Carl Hitchens - tracking the self …
Carl Hitchens - tracking the self …
2011
Some friends of mine recently asked for clarification on comments I had made at a recent book talk about the seed of war. When I think about it, the seed of war is the same seed of all conflict.
The seed of war is the natural inner-warrior drive for all forms of life to survive and self-perpetuate. All human efforts to "perfect" our living situations get down to trying to ensure our survival on this plane of existence. Even our art forms are efforts to express the quintessential nature of life of which we are inextricably bound up in. The joys the angst of living, the mysteries we seek to reveal are all efforts to inform ourselves and others of this great adventure that we are inescapably linked together in.
It is our interconnectedness, our inseparability that we at once seek greater intimacy with and distance from. We are not free of each other. We affect each other's motion and drive to successfully navigate the waters of life. We are simultaneously both interferers and supporters of each other's efforts to gain from life the necessities of mind, body, and spirit. How we each believe and take action towards achieving mastery over life's uncertainty brings us either into harmony or conflict with another human being or other life form. It is this duality-effect that separates or binds us together with another person or thing. Thus, separation becomes the ironic self-delusion born out of the reality of being inseparably tied together.
War is the extreme consequence of this ironic coupling. It is the extreme response to inharmonious ideological, locomotive, or spatial interactions between people. The Buddhists are quite correct in designating SEPARATION as the culprit of disharmony and conflict, but their opining on separation lacks proper nuancing. It suggests that maintaining non-duality and non-separation in one's own inner/outer disposition and actions will obviate human conflict. This could only be true, however, if all human beings dwelled in this state at all times. It only takes one person dwelling in a state of non-duality or separation to ferment conflict in the world. The notion that the non-dual/non-separate state—being non-resistant to all life—will not attract resistance is overly simplistic. In fact, the evidence for this runs in the opposite direction.
The reason is clear. Non-dualistic thought and attitude stands in stark contrast to dualistic thought and attitude. This Reality, this cosmic dream we traverse is dual-spirited. It is maintained by the attraction and repulsion of opposites. One does not exist without the other. Only when a non-dualistic state can effectively react a dualistic state into non-dualism is resistance cancelled out. War cannot be negated by peace. It must be transformed by peace. The total elimination of war in a cosmic dream-reality perpetuated by opposites is unlikely. Better to wake up out of the dream. Once awake, we can interact with it by choice, without being ensnared in it. Any being, human or otherwise, claiming to be liberated from this dream and is not free of its limiting relativity is spouting only empty words.
Carl
The Seed of Conflict
8/31/11