Smoking pot again?

To achieve that perfect balance. Conflicts usually seem to be directed towards altering the balance, the status-quo towards one side or the other. A do-or-die situation for those waging the conflict on either side. The warriors rush headlong into battle, believing in only the resolution of the situation to their satisfaction. And at some point, for these warriors, the lines separating their beliefs, desires and ambitions get blurred. And when one side wins, it’s unclear as to whether the cost at which the resolution was earned was worth waging the battle in the first place.

Given this innate blurring and confusion that disallows us from achieving any lasting clarity, it would be foolhardy for us to confuse the warriors waging conflicts with believers of a particular cause. It’s clear that the warriors desire conflict resolution in their favour. But is it clear that they all desire the conflict resolution in their favour for the same reasons? Perhaps conflicts in the physical space are all results of the inability to resolve them in our own mental arenas. And the implicit, even sub-conscious desire, to see those mental conflicts resolved in a more tangible, physical space. Perhaps a space containing another human being. Perhaps several of them. Heck – all of them in my case!

Underneath that cloud of muddled thought which dooms us to muddled paths through life, one could perhaps discover the clarity of purpose. Some would claim to you that they’ve already achieved it. I would tell you to indulge those people as my kindergarten and primary teachers indulged me by listening to my increasingly fantastic (and with generous application of embellishments) stories and accounts of things that took place in my little life until then. It’s not like they’re all lying consciously. They’ve probably convinced themselves that they’re speaking the truth. But conviction should most definitely not be confused with truth.

If conviction is not necessarily truth, then is clarity the same as truth? Perhaps. But clarity is a personal realization. Clarity is truth if truth is also a personal realization. For that to be possible, an all encompassing truth that is above our individual realizations must not really exist then. But who knows that for sure? And on that basis, even truth is unclear. Perhaps our situation is truly analogous to the poem about the six blind men who are trying to feel their way around an elephant, and each of them ends up mentally modeling the elephant based on the part they’ve touched and felt but never seen. That truth is then only a personal realization.

But when that realization is blurred with conviction, it becomes an individual reality. And when that reality is further pondered upon and it then becomes apparent that it is not to our liking, then that conviction is used to transform that reality by means of a conflict. In that context, if there really exists an all-encompassing truth such as the elephant of which we are only privy to a miniscule part, which we cannot even see and therefore struggle to define, then it is no longer valid to compare it to the elephant as an analogy. Instead, it’s now more like a Swiss-knife. It still has many parts. But each part is a separate instrument. And we all use a different instrument to achieve our goals through conflict resolution. The truth or parts of it then become our weapons of choice. You could call it “Applied Truth”, if you will. Some probably label those instruments (not the Swiss-knife itself) as god. Still others call it the way, or the common good, or redemption. They then proceed to use these instruments or parts of the same Knife to resolve mutual conflicts with each other.

"Die motherf$%&er!"