After September 11th, 2001, peace appears as an issue in many countries of the world, when it may previously have been taken for granted.

 

We all want peace, but how can we achieve it? 

 

Human kind has a long history of lack of peace between tribes, religious groups, nations, collection of nations. Individually we experience varying difficulties creating and maintaining peace in our personal relations, and within our own experience.

 

In creating peace, hope is not sufficient; conversations are crucial; but what kinds of conversations, and with whom? Are there some conversations we can’t manage?

 

We can explore the language forms, the emotions and embodied experiences of the solution oriented approach familiar to us in our clinical work and ask how they might be relevant to the process of creating peace.

 

Preamble

I am a fraud. In the process of preparing this talk, I have had conflicts with several people. In offering this to you, I can only hope that there may be some small response that can make some small difference ... perhaps 1 millionth of one percent ... that there may be something that results, perhaps for me also.

 

Also, since choosing the topic, Humberto Maturana and Werner Erhard have arrived into the conversation, also Gandhi and Terrance, not to mention me, and now you.

 

What is peace?

Peace is more than the absence of war or conflict. 

It is an emotion of acceptance of what is so, with no conflict, ambivalence or discord. It is an emotion of stillness, of concordance.

It is not tolerance, which Maturana defines as a putting off of resentment – “You have damaged me in the past, and I won’t take revenge YET”. 

It is not a state of a truce, which is still an expression of conflict being avoided or managed.

Peace is a distinct emotion – an emotion of acceptance.

Peace can be experienced directly, or created in language, and embodied.

 

Exercise: recall a personal experience of peace.

 

The solution orientation reminds us that language shapes our experience and relieves us from being a passive slave to describing what has already happened. If we don’t like what is happening to us, we can look to conversations to change our experience. If we don’t want the emotion we find ourselves in, we can ask ourself what emotion we would prefer, and explore the generation of that preferred emotion. We can also enrol the body in recalling, remembering, re-experiencing how our body has felt when we have experienced peace in the past, and this can revitalise the soil which can grow and nurture our experience of peace.

 

Exercise: recall a situation where you created an experience of peace, and how you did that.

 

We know how to achieve this, and yet we don’t always act on our knowledge. How can this be so? Is it like the saint who said he wanted salvation, but not yet, or like the smoker who knows they need to stop smoking, and decides to stop tomorrow?

 

When I was a teenager, I was impressed by a book that I didn’t read called “The Anatomy of Peace” which stated that peace is more than an absence of war. Peace involves people becoming different.

 

What is missing for us to experience peace.?

Some missing elements are 

the possibility of peace, 

the willingness to create peace, 

the willingness to get past our past pain and resentments, to move beyond being right – to step down from the high moral ground, and dare to converse with our previous enemy, 

the skills to create peace.

 

The possibility of peace

Is peace possible? If there has never been a persistent peace in the past, how could there possibly be a persistent peace in the future?

 

Werner Erhard was part of establishing The Hunger Project some years ago. This was a project that had as its mission to create the possibility of ending world hunger by the year 2000, and assumed that until the possibility of ending hunger was created, it would not be possible. The was no attempt to feed people, but solely to create the possibility of ending world hunger, with the assumption that once ending something as horrendous as world hunger became possible, then natural processes would happen and world hunger would be dealt with. 2000 has passed, and hunger persists. Does this mean that the hunger project was just wishful thinking by idealists?

 

Exercise: recall some situation where you know that peace is not possible for you.

 

The willingness to create peace.

We have all witnessed the terrible cost of war – directly or indirectly, emotionally or culturally, and the recent New York experience brought it home to Americans, perhaps for the first time, what many others had experienced in their own countries. How can we bear the loss of those 6,000 lives, and yet that many people die monthly in Iraq as a result of US sanctions after the Gulf War, and 10 times that number of innocent lives were lost in Beirut. Statistics have the horrible effect of reducing individuals to numbers, and so coldly obscuring the tidal wave of suffering of family members after the loss.

 

Any thinking feeling human being will have to be repulsed and sickened by the result of any war, of whatever cause, when the experience is actually experienced personally, not merely as some conceptual result of some cause, however righteous, happening to people “out there”.

 

Maturana & Varella claim “... we have only the world that we bring forth with others, and only love helps to bring it forth. ...”

 

In Richard Attenborough’s film - Gandhi, a Hindu man burst in on Gandhi’s fasting saying that some Muslims had killed his 12 year old son, and he was so enraged that he sought out and killed a 12 year old Muslim boy and he couldn’t let Gandhi die with his sins on his conscience. Gandhi told him that there was a way out. He should seek out a 12 year old Muslim boy whose parents had been killed by Hindus, and raise him as his own son. But he should raise him as a Muslim.

 

Exercise: ask yourself what it costs you to not create peace in your specific situation - what would be needed for you to create a willingness to create peace in that situation?

 

 

Disturbing possibilities from Terrance and Werner Erhard.

These two quotes are the most discomforting and generative that I have come across.

 

Terrance:  “Because I am human, there is nothing that any human being can do that is totally foreign to me.”

 

Werner Erhard’s Definition of responsibility:

Responsibility starts with the willingness to experience yourSelf as cause.

It starts with the willingness to have the experience of yourSelf as cause in the matter.

Responsibility is not burden, fault, praise, blame, credit, shame, or guilt. All these include judgements and evaluations of good and bad, right and wrong, or better and worse. They are not responsibility. They are derived from a ground of being in which Self is considered to be a thing or an object rather than context.

Responsibility starts with the willingness to deal with a situation from and with the point of view, whether at the moment realised or not, that you are the source of what you are, what you do, and what you have. This point of view extends to include even what is done to you and ultimately what another does to another.

Ultimately, responsibility is a context - a context of Self as source - for the content, i.e., for what is.

 

How does this relate to peace?

If the US blames terrorist extremists for the New York disaster, or if the terrorists blame the US, and each ignores its own part in generating the situation, there is a risk of mutual retaliation and further escalation of the groundswell of resentment which preceded the tragedy.

 

If the US or the terrorists were to blame themselves, it will generate self criticism and guilt which will hardly help the healing either.

 

If the US and / or the terrorists were to begin with the acceptance that what happened happened, and that the horrendous nature of what happened does not take from the fact that it happened, then the possibility of asking about what might be useful, helpful, relevant to healing appears for the first time. If the past could be acknowledged adequately, the future may have an opportunity to appear as more than a variation on the theme of the unacceptable past.

 

We can, any of us, at any moment in time, ask ourselves what we are doing or not doing that might influence directly or indirectly the movement in our personal experience, our personal relationships, our community, our country, the world away from or towards peace, we can begin to see what we might be able to contribute. Maturana says that we cannot be held responsible for where we are, but on recognising that we are where we are, we are totally responsible for where we go from this point. I am discomforted by this perspective but I like it. I had and have a similar response to Terrence’s comment and Erhard’s.

 

Shifting from fixing what’s wrong to exploring what’s missing.

War is generated in a mood of hate, or mutual negation. When we hate another, we negate their legitimacy, and so, killing them becomes possible, or even a duty. They are wrong, and need to be fixed or corrected, or if necessary exterminated. The problem escalates when each side of the conflict knows that they are right, that the other side is defective, and so needing to be fixed. The hate is mutual. The negation is mutual. The lack of legitimacy is mutual.

 

Whether either or both are right or not, whether god is on one or the other or both sides, this won’t lead to peace. The right / wrong conversation will never lead to peace. I am reminded of a conflictual couple being told by Erickson that each was 80% right and 20% wrong, and that each should explain to the other the 20% that they were wrong. I am not sure who an Erickson might be in a waring situation but Stoltenberg may have come close several years ago at the beginning of what promised to be a useful beginning of a peace process in the Middle East, and although it didn’t persist, the process points to something. As a Scandinavian diplomat, Stoltenberg arranged a secret meeting between the two mutually negating negotiators in an isolated villa in the mountains of Scandinavia. He filled them full of gluvine, sat them in front of a fire, and they each discovered their mutual hate, and their shared love of their own country and people, and fell into each others’ arms weeping at their shared human experience. The peace process had begun.

 

Exercise: with your situation, what’s missing such that peace could happen?

 

War and peace – complainants and customers.

We can look at the terrorists and the US as complainants. The terrorists have a problem – the US. The US has a problem – the terrorists. Anyone whose clinical practice include couples will have felt the frustration of being in the presence of two complainants, and the inevitable escalation which follows unless we intervene to change the mood and direction of the conversation.

 

In my first marriage, I had a major problem – my first wife, and she had a matching major problem – me. Each knew with a certainty which was beyond question that the individual position was rock solid and right. When we had to attend counselling before the divorce, the unfortunate counsellor found herself in a war zone. I am ashamed, looking back, at my arrogant blindness, and although I have no regrets about the outcome, I can’t help wishing that this might have been achieve with more dignity and less verbal violence.

 

In working with couples who argue, I have observed, at least often enough, that each individual knows they are right, the other is wrong, and that for the problem to be resolved, the other needs to change, and the self has no contribution to make, and even if it has, why should it, since it should be the other. A colleague said years ago that in her personal experience, she’d notices that she could be right or in relationship, but not both.

 

I have also recurrently and predictably experienced the relief which follows acknowledging the legitimacy of each complainant’s perspective. This can easily be created by “standing in their shoes” and just as easily each can be complimented genuinely for doing as well as they have, given their experience. It is such a joy, relief, and benefit to then ask this genuinely suffering, legitimate individual about what they already have done, or might be willing to do themselves to lessen their own suffering, and bring some tiny movements towards peace from their position.

 

Exercise: imagine that the other in your conflict is acknowledging the legitimacy of your experience, giving you a compliment, and then ask yourself what is the smallest and easiest action you have already begun to do or that you might be willing to do in the future?

 

 

Inner Peace – world peace.

 

Dear friends around the world:

 

The events of this day cause every thinking person to stop their daily lives, whatever is going on in them, and to ponder deeply the larger questions of life. We search again for not only the meaning of life, but the purpose of our individual and collective experience as we have created it--and we look earnestly for ways in which we might recreate ourselves anew as a human species, so that we will never treat each other this way again.

 

The hour has come for us to demonstrate at the highest level our most extraordinary thought about Who We Really Are.

 

There are two possible responses to what has occurred today. The first comes from love, the second from fear. If we come from fear we may panic and do things--as individuals and as nations--that could only cause further damage. If we come from love we will find refuge and strength, even as we provide it to others. This is the moment of your ministry. This is the time of teaching. What you teach at this time, through your every word and action right now, will remain as indelible lessons in the hearts and minds of those whose lives you touch, both now, and for years to come.

 

We will set the course for tomorrow, today. At this hour. In this moment. Let us seek not to pinpoint blame, but to pinpoint cause. Unless we take this time to look at the cause of our experience, we will never remove ourselves from the experiences it creates. Instead, we will forever live in fear of retribution from those within the human family who feel aggrieved, and, likewise, seek retribution from them.

 

To us [Buddhist thinkers] the reasons are clear. We have not learned the most basic human lessons. We have not remembered the most basic human truths. We have not understood the most basic spiritual wisdom. In short, we have not been listening to God, and because we have not, we watch ourselves do ungodly things.

 

The message we hear from all sources of truth is clear: We are all one. That is a message the human race has largely ignored. Forgetting this truth is the only cause of hatred and war, and the way to remember is simple:

 

Love, [in] this and every moment.

 

If we could love even those who have attacked us, and seek to understand why they have done so, what then would be our response? Yet if we meet negativity with negativity, rage with rage, attack with attack, what then will be the outcome?

 

These are the questions that are placed before the human race today. They are questions that we have failed to answer for thousands of years.

 

Failure to answer them now could eliminate the need to answer them at all.

 

If we want the beauty of the world that we have co-created to be experienced by our children and our children's children, we will have to become spiritual activists right here, right now, and cause that to happen.

 

We must choose to be a cause in the matter.

 

So, talk with God today. Ask God for help, for counsel and advice, for insight and for strength and for inner peace and for deep wisdom.

 

Ask God on this day to show us how to show up in the world in a way that will cause the world itself to change. And join all those people around the world who are praying right now, adding your Light to the Light that dispels all fear.

 

That is the challenge that is placed before every thinking person today. Today the human soul asks the question: What can I do to preserve the beauty and the wonder of our world and to eliminate the anger and hatred--and the disparity that inevitably causes it—in that part of the world which I touch?

 

Please seek to answer that question today, with all the magnificence that is You. What can you do TODAY...[at] this very moment? A central teaching in most spiritual traditions is: What you wish to experience, provide for another.

 

Look to see, now, what it is you wish to experience--in your own life, and in the world. Then see if there is another for whom you may be the source of that.

 

If you wish to experience peace, provide peace for another. If you wish to know that you are safe, cause [others] to know that they are safe.

 

If you wish to better understand seemingly incomprehensible things, help another to better understand.

 

If you wish to heal your own sadness or anger, seek to heal the sadness or anger of another.

Those others are waiting for you now. They are looking to you for guidance, for help, for courage, for strength, for understanding, and for assurance at this hour. Most of all, they are looking to you for love.

 

My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.

 

Dalai Lama

 

 

James Wolfensohn, the Australian born President of the World Bank.

wrote in The Melbourne Age on 15th October, 2001.

 

The horrifying events of September 11 have made this a time of reflection on how to make the world a better and safer place. The international community has already moved strongly to do so by confronting terrorism directly and increasing security., and working to avert global recession - seeking, international responses to international problems.

 

But we must go one step further. The greatest long-term challenge for the world community in building a better world is that of fighting poverty and promoting inclusion. This is even more imperative now when we know that, because of the terrorist attacks, growth in developing countries will falter, pushing millions more into poverty and causing tens of thousands of children to die from malnutrition, disease and deprivation.

 

Poverty in itself does not directly lead to conflict, let alone to terrorism. The vast majority of poor people worldwide devote their energy to the day-in, day-out struggle to secure income, food and opportunities for their children.

 

Yet we know that exclusion can breed violent conflict. Civil wars have often resulted not so much from ethnic diversity, the usual scapegoat, as from a mix of factors, of which, it must be recognised, poverty is a central ingredient. In turn, conflict-ridden countries become havens for terrorists.

 

Our common goal must be to eradicate poverty, to promote inclusion and social justice, to bring the marginalised into the mainstream. 

 

We can do this through steps that help prevent conflicts. Equally important, we can help peace set down roots in societies just emerging from conflict. Success may take years of hard work, but the alternative is a never-ending cycle of violence.

 

Central to conflict prevention and peace-building must be strategies for promoting social cohesion and inclusion. Inclusion means ensuring that all have opportunities for gainful employment, and that societies avoid wide income inequalities that can threaten social stability.

 

But inclusion goes well beyond incomes. It also means seeing that poor people have access to basic services. It means enabling people to participate in key decisions that affect their lives.

 

But can we really make progress against poverty? Recent history tells us that we can. After increasing steadily for 200 years, the number of people living in poverty worldwide started to fall 15 or 20 years ago.

 

... And ... act internationally on global issues. This includes confronting terrorism and internationalised crime, but also combating communicable diseases such as AIDS and malaria, building an equitable global trading system, safeguarding financial stability to prevent deep and sudden crises, and safeguarding the natural resources and environment on which so many poor people depend for their livelihoods.

 

And all this we must do with developing countries in the driving seat, designing their own programs and making their own choices. But we must also bring in the private sector, civil society, faith-based groups, and international and national donors.

 

Ours must be a global coalition, to fight terrorism, yes, but also to fight poverty.

 

Get real!!!

A Danish therapist friend, Grethe Bruun, spoke of us all having our own Bin Laden our own Stoltenberg, and the value of honouring what is happening, to get these parts better integrated or accepted as part of you. Of course there will alway be some kind of "inner civil war”, or “the Greek chorus” alive in all of us … but I believe in that our psychic forces meet, confront, melt, blend ... and if there is a profound meeting your heart is involved as well as your gut-feelings and only in the meeting a melting between love and hate you can create harmony. She concluded by quoting the wife of a Danish author was asked if she ever had been thinking of having a divorce and she replied : "No never, but I often considered murder !"

 

Maturana writes with Varella on page 244 of The Tree of Knowledge [Shambala 1988 Boston] “Knowledge of knowledge compels ... us to adopt an attitude of permanent vigilance against the temptation of certainty. ... If we want to coexist with the other person, we must see that his certainty – however undesirable it may seem to us – is as legitimate and valid as our own ... A conflict is always a mutual negation. ... [and] can go away only if we move to another domain where coexistence takes place. ... This is the biological foundation of social phenomena: without love, without acceptance of others living beside us, there is no social process and, therefore, no humanness. ... we are not moralising, we are not preaching love. We are only revealing the fact that, biologically, without love, without acceptance of others, there is no social phenomenon. ... we have only the world that we bring forth with others, and only love helps to bring it forth. ... We affirm that at the core of all the troubles we face today is our very ignorance of knowing. ... as our actions – all without exception – help bring forth and validate the world wherein we become what we become with others, in that process of bringing forth a world. This is a misunderstanding that only knowledge of knowledge can correct.”

 

To emphasise again that “... we have only the world that we bring forth with others, and only love helps to bring it forth.” Compels us to ask the?”question “What world do we wish to bring forth”