The Nature of Conflict

Why is it that we seek pleasure and avoid pain? It is very difficult to look at pain or conflict in a dispassionate manner. We a caught up in the details and emotions of what we believe is the source of a conflict. It can be a person or a circumstance that triggers the emotional stress. We live in expectation of our projected desires. We maintain a reality in our mind that is the projection of an ideal. Are we the source of our pain or is it the other, the one who has not complied with our image of the ideal? We are searching for conformity in a world that seldom conforms to our desires. The truth may lie in the dual nature of self and the projection of that duality as pleasure and pain. Is there a difference between pain and pleasure? Is the mere absence of pleasure, pain and vice versa? Is it possible for one to see the relationship that exist between the two emotional states? Can one realize that they are not in reality two distinct conditions of the mind, but one? While these questions are rhetorical, they should enable one to stop for a moment and really look at thoughts movement as the motivations of the self that is seeking and avoiding. To seek is to avoid, and to avoid is to seek. Pain is pleasure and pleasure is pain, they are one in the same. One creates the psychological impetus for the other. To take it one step further, can one realize that this dynamic is the result of the mind that is seeking the image of its self in what is. It is the result of the desire for conformity in the perception of what is.

This is duality, and it is the nature of all conflict. It begins and ends with the motivations of the self that is seeking. One must see through the position and opposition dynamic of thought as the separated self that is the root of all duality as conflict. If one can observe this activity as the observed then there will be a dissipation of the self as the conflict of the moment. It is the full realization of the self as that conflict. When one realizes that one is the conflict and not separate from it something quite extraordinary may happen. One may see the illusion of self and the self created in that conflict. The outcome of which is the timelessness of the absolute moment that is the dissipation of all save the true self.