THE PENDULUM OF CONFLICT

FOR HUMANITY, MEMORY HAS COME TO REPLACE UNDERSTANDING

THIS IS WHY CURRENT CONFLICTS IN OUR WORLD
CANNOT BE RESOLVED

Memory cannot, of itself, lead to Understanding. It can only shape Points of View. These are endlessly subject to change.

Understanding based on Memory is therefore also endlessly subject to change. It also has to compete with other competing “understandings”. Points of View.

Real Understanding only comes into existence with DIRECT SEEING IN THE PRESENT MOMENT.  As soon as it enters Memory, it also is already subject to revision. Because it has become detached from Seeing.

What you see and remember is filtered through your window frame. The man at the upstairs window will see something different. The man at the back-bedroom window may doubt your sanity.

The circle represents the confines of a system in which duality operates. In our case, this is the field of Humanity.

The diagram of the triangle is a conceptual image. It is a tool for understanding UPSTREAMING and how it works and also how to put it into practice. In everyday life. Here and now.

The Apex is the point from which the impulse of energy flows out from its source. In flowing out, as at a fork in the road, it creates a duality – a pair of opposites. These manifest at each end of the base of the triangle. They represent conflicting points of view and experience. Jews and Arabs, You and Me, Past and Future, Good and Evil, My Religion and Your Religion, Happiness and Unhappiness, Pleasure and Pain, Desire and Aversion, Birth and Death, and so on.

The space between them (the base line) represents the area in which the conflict is played out.

There are innumerable possible triangles but they all have the same Apex, the point UPSTREAM of their diverging dualities. From this point, they flow out (centrifugally), along with the diverging mirror images of their opposites. To it they return (centripetally) in search of the end of conflict, for reconciliation and peace. This happens when all efforts to solve the problem on the base line, on its own dualistic terms, have failed.

If you could lay all possible triangles next to each other with their sides touching, they would form a circle, like a wheel. All the sides flow out from the same Apex, the Centre. The sides of the triangle appear like the spokes of a wheel. The base lines join together to make the circumference of the circle, the rim of the wheel.

The circumference is made up of an infinite number of dots. Each dot represents the point where the outward flowing impulse from the Centre materialises as form in opposition to its opposing form.

These forms react to their opposites and exist in conflict with them until reconciliation is found. This puts an end to their imagined separateness by locating the apex or its counterpart at the median point of the baseline. For example:

• Religious or political activists abandon the beliefs which separate them in favour of an awareness of their shared humanity which re-connects them in unity;
  
• the rich abandon ‘too much’ and relieve the poor of ‘not enough’ on the basis of their shared status as fellow living beings of the One family.

The outward impulse is outward looking and leads to identification… This results in the illusion of separation into ‘self’ and ‘other(s). This flowing out is centrifugal. It creates the baseline of dualistic activity in the world.

Looking inwards and withdrawing upwards from the baseline activity (experienced as suffering) to the Apex (experienced as consciousness) is centripetal. The centre of the wheel is still. Likewise the Apex, the Centre, is still. It is empty like space.

The diagram is static. but it can be conceived as a moving wheel. The Wheel of Life. This is used in Eastern cosmologies to represent the Samsara, the wandering on through the world of form, the world of birth and death. What keeps it in motion is Desire – the motivating force behind the outward impulse away from the Centre.

C represents the upstream point at which humans are reconciled by abandoning A and B. It is both an exit and an entry point.

As an entry point, it can be said to represent the moment when humanity chose to eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, thereby debarring mankind from the fruit of the Tree of Life.

As an exit point, it represents the point of opportunity for humans to abandon living separatist lives based on knowledge of the Past and speculation about the Future. Such lives are circumscribed by the belief that there is a “person” who is born and therefore dies. This is what is meant by “In the day you eat thereof, you shall die”.  

With the abandonment of this belief, with all its accompanying fear, worry and dysfunction, there is re-entry into the Eternal Present – the Fruit of the Tree of Life.

That is what Jesus meant by, “I bring you Life more abundant”. It means access to the fruit of the Tree of Life which had been lost with the Fall of Man.

C represents the Apex of the triangle of duality. By increasing self-development, men move away from self-assertion and separatism of A and B and towards the awareness of unity and harmony. C is the exit point from the world of AB conflicts. Conflict is replaced by reconciliation. This is the escape route for the individual.

R represents the linear point within the horizontal field of conflict where the antagonists can, by abandoning A and B, achieve reconciliation and peace. This is unlikely, however, because of the momentum accumulated by the Pendulum of Conflict in its ongoing advances and retreats.  This momentum reinforces the differentiations of A and B.

Unlikely but necessary and possible.

Coming to the Peace Conference Table, each of the antagonists can leave his identification at the door. If it’s war, this means they reach point R and look together at what is really happening on the ground. Not statistics. Not different perceptions of right and wrong.

Not justifications. Not newspaper propaganda. Not aeroplanes or long-distance missiles in the air. Not from the comfort zone of generals and politicians behind desks. Not flags. Not uniforms. What they see are bodies, blood and bits of bodies. Dead. Or nearly dead and crying out in suffering. Does it matter what nationalities they are? They are…

…SUFFERING.

If both sides see that as the only reality in the present and don’t try to shut it out with the divisive information in their minds, the same mental response will arise spontaneously in the minds of both (or all) sides.

“ENOUGH. What can we do together to stop CAUSING this suffering now?”

However, if they pick up their identities as they leave the table, the whole obscene business will inevitably resume.

Each and every one of these issues on which humans are in conflict with each other has the same Reconciliation Point; the complete surrender of identification with the points of origin of their conflicts. A and B. What they choose or are compelled to identify with.

This identification is replaced by directly seeing how things actually are in the present moment.

Reconciliation is rediscovery, in the living present, of sameness – our real (and eternal) Identity. This replaces identification with “differentness”, which occurs when understanding is based on memory of the past and the points of view it conditions.

Because of the enormous powers of destruction which human beings have obtained, our continuing failure to solve our ongoing and worsening AB conflicts now endangers the Earth itself.

Also, the apparent emptiness within the circle/sphere itself is actually a fullness.  Full of events, incidents, rivalries, hostilities, revenge, justifications, memories, points of view, understandings and misunderstandings.  All are movements of the conditioned mind.

Full and expanding.

It is a rich compost in which A and B continually seek and find the food to support and nourish their differences rather than reveal their sameness and resolve their conflicts.

It is like a thistle growing next to a lettuce. Each takes from the same soil what its roots need to keep thistles quite different from lettuces.

STOP WORLD WAR THREE BEFORE IT STARTS

Brian Taylor

Download ‘THE PENDULUM OF HUMAN CONFLICT’ poster here