Unless you’ve chosen a monastic life, you will encounter conflict, and you’ll need to navigate it. You don’t have to chose it; it will find you. Human needs clash whenever so many of us are blended into a society together. It is inevitable. Yet, so many of us — like Arjuna at the beginning of the Bhagavad Gita — somehow get the notion that we can renounce it, avoid it, and gesture at some sort of wisdom for doing so.
Read MoreFor those who have decided that the monastic life, even, lacks this sort of inevitable conflict: I’ve had several friends who had stints as monks of one sort or another (Zen, Hindu, Catholic) disabuse me of this opinion. A monastic order is a microcosm of society in some ways, no matter how they may try to steer it otherwise. And in any setting wherein two humans’ needs might disagree, there will be conflict.
Again, we see: you will have to fight.
Is it right for me to invisibly substitute “fight” for “conflict” here? Cannot conflict have peaceful and nonviolent dimensions? Of course it can. But even in the sense that you have to struggle to have your needs not canceled out by others, or even that you have to struggle to not act against your own spirit by some need to avoid conflict, there will be one or another fight, now or later. A martial arts tournament might have less (or even: no violence) than a heart neglecting itself, or one heart doing quiet wrongs to another.
Then there are those of us who do not have reservations about fighting, even in literal senses, when the correct circumstances trigger a need to do so. We know we’ll need to be prepared to fight one day, maybe even at a time we don’t chose. We train some sort of readiness for a fight like this; maybe martial arts classes, maybe speech and debate clubs for rhetorical struggles; maybe even shooting lessons for the potential of deadly encounters where people mean to take our very lives from us. The world has darknesses weaved into it, and even compassion for those wounded souls who sometimes multiply the world’s darkness does not translate to a willingness to let them harm us. So here again, we will fight.
Preparing your skills for conflict doesn’t also mean preparing your mind, per se; though some aspects of repetitive practice do yield some level of preparedness, for some aspects of the reality of a fight. Other aspects must be prepared in other ways. Some professional warriors (samurai, for example) had meditations wherein they would visualize battles and even their own death; and these same warriors also often had meditative preparations to clear their mind of anything and everything so that they could be accustomed to acting as a vessel empty of disturbances of the mind and perceptions. There are many ways to prepare for the fight, and they are all valuable in one or another sense.
But, in sum: how are you preparing for whatever fight is inevitable in your life? Or are you still under the delusion that there will be no fight, no struggle, and that a perfectly tranquil existence was somehow your right, or inheritance, when all of nature around you literally struggles for survival even in the most microscopic violences you’ll never even know to look for until you’re told how? Where even the plants vie with one another for nutrients as often as they collaborate in a system?
In this existence, perhaps it is best to be just as prepared for adversarial struggle of one kind or another as we are for cooperation and collaboration; may we have the courage to reach for the appropriate choice at the appropriate time, and the wisdom and discernment to identify that appropriate time.