Awakening Through Conflict
~ Pele. Nov 2023
My soul spoke this morning clear and loud: We are here for awakening, not for mere survival. Going through this life, protected as much as possible, in a small cultural pocket of wonderful friends is simply not enough!
We're just not here to survive this life, she said. We are here to wake up! To wake up within the flesh-and-skin-bag called "me" and within others, who are not truly separate. We are here to wake up as Love, wake up as Empowerment, wake up as Freedom. Love, Freedom, and Empowerment are not empty slogans. These are the closest words to paradoxically describe together the essence that words can never define.
All the difficulties in life come not to crush us, but to wake us up. Every angst or sorrow is an opportunity for awakening, a call for initiation into a deeper essence of life.
But complaining about the actions of others is so tempting... it is so tempting to justify ourselves and blame others, to point a finger at them, to condemn them. Even to hate them. Will we agree to pay attention to this bittersweetness that makes us shuffle inside the same familiar self, feel so righteous and wrong the others?
In the depths of the hatred of “others” hides self-hatred in camouflage. It is hard to notice, but it's there. One who does not hate oneself is not capable of hating others., simply because there is no hatred in them. Just as one who does not love themselves cannot love others, because they have no love.
An awakened person may oppose the actions of others, they may, under certain circumstances even fight against them, but such warfare will not stem from hatred and will have a different frequency than an unconscious reactive fight. It will have a frequency of compassion and a call for mutual awakening in any wielding of the sword.
The ego seeks justification for its dubious existence by creating an irreconcilable gap between it and the other. Justification creates separateness, "I am right, and you are wrong.” This sense of justification makes the ego feel important and, therefore —validated in its existence. Even at the cost of suffering, our ego prefers to feel right, because being right validates its very ephemeral existence. As a result, we fortify ourselves in the fortress of self-righteousness against the "other,” a fortress with high walls and a moat, which creates a gap of difference between us and them. A gap that affirms our separate egoic identity, while deep inside, we tremble with the fear of knowing how fragile, transient, and relative its existence is.
But the soul is not transient, and therefore it does not play the same game at all. It calls us to wake up from the never-ending nightmare of the victim-perpetrator dynamics that humanity is so obsessed with, where everyone claims to be so right all the time, and the cycle of violence is perpetual.
We play the victim-perpetrator dynamics with everyone. It doesn't really matter who the "other" is. It can be someone we love but with whom we're having a tough argument or someone who's really trying to harm us. (Yes, there are such people who try to harm others. We should not ignore it, because Love is not blind, and does not try to beautify reality. On the contrary - Love is open-eyed to the depth of what reality is, while hate is the one that is blind, especially towards oneself. To live as Love in the sense I'm talking about is to wake up to the deep nature of reality and see and feel it all. I know I'm here to wake up in this way, deeper and deeper every day of my life. Are you too?)
So yes, there are indeed people who are so wounded that they seek to hurt and harm others. But, just like us, they too tell themselves some story that justifies their actions. They believe that they protect something extremely important, and therefore, they are allowed, or even commanded to harm others whom they deem a threat to their belief. They tell themselves that they are acting in the name of religion, morality, or some other lofty idea that justifies harming others. But just like us, in their own eyes, they are right.
We all end up telling ourselves the same old story: "They're the bad guys, and we're the good ones." But it's so ridiculous, because even the "bad guys" think exactly the same and have their own narrative that portrays them as the victims.
If it weren't so sad, it could be very funny: the nature of any conflict is that each side is sure that they are right and the others are wrong. The human drama is indeed a divine comedy. But truly it is mostly a tragedy because we are blind. We do not see that a conflict is not a war. A conflict is an invitation for growth.
Conflict does not equal war. War is nothing but a desperate attempt to resolve a conflict by subduing and overpowering the other. But conflict in its pureness is an invitation for growth. I try to remind myself of this every time I find myself in a small conflict with my beloved, or in a big conflict with people who decided that I am their enemy. My ego wants to fight and win over, or surrender in despair, be a victim, and complain about it, but then my soul whispers from within that this is just another invitation for growth, an invitation to initiate myself into a new stage in life that is so needed.
Conflict is nothing but an invitation for growth into a new space, into a new dimension where the conflict can dissipate, not by subjugating one of the parties. So how? This is an enigma, a Koan to be faced with each time in a new way. My Zen teacher, Roshi Bernie Glasman, the founder of the Zen-Peacemakers order, used to say that “Peacemaking is a Koan.” There is no reasonable way to solve a Koan. A Koan is solved when you have “solved” yourself.
Conflict is an invitation for growth because, in the dimension in which the conflict was created, we cannot grasp how could it ever be resolved. Something needs to transform in us so that we can see things from a different perspective. We need to add a dimension to our reality and thus find a solution that we could never see before. But who wants to change? Changing is not exactly what the ego desires because it means leaving the known narrative that held us in our story and identity so far. It means “dying" in a certain sense in order to be reborn. But the death of our story scares the shit out of us, so instead, we go to war… and kill or die, or we kill a precious relationship, just not to let our story die.
Instead of growing, we often try to defend our egos, and in doing so, we truly die. In order to truly live, one must agree to die over and over again as part of the initiation processes that our soul lays in front of us. As the ancient sages said: "Do you wish that you not die? Die (an internal death) until you won’t die."
So, every conflict is an invitation from our soul to grow. Life is full of opportunities like that and initiations that the soul puts before us. These are all opportunities for awakening. Will we agree to wake up, or will we continue to wade through the murky dynamic of Victim-Perpetrator-Saviour forever?
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These things burn in me.
As I am doing the work with myself over and over again, I wish to also help as many people as possible to initiate themselves to the new levels that their own soul is calling them to reach.
I invite you to join me at the BLACK BUTTERFLY seminar that I will hold with my team for a small group of selected individuals in Cyprus in December 2023. It is a seminar that is entirely intended for “caterpillars” who are already ready to undergo metamorphosis, own their shadows, die an internal death, hatch, and spread their miraculous dark and powerful wings of magic.
* Because of the situation in the Middle East, we are happy to offer a special discount or installment plan to people from the Middle East. If you are one of them — talk to us.
