The Need for Conflict
image from jdlejeune.com
based on Eckhart Tolle's "Living a Life of Inner Peace"
"Hell is the others" (Jean Paul Sartre)
"Us" and the "others", "Vegetarians and meat eaters", "Jews and Arabs", "Buddhists and non-Buddhists", "Locals and foreigners", "Believers and non-believers", "Patriots and terrorists".
As you grow you'll notice how preoccupied our minds are with conflict; finding what's good, what's wrong, what's too noisy or different.
You'll be surrounded by those who complain - complaining about the traffic jam because they need to feel "right". They need to feel morally superior to reality.
The need to complain is based on a fear of rejection. People will travel the world and complain about the places they go because they feel outside their comfort zone and in fear of rejection will reject their host first. We'll complain about the food, the weather, the traffic, the hotel or whatever we are able to reject.
This is the basis for conflict. We fear others we don't know and preempty rejection by first building a mental construct about these unknowns that skew our reality such that what we experience confirms our convictions.
We create signposts to enable us to deal with this rejection. I hide behind the veil of being "English" or "American" or "French" enabling me to in turn hide behind a collective set of beliefs, actions and securities that justify my rejection of others.
These convictions inevitably create our identity. Without conflict therefore, we feel our identity, our sense of "me" is threatened.
There is only one thing worse than the "egoic" me - the "egoic" us; criminals create less than 1% of all the suffering in the world - the rest is manufactured by normal citizens.
