Internal Conflict --a necessary, natural and life-giving diet

conflict...a necessary diet

What if all of the "shit" that each of us has gone through was necessary and inevitable and also life-giving?

And what if the primary question for each of us is not just to diagnose the anatomy of each conflicted chapter and then contextualize it as the patterns appear but to "learn" from and to "grow" from the emotional and psychic "welts" that remain?
That may sound simplistically cliche.

And yet....

The basic notions that life was never ever going to be easy, that nature is full of "snakes in the grass" and that in whatever situation we enter there is always and inevitably and even predictably going to be any number and kind of "head winds" that we are going to confront seems so obvious and yet poses such a riddle and profound ennui for many.

The riddle might be contained in the Pauline insight:  I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. (Romans 7: 15-16) And, what if, rather than reduce my ‘conflicted self to sin and evil, as carnal and lustful, perhaps the conflict is inherent, natural and even ethically necessary and ultimately good, as opposed to evil?

 What if, WE are the conflict that we bring into each encounter.

And that kernel is the one we seem most blind to realize, to accept and to reconcile.

Conflicted inherently, we both project the tentacles of tension into the environment and also evoke the conflicts and tensions within each of the others present.
Much of this reciprocal projection takes place under the radar of the unconscious. Consequently, rarely if ever does the resulting collision, really collusion, become the acceptable agenda for open discussion and relationship-building.
Instead, there are some well-established protocols, politically correct, and non-invasive "dance-steps" that appear. Intuitive signals put up our defences, point us to detach, or even to withdraw if, after minimal or even moderate attempts to
moderate the rumblings in the gut, we come to "believe" that compatibility or professional reconciliation is either impossible or not worth fighting for.
Of course, our needs and circumstances will extend the time and the energy we put into achieving some kind of tolerable co-existence.

All of this sketch grows out of the "greenhouse" of our childhood where the levels of conflict, while ubiquitous, vary in details and psychic impact in each situation and with each individual.

The "weight" of the burden of our early life shifts depending on our new relationships, both with others and the new insights we learn about how we were a part of the incubator of our family of origin. Self-consciousness, not narcissism, is not a finite destination but rather a life-long pilgrimage. Being true to oneself, also is not an itinerary or a program; nor is it a medical diagnosis or prescription. Wqe work assiduously to "find" paths and places, classrooms and courses, careers and clusters of associates, both as enactments of our social 'hard wiring' and our continual need to learn and grow and develop, congruent with the calendar and our courage and cosmic connection.

Questions of skills and talents, supported or restrained by coaches and teachers (and possibly parents), and books, lectures, homilies, mentors and even heroes, like intersecting movies are forming within our senses and our cognition and our emotional and psychic life, and transforming our "conception" of our place, meaning and purpose.

Sometimes (often?) reaching beyond minimalism, and the motive to “fit” into the expectations of others, we discover our limits, our failures and our finitude in the belief that we can and will only discover who we really are by bumping up against those walls of a situation demanding competencies and strengths we did not  know we even had. Whether those limits and failures are defined as "sins" and/or new insights or some combination of both comes out of our personal, family and culture's inculcation and our integration of those impulses.

Any image of a deity, including relevant texts, shamans, elders and dogmas, evolves from the impact of both the energies we encounter and our filtering of those energies,  an interactive river of both consciousness and unconsciousness.
Our choices, decisions, acts and avoidances in dynamic relationship with the acts, decisions avoidances of others in our circles comprise more of the same cataract of consciousness and its unconsciousness.

Attempting to "snap-shot" any moment, or having to "pause" to absorb the impact of trauma tends to offer a glimpse of the anatomy of who we are, or seem. Pauses and reflections also have the potential to connect us to the pain and abuse in  other moments in other lives and places in some imperfect comparison.

Personal identities, and the manner and mask we "present" to the world depend on many variables including the conflicting motives of self-protection and magnanimity that swirl within, again, as always, in various degrees depending on our perceptions and attitudes of the moment and our place in it.

The dynamism of our personal and private selves, itself a swirling whirlpool of recurring eddies, is engaged in a parallel gestalt of eddies and whirlpools outside of us in concentric circles that both encircle us and impose constrictions for us to challenge. This reciprocal process makes for a release of some many different energies, opinions, emotions, ideologies, faith threads, fiscal, physical and spiritual probes and responses.

And all if these impulses throb within our mind, body, relationships and imaginations, again replicating some of the more complex inter-and inner-relationships in nature.

Relationships and perceptions and attitudes to God, to authority, to our responsibilities to ourselves our community and the universe are all developing and expressing themselves, and through expressions, we "see" who we are and others also believe they "see" us. And of course, they “evaluate” what they believe to be the “truth” of who we are, just as we “evaluate” and assess the ‘truth’ of who they are, including whether or not their mask is pretense, defence, secure, authentic or whatever.

In fact, however, the public/private aspects of our "performance" just like the public/private aspects of everyone else are both presented and grasped only minimally, partially and through a fog generated by all.

Ironically, believing we must be "data-driven, basing our interpretations on empirical evidence, we fail to acknowledge how little we "see" or "know" or "understand" and continually make observations, build attitudes and join causes that themselves are little more than apparitions. Our consent to join those mirages, however, remain integral to our perceptions of who we are/must be/are expected to be and do not warrant dismissal from others unless the experiences threaten or abuse us.

All of our attempts to seek, to find and to impose order on any situation are implicitly incomplete, based on limited and obscure data and perceptions and therefore tenuous and imperfect and flawed.

Our protest to the contrary, that we are dealing with absolute truth, is fraught with fear and levels of hubris and assertiveness and even aggression that are likely unwarranted from any objective perspective.

It matters not the source of absolutes given that all declarations of “absolute” truth are, by definition, human, conflicted, partial, imperfect and tenuous.
We have, however, been "schooled" in the empirical, measureable and dependable data of our senses, repeatable and predictable under the rubrics of theory. And that ‘schooling’ is, by definition, only a partial and incomplete and foggy notion of the whole of reality, and the depth of truth.

And, at the same time as we underdo the discipline of our schooling, coaching, mentoring and evaluations, we risk losing, or at least forgetting, avoiding, resisting and defying our counter-vailing truth:

that we (and they) do not know the whole or the incontrovertible fullness of the truth.

There is, however,  nothing wrong with "not knowing"! The danger and threat arises when we deny/defy/avoid/fail to acknowledge that we do not know.

Incompleteness, uncertainty, ambiguity, confusion and humility, rather than being weaknesses, are essential truths and thereby strengths.

Our refusal to acknowledge the resource, not only the ethics and morality, of our uncertainty and tentative quality of all of our knowledge threatens to hoist us in our own petard.

Messers Putin, Xi Jin Ping, Biden, Macron, Johnson, Zalensky.... are you reading?

My own internal tensions and blindnesses, too late in many cases, have shaped much of my story. Reconciling with the story and the pain I have caused, and have been subjected to, are and remain life-enhancing experiences, although not always, or even often, pleasureable or certainly without deep pain and shame.

Nor is that reconciliation and learning and acknowledging, like sweet deserts, the first choice when envisioning a schedule for a day or week.

Encompassing discomfort and unrest and the uncertainty of the conflict of always wondering about our own authenticity, however, deepens our connection with the universal, human truth/reality of critical self-examination and the tensions of conflict inside and surrounding each of us.....and that river continues to flow inside and outside interminably.

And Thankfully!