Doorways of Support and Inspiration:
Peace

Conflict  Eric Alan

Excerpted from Wild Grace: Nature as a Spiritual Path (White Cloud Press, Ashland, OR, 2003).

 

Conflict has its handprint on everything. It’s as inherent in the natural life as breathing; it’s the key to the grand design. It’s not just the predator/prey dance, either: regardless of other species, every animal left alone against the elements finds conflict with the conditions of the planet that have made its existence possible. Winter storms, violent heat, shuddering earth, a disappearance of water—such things can make a creature seem to be at personal war, at times, with the very earth.

 

Even when there is no external conflict with other species or climatic conditions, there is struggle with members of the same species: a competition for mates, for food, for territory. And even beyond this is the conflict within: the struggles of bacteria and viruses and other tiny lives inside that a single body hosts, coincides with, or battles with on a level too microscopic for awareness to reach. Beyond even this, there is also the conflict with time itself—the force that moves through all, and ultimately conquers every life to which it has given rise.

 

Another conflict has been created by humans, between the essential nature of conflict, and our desire to find a life free of it. We have slowly removed ourselves from the immediacy of the food chain, to protect ourselves from the conflict of predator and prey. We find then that we still seem to need those battles, and turn against our own to find them, on streets and battlefields. We have reached to shelter ourselves from the elements—only to find that our remove from them creates a deeper conflict with our basic need to be connected to them. An emptiness of soul begins to develop inside our shelter—a conflict with ourselves.

 

Through medicine and other means of safety we have dedicated our narrow brilliance to removing the conflict against time and inner invaders. We are older, and in one view healthier, than ever before. And again, we find that the result is only a greater conflict between our species and the earth. Overburdened by our swelling presence, it fights back with new disease and difficulty.

 

The more we try to separate from each of the conflicts, the more we find new conflicts of inner soul, wondering what our purpose is, where we belong, who we are. This becomes a conflict so fundamental that it appears to be a crisis unprecedented in the history of earthly evolution. What other species has ever felt at a loss for its purpose? When every lowly fly knows what we have forgotten, how can it be seen as lowly?

 

Is it any wonder the peace on earth we’ve endlessly longed for has remained elusive? Peace on earth, defined as an absence of conflict, appears to have never existed. It seems to be fundamentally in conflict with the entire process of evolution. It’s in conflict with the nature of soul.

 

One reply to our peace prayers echoes through the great cathedral: the way to peace is in the acceptance of conflict. Peace is not an idyllic external circumstance; those don’t exist in nature. Peace is a calm inner way of being within the conflict at hand, whatever it may be. Being with it, fully, right here, right now.

 

The primary natural means of conflict resolution is simple: fight, until the physically dominant one prevails. When the fight is between species, the life giving life of sustenance battles, the fight is usually to the death. When the conflict is between members of the same species, for territory, food or mates, the fights are most frequently done with the minimal amount of necessary injury. There are exceptions—some monkeys, as well as lions, kill the cubs of their vanquished rivals after taking their mates—but intraspecies conflict in nature is often stylized, ritualized. Actual blows are frequently avoided by ritual displays of size and strength in which dominance is established; and injurious blows are a last escalation. There is no evolutionary advantage in having members of a species kill each other off; there are enough external challenges already.

 

The natural means of conflict resolution has often been called barbaric. Surely we have advanced beyond this, human reasoning runs. But consider the opposite perspective. Nature’s conflicts and fights are elegantly decided with only the strength of the individual; the weapon of the body itself. By this means, the potential damage of conflict remains limited, and the stronger, healthier life is always favored. This is evolutionary refinement, not brutality.

 

By inventing other weapons, we have destabilized nature’s graceful, delicate dance of conflict. We have vastly increased the amount of damage that an individual can do in a conflict. An individual with the right weapon can now ruin whole populations or ecosystems.

 

We can create ruin not just with intentional weapons, whether explosive, chemical or biological; also with weapons such as cars, chainsaws and oil drills. They, too, are lethal to other species and our own; and the collective damage is massive.  It’s a vast increase in barbarity.

 

Paradoxically, another trouble provides proof evolution is still working—albeit in a skewed way. Survival of the fittest now means the fittest weapons survive, rather than the fittest creatures. It’s as if our dangerous tools, from missiles to cars to computer viruses, have become dominant life forms with their own quest for continuance. This means our conflicts don’t select for the best and healthiest lives, or for the life of the planet. They select instead for the life of the weapons; for whomever happens to be holding them—which means money may be the most dangerous weapon of all, given its acquisitive power. Money, although of no value to nature, is perhaps the species currently finding the greatest evolutionary success.

 

Fortunately, it’s also true that we’ve evolved other means of resolving conflicts which are individually peaceful, creative and without obvious injury. It’s part of the unique dance of emotional intimacy humanity has developed. From meditative introspection to whispered loving speech to business mediation, our capacity for communication and understanding has increased immeasurably. Love, too, is an evolving species as effective as any in its quest for continuance. Look at all that is has survived so far. It can even transcend boundaries of species.

 

Note that nature has no laws, let alone lawyers. It does have ways of being which enforce themselves simply by evolving and existing. But nature’s ways are not laws, as we’ve defined laws, for laws can be broken—they’re rarely even written unless they already have been broken or likely will be. Nature’s ways, by contrast, just are. All creatures inherently live within them. Our laws are simply odd little conceptions, in comparison, and very narrow ones at that. They’re mere notions of currently socially acceptable behavior that shift wildly in the winds of ideas. Our laws do not exist in any landscape without us.

 

Human laws begin by serving the ones who make them—much more than they serve the ones ruled by them. (This too is different from nature, which serves itself holistically.) Then laws begin to evolve in their own right, like another weapon, another species. Laws begin to primarily serve themselves. They reproduce profusely in their search for continuance—laws begetting more and more laws until society chokes on their abundance. The courts, which started out as a means for conflict resolution, have instead become a means for making conflicts endless. A single dispute can now drag on for many agonizing years, even decades, where it would have been settled in the dust in twenty minutes, in so-called primitive times. Yes, we have forgotten what every fly knows.

 

Nature still offers the same simple answer to all of this: If conflict is unavoidable, put your weapons down, and fight. Naked. Right now. Let your conflicts and their resolutions be as stark and clear as the desert dunes.

 

Given our current context, though, we can’t return to the ways of the wilderness and find harmony with the human standard. Things have changed too much, even if it’s our own doing. In our modern circumstances, the situations of conflict we face daily are so shifted that our instinctive responses have become ineffective or inappropriate, as strong as they may still be. This is one of the most stressful conflicts of all. The slow development of instinct could not possibly keep pace with the fast-edit motions of modern change—leaving us with natural responses ill-equipped to deal with the surface world we ourselves have created. For example, male aggression is not a character flaw, but a wilderness instinct out of context, finding its distorted expression in predatory business practices, bar fights, rapes and wars; needing transformation into a more apt force.

 

Adapt or die, nature still says. Why should that message change now? Sudden changes of condition, from sweetness to harshness and back, have characterized the earthly eras of ice and fire and pristine green springtime. These conditions have never given benefit of exception from this to any chosen species, regardless of its abundance or intelligence. If what we must adapt to is, in part, ourselves, so be it. That is part of nature too.

 

Fortunately all our tools of physics and spirit also arise from nature. From meditation to mediation, these tools of transformation offer tremendous power in service to better awareness. They have their own evolution, within and beyond us. They offer such unprecedented assistance in our effort of adaptation that success seems in grasp, if we can evolve with them. Success will mean transformation of our relationship to conflict in a search for peace—a true peace which welcomes all the conflict and struggle we are ever graced with.

 

When we transform ourselves, the world itself will transform around us if it needs to. Our new ways will become instincts, over generations and millennia, passed down above and below the line of consciousness. There is nothing to worry about. We will either transform in ways which serve ourselves and the greater balance, in which case we will prosper on healthy ground; or we will not, in which case we will die and the ground will work on its own to transform, restore, and grow healthy once more. Nature does not appear worried by us: it has much more time than we do. It has much more life that just ours. It has not only survived, but lovingly mothered, much greater conflict. It appears at peace with that. So peace on earth is here.

 

 

Excerpted from Wild Grace: Nature as a Spiritual Path, a book by Eric Alan, published by White Cloud Press.

©2003 by Eric Alan. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the author and White Cloud Press. For more information on the book and the author, or to read further excerpts, visit www.wildgrace.org.