World of Strife

  There is all kinds of conflict going on in the world today, and I do wonder what is a good strategy to deal with conflict. I have come to a certain observation in myself that conflict doesn't really come from two or more people. It is always coming from the thoughts and how one interacts with them. To give a simple example which I had recalled in the study group tonight: if I see someone coming toward me and I am reminded of a similar person who might have bullied me in the past, I am no longer interacting with that person in the moment. The strife comes from what I do to that person internally: the kinds of labels and attributes I assign to him or her. And more importantly, all this attribution belongs to thought. It's not something that has awareness or consciousness. Knowing this, I may start to let go of engaging in a struggle with that thought.
    Is it possible to know that the disturbing thought has no awareness? I think about how one of our Fashis(Venerable) has often used the example of a puppet. If you dress up a puppet in all the goriest accoutrements, you will be afraid of it, but it's only inanimate. In order for me to truly fear the puppet, I must believe it has its own self-organizing awareness and existence. Otherwise, the puppet is inanimate, and there is no literal life in it. Is there life in anything we see, feel, hear? Of course there is life there, but when I think of someone, that thinking is not alive or aware. Yet most of the time, I treat the thought as though it were alive and aware and become frightened by my very own thought.
    What I can tell is that whatever I experience about a person is based on a whole lot of aggregated filtering. I pile meaning upon meaning, without ever really touching the other person in any significant way. But if I am aware that the thought is not aware, what happens is that I am no longer struggling. Try this then: whenever you feel discomfort with someone, just realize that the comfort is simply your thought about that person. It is never that person. It's a trace of what we experienced in the past, now come back to link to the present moment of the person. When I interact with the memory, I am really interacting with something that is not alive, and can't even respond to me.  Yet, that is often what happens: one treats the memory as an actual living person with whom one can converse and respond. In fact, that memory refers to nothing that is alive today. So why should I be overly upset with the memory? It's only tangentially related to what is happening now, almost by a sort of coincidence.
     To go back to the topic, can strife be overcome through this view? I think it can be, but it takes a lot of practice. It takes practice to stop connecting one's feeling with another person, and to see that it is a reaction to a memory that has already past.