The Beast's Yield: Opponent Processing in an Ancient Tale
This post continues exploring opponent processing and tensegrity from the previous post. If you've arrived midway through this tensegrity series, the core idea: opposing forces—compression and tension—can create structure rather than just conflict. From this, something magical (or dare I say "sacred") happens.
Once upon a time in a far off land before cinema multiplexes and Disney channel lived a humble folktale. A father picks a rose from an enchanted garden. The Beast who owns it demands one of his daughters come live with him as punishment. The youngest (Beauty) acquiesces to honour and protect her father, then finds herself treated with unexpected generosity alongside the Beast's fearsome nature. She gradually comes to care for him, and when she confesses love, the Beast dies to his old form and a prince emerges. Multiple versions here.
Context first: Yes, Beauty and the Beast has been interpreted as hoodwinking young girls into marrying older, monied men (Whose visage has devolved along with the battles of worldly commerce into something beastly). Yes, it may derive from the Roman myth of Psyche and Cupid.[1] These readings do matter, but, the narrative mechanics encode how an adversarial (opponent) setting creates structure for an outcome that is better for all (transcending game mechanics[2].
The Setup
The Beast demonstrates violence and malevolence. He demands— the ownership of Beauty as retribution, he "compresses" her purity with rigid dominance in the cage of his house. The maiden (youngest of three, the purity figure) accepts her imprisonment with vulnerability. But not submission.
The Critical Phase
Beauty and Beast exist in apparent opposition - two dissimilar forces held in a tension.
Over time, the Beast shows generosity—not replacing his beastly overbearing nature but alongside it.
Crucially, they meet daily, talk daily. This isn't passive coexistence; it's sustained engagement. She finds something to love, possibly unconsciously sensing the "prince trapped within." This is key: she doesn't love despite the beast. She loves through him, maintaining tension while perceiving what's compressed inside.
NOTE: Beauty's yielding is not complete submission (collapse), nor is the Beast overbearing, domineering (compression) or exploitative; there is an honourable tensegrity between the protagonists.
The Structural Shift
The Beast "lies down"—explicitly stops forcing the structure. Until now, the spell (surface appearance) was maintained by his rigid enmity but no longer, he too shows vulnerability. Her confession of love acknowledges that their tension created something real. His death-to-old-nature releases the over-bearing grip (compression). The prince emerges not as a third thing but as what was always there when forces properly balanced.
This follows the Hegelian dialectic: the Beast (thesis) and Beauty's resistance (antithesis) don't just compromise or cancel out. Through sustained engagement, they produce a synthesis—the prince and transformed relationship. Neither the original Beast nor the maiden-under-duress remains. Something genuinely new emerges from the opposition.
The magic is that the two created conditions for the prince via their good will, persistence, fortitude and a an attention to what lie beneath surface appearances.
This is a sacred act conjured by both.
Why This Pattern Persists
Stories that encode opponent-process dynamics—where opposing forces create rather than destroy structure—survive across millennia because they map onto lived experience. The same pattern appears (from my earlier prefacing posts) in Taiji's lu (rollback), in tensegrity structures, in how yielding can be strength.
Tensegrity is the perfect balance point of opposing forces. In push hands, the capacity for deep and sensitive ting (listening) is the highest calling—not because it's passive, but because it creates the conditions for synthesis. You can only find the balance point if you're genuinely feeling the other force. You can only yield effectively if you're truly listening to where the compression pushes. You can only listen if you calm your nervous system and mind.
Imagine how frightened a young Beauty would be trapped in a Beast's house. She is operating at some high level of meditative stillness to not freak out completely.
The Constraint That Creates
Notice what happens during the critical phase: Beauty and the Beast spend constrained but deliberate time together. Their relationship after lunch is an "arena" for dialogue and company—dynamic opponent processing in real time.
She[3] doesn't run, hide, dismiss, ghost or strawman him ("he's just a filthy beast"). He doesn't force compliance. They engage in good faith without collapsing their own true natures.
What's the point of all this waffle?
This post may be too far "into the weeds" for the average 2025 attention span, but I do think we have an opportunity to directly experience a sacred process in a very normal (and therefore taken-for-granted) everyday way. Work on ourselves and work with others. For example....
Self-Work and Transformation
Ok, don't roll your eyes, I know Jung is some old codger psychologist to most people, but if you ever get a chance take a look at his "The Red Book", to my eyes is a monumental work of self Opponent Processing. The book documents his intense personal and spiritual journey of confronting the unconscious and clearly qualifies him as a fully qualified mystic.
Through a Jungian lens, this folktale maps onto internal integration as much as external relationships:
-
The Beast represents masculine consciousness encountering its own anima—the feminine principle compressed within.
-
Beauty's willingness to see the prince "encapsulated within" mirrors the work every psyche must do: recognising and befriending the parts of ourselves that don't match our surface.
Specifically as an internal work:
-
The daily dialogue isn't just between two people but between conscious ego and inner opposite.
-
When the Beast "lies down," it's the masculine principle yielding to its own feminine aspect, allowing what was always internal to emerge.
-
The synthesis isn't man-meets-woman but psyche-meets-itself, the animus/anima integration that Jung saw as essential to wholeness.
-
The spell that locks the prince in beast-form is the rigidity that refuses this recognition—the masculine consciousness that can't acknowledge its own receptive, feeling dimension until met with persistent, unflinching feminine presence.
Transformation requires both the strength that demands and the willingness to yield. The beast who never lies down remains monstrous. The maiden who collapses finds no prince. The tension between them is what makes emergence possible.
Your meditation practice
For many of us, meditation might be 15 minutes of thinking and thinking denial and scolding ourselves for thinking. Those are the brave ones. Most people say some variation of "it doesn't work for them", "don't have enough time" or more honestly "its a waste of time".
So you can see that the voice in your head is an admirable opponent for some opponent-processing. We know this voice can make ANYTHING up, it can make me care deeply and emotionally and neurotically about that thought, then 5 minutes later commence torture with another thought.
Thank goodness for distractions of children and family and career, that will keep the voice on less difficult monologs!Â
So to sit in meditation and resolve to be with the voice and set it aside, let it go is a worthy opponent processing opportunity. There is a tensegrity balance where lots of energy is created and that is when the meditation practice gets very interesting.
Modern Discourse
This is the mechanism modern discourse lacks. The dialectic requires presence—actual time spent with the opposition, not caricatures of it. The ad hominem is lazy. The bad-faith debate is a refusal to sit at the table. The transformative third only emerges when both parties maintain tension while actually engaging - sustained, uncomfortable proximity of genuine opponent processing.
We can start with this kind of opponent processing with our partner/spouse, our close colleagues. Pretty much any person you don't agree with.
Caveat: Maybe don't start with social media, the chance of getting good faith engagement on X would be low. It takes a very high level adept or a sociapath to opponent process here - and only one of those is seeking tensegrity.
We want shortcuts. We want to skip the dinners. But the structure only emerges from the tension, and the tension only works when both sides show up.
Exemplars for our children
Our screen culture overrides good parenting to teach children to be: self-centered, triggered, overly dramatic, combative - where are the exemplars of these finer human qualities? Perhaps I should watch Disney channel more?
I fear that "mindfullness" taught in schools and apps largely has a victim mindset applied to calm down "out of the arena"[[4]](#fn4). We all need training that allows us good faith when engaging with others that we may not agree with (or even the voices in our own head!).
Â
This is part of a series exploring tensegrity, opponent processing, and how structures emerge from opposition. See the links at the top to others in the series.
-
The tale is traceable to Indo-European roots 2,500-6,000 years old—possibly present in the last common ancestor of Western Indo-European languages. ↩︎
-
More about this in a later post, but checkout the evolutionary eventuality of dominance in Meditations on Moloch by Scott Alexander. ↩︎
-
Beauty's virginal purity lacks the malevolence to behave towards her capture but diminishes her no less. Malevolence is something that the world infects us with over time. As with Cinderella its no coincidence that the youngest is the protagonist.
-
This comes from "Agent and Arena" afaik from Ep7 of Vervaeke's "Awakening from the Meaning Crisis" series as a concept of embodied cognition. Previous posts
