The Nature of Conflict

This series is about exploring the human consciousness. To understand the world one must first understand one’s self. What is the self? What is the structure of the human mind? How do we live and why is there so much conflict within us—and therefore in the world? The reason for asking these questions is to explorer our mind and learn about it’s inner workings. Only by looking at how the mind functions with a clear and innocent mind can we tune into the state of understanding.

This series is about a journey I want to take with you, like we would walk on a spring day in the fields: come with me and let’s see what life is all about…

Today: The Nature of Conflict

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Conflict is the struggle between two sides. In the state of conflict, the duality of the world is revealed. There is black and white, and warm and cold; there is up and down, as well as inside and outside; female and male, night and day.

But how does conflict come about? Have you asked this yourself? Have you taken yourself time to explorer this question with all of it’s significance and meaning?

Conflict is inside me and therefore it exists in the world. There is no separation. The world is a mirror to your self. It is a mirror to all of our selves and therefore the self is also a mirror of the world. There is no difference.
Conflict is within us for we distinguish between an entity who thinks—which we identify with our self—and the thing we think about. It is this duality which is the source of all of our psychological conflict.

Me, the I, the Self is the sum of my thoughts and therefore the sum of my memories. I have experienced the world and these experiences have made me who I am. The “I” is the sum of my thoughts—the thoughts in my mind are me. I am my thoughts.

And yet we make a distinction between our thoughts and an entity who thinks. “I think about my thoughts” we usually say, but is this so? Are the thoughts you think different from your self? In the stream of thought there is the thinker who watches his or her thoughts go by, like the water which flows in a river. Yet have you asked yourself who the thinker truly is? Who is the entity who watches his or her thoughts? Is he or her not thought itself? Is he or her not exactly the same as his or her thoughts? The thinker is the stream of thoughts.

In fact, there is no distinction between the two. The thought is the thinker and the thinker is the thought. The observer who watches me—the consciousness that is aware of itself when talking, when opening the door, when crossing the street, when looking at the clouds—is a stream of thought; just like the experience which becomes memory and therefore flows within this stream of thought.

The experience of riding through the countryside becomes in another moment a memory. A memory that I can recall and exists within the stream of thought. My thoughts are not different from the “I” that recalls his or her memories. The thinker is in fact the thought he or she thinks about. There is no separation.

This fact is fundamental to understanding the nature of conflict. Without the separation between a thinker and the thoughts there is only the stream of experience. The thinker dissolves and there is only the present.

The present is the now. The present is not within the realm of thought, for the stream of thought is the past. The past of experiences. With this comes a shift from the thinker to a state of attention. There is attention of the stream of experience. That which happens every moment in the now. Within the state of attention there is no conflict because there is no duality. Duality seizes to exist for there is only the stream of experience, which is the now.

As soon as the thinker appears (which means that there is a holding of a thought of memory, and therefore the thinker always lives in the past) then there is duality again. The world becomes filled again with light and darkness, up and down, male and female, and wet and dry.

The state of attention is a state and cannot be grasped. As soon as it is realized as a thought, the thinker appears again.

This does not mean that one only lives in a state of attention because we have to use thought to solve problems and live life. But it has to be intelligent thought. When thinking about solving a math problem there has to be a thinker; when buying the groceries there has to be a thinker; when analyzing facts there has to be a thinker; when recalling a memory there has to be a thinker.

The thought is recalled from memory and the thinker is that thought that he or she has retrieved from his or her memory. Yet normally we don’t see that we become that thought. We normally see it as something foreign, something that separates us from the “I”. Like when we become angry and see the hate or anger as something separate from us, when in reality we are the anger or the hate.

When you see that the “I”, that the self is its thoughts, then conflict seizes for there are not two sides which struggle with one another. The thinker sees itself separate from the thing it thinks about and so there is conflict. “I want to be richer, I am lazy, but want to be productive, I have no friends, I am lonely.” In this state there is the comparison between two things which the thinker sees as two separate things. The “I”—the thinker and the thing it thinks about “the future that does not exist, or a thought which makes the thinker seem inferior to others, like the amount of money in a bank account or the clothes one does not have”. Naturally, the “I” wants to achieve or become things that it sees itself separate from. Yet if there is the realization of unity then there cannot be any separation and hence there is no conflict.

When you realize this then the mind becomes quieter and quieter until the stream of thoughts comes to a stop. There is only the stream of experience. In this there is no conflict. In this the thinker seizes. In this there is that which we call death—the seizing of the thinker and the self.

Yet what is there when the thinker seizes and there is no self? Is it a state of indifference, a state that is empty? Or is this emptiness not filled with the flame of creation? The flame of life and death? Does from this not arise passion and true change? A true mutation in human consciousness?

TobeTada 2017

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The Nature of Fear