this word represents divine, unconditional, self-sacrificing, active, volitional, and thoughtful love. Although the word does not have specific religious connotation, the word has been used by a variety of contemporary and ancient sources, including Biblical authors and Christian authors. Greek philosophers at the time of Plato and other ancient authors have used forms of the word to denote love of a spouse or family, or affection for a particular activity, in contrast to philia (an affection that could denote friendship, brotherhood or generally non-sexual affection) and eros, an affection of a sexual nature. Thomas Jay Oord has defined agape as “an intentional response to promote well-being when responding to that which has generated ill-being.”

With the rebel yell, cry yeah yeah yeah…

There is, perhaps, no worse misfortune than to develop the rebellious habit of mind! And no person is to be pitied more than the rebellious person. And no one so self-deceived as a person who is a habitual nay-sayer in the belief that he is expressing a mind and individuality of his own. The humiliating aspect of it is that he imagines he is being original in his endless opposition, whereas he is only being the other end of the stick – not his own free agent…. The catastrophe lies in the fact that a rebel may often destroy himself in such senseless resistance and never ralize that he is fighting absolutely no one but himself.

Page 59
Beyond Success and Failure
Willard and Marguerite Beecher
1966
Simon and Schuster Books

Illusion versus delusion

From Primum No Nocere…

When we have an illusion we see or hear things, but we are aware they are not actually there, i.e. illusionist, magician. A delusion, however, is seeing or hearing things without realising it is not there. No amount of evidence will convince people, suffering from a delusion, that it is imaginary, i.e. paranoid delusional disorder.

Difference between worthy and self-righteous…

“What are you working on now?” she asks.
“I’m thinking about doing an essay on self-righteousness. How it has affected the women’s movement, and so forth.”
She laughs. I know this laugh well. It is Australian through and through, equal parts amusement and mockery. “You were always self-righteous,” she observes.
I am stung but try not to show it. “What were you?” I retaliate.
More laughter. “I was worthy.”
page 25 of Kate Jenning’s collection “Trouble”

Guilt versus Responsibility

James Hatley, in his excellent analysis of ‘testimony and history’, discusses Levinas’s distinction that guilt ‘is the burden I or the other may carry for our specific actions or comportment’, while ‘responsibility is the burden upon me of the other’s vulnerability to suffering’ (Hatley 2000: 104). The distinction to be made is that between one’s own actions ( concerning which one may have cause for guilt), and the human condition of living with and for others.
Page 12
Reports from a Wild Country: ethics for decolonisation
Deborah Bird Rose
UNSW Press 2004