What Does It Mean To Live In Peace, Without Any Conflict?
When I talk about Living Without Conflict, I’m really talking about something that is very deep. The idea of living in peace, can be taken on many levels from the banal to the profound. If you really get what it means, then you will have a framework for living that will ensure you grow spiritually and live with ever greater integrity and happiness.
Usually people take it to mean saying yes to everyone, keeping the peace and not saying boo to a goose. This is the conventional view of living in peace. The problem is that it seems like everyone else is getting what they want and you’re missing out. Or maybe you just feel something so deeply that you can’t keep quiet.
So what happens is that it seems that to be selfless is saintly, but means doing without. And can often feel like condoning a wrong or allowing suffering by omission. Consequently, people feel they should keep quiet, but at the same time they are impelled to act.
Thus they have a conflict internally whether or not they ever raise the issue with anyone else.
Furthermore, whenever you want something, a career, a certain clothes size, a relationship or whatever and you don’t have it you’re in conflict.
To live without conflict is about resolving these conflicts. You see, in life you always will resolve these conflicts eventually. But life sucks, while you are in the middle of the battle. Every minute spent fighting a war is costly. The Iraq conflict cost $100,000 per minute. Now while your battles might not cost that much, what are they costing you in your relationships, in lost opportunities and in what you could otherwise be doing?
The key to living in peace, then is to get over these conflicts as quickly as possible. With practice and focused attention comes awareness. In time you can get so good at this that you resolve the conflict before anything bad happens. By the time you get into any unpleasant arguments or sticky situations, it’s because you weren’t aware of the conflict.
Let’s put this in a different way to illustrate the point. There was been a lot of media attention, here in England, about a case named Baby P. It’s a classic case, that unfortunately repeats itself over and over again, of a child neglected and persistently physically abused, ending in their death.
As the story came out, it became clear that there were plenty of warning signs that Social Workers had to have prevented the tragedy. There was always a problem there for 17 months. Had the system worked as it is supposed to, it would have been resolved before the Child was too badly weakened. But because no-one acted the problem culminated in the child’s death.
Now of course, our everyday problems and stresses aren’t at this level of seriousness. However the big problems we face. The big arguments that we have. The major hassles in our life’s. These are all because we either ignored the early warning signals or we weren’t sensitive enough to notice them.
It’s easy in today’s world to get so busy and distracted that you can’t pay attention to everything. Just like the Social Workers were so overloaded with cases and understaffed that they let Baby P suffer, we all make ourselves suffer stressful situations.
photo credit: h.koppdelaney
To live without conflict is really about reaching a level of inner peace, that is so fulfilling and enjoyable that any form of tension or conflict is uncomfortable.
So then, we have to look at, where does this tension and conflict come from?
It all comes about because we live in this huge, vast universe filled with possibilities. Yet to operate with any level of sanity, we have to make sense of it all through a very narrow range of beliefs, experience and perspectives. Let’s say for the sake of a simple explanation that our operating system, our mental model of the world is 2/10’s correct. That would mean 80% of the time, we’re wrong and 20% we are correct in our thinking and understanding of the world.
It’s this 80% of false ideas that we believe are true that cause our stress. We experience the stress when we encounter a situation in the world that demonstrates the falsity of what we believe. So the problem was always there, it’s just that we were able to act as if it were true. Now someone or something has pointed out the error in our thoughts and so we have a conflict. The conflict is between what we believe and the reality.
photo credit: Svadilfari
Let’s use a classic example. Religious doctrine has an explanation for how our universe operates and came about. Then along come people like Gallileo, Copernicus and Darwin with information that contradicted dogma. Now there is a conflict between what the Church believed and what evidence proves is true. So like any reasonable, stressed person, the church decided to blame the messenger for causing the stress and persecuted anyone who disagreed with their view of things.
Really when you feel stressed or angry. The problem is not the person or the situation. The anger and tension come about because you were comfortable with your model of the world. And now someone or something has come along and pointed out that you were misperceiving the world. Because change is unsettling and frightening, you are afraid and so angry at the person that made you make the change.
As in all cases, eventually the church found a way to align the two views and assimiliate the new facts into the old thought system. And hence the conflict was overcome. And so too will you, with your stresses.
You really don’t have a choice about whether you can ever avoid conflict, growth and stress. It’s a fundamental part of the human experience. However, you do have a choice about how deeply and for how long they affect you.
To live without conflict is to take a path that makes life an exciting adventure. And it does this by minimising all the stuff that pressures and de-presses us. To do this takes a commitment to live responsibly and with integrity. More than that it takes the urge to love yourself enough that you won’t settle for anything that steals your happiness from you
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photo credit: denniskatinas
Don’t settle for a mediocre experience of life, when just a few steps further is the path to bliss.
