Learning to Be at Peace with Differences

My Way or the High Way

People get very ugly around election time. The natural polarizations in our societies get magnified. The drama of win/lose is in the air. People are insisting: “My way is the right way.”

How Do We Find Common Ground?
My sense is that the drive to be right is an urge to create safety, a predictable world where we can feel at home, and a way to try to create peace. With six billion points of view in the world, this strategy is unlikely to succeed. If people hold such opposing views how is common ground to be found?

Consciousness Evolves–A Useful Analysis of Conflict
Harrison Owen in The Practice of Peace writes about the evolution of consciousness and how this creates conflicts between individuals, nations and cultures. People are not all the same. Some kinds of personalities tend to drive us crazy. Recent scholarship in this area (Ken Wilber, Don Beck)  has begun to explore how awareness (consciousness) evolves. Some people tend to linger at one level for their entire lives; other people move on through the cycle.

The Ancients Knew a Thing or Two
Knowledge of this cycle is not new. It was known by the ancients as The Great Chain of Being. All of us start out as babies and our awareness is at the level of the Body. As we grow we develop language and mental capacities and learn to think and reason. This is the level of Mind. The majority of the world moves on to the level of Intellect. Here we become absorbed in making judgments about what is right and wrong and with making analyses about how to fix things we find wrong. This is the level of the ego and is known as Intellect. The fourth level is Soul, a time when the previous levels are integrated. A person finds his rightful place in the world as a responsible cosmic citizen. The last level, rarely attained, is called Spirit, when an individual, not constrained by time or place has peak experiences like Being in the Zone.

Can’t We All Just Get Along?
Individuals separated by two or more levels have real problems getting along with each other. We bitch and argue. We have different political parties and religious differences. Yet we have to live in one nation, share families and work spaces. We even have to elect a president together and determine the future course of a nation together.

Connecting at the Level of the Heart

Owen, whose book I reviewed recently, is not the be all and end all of anything. But his thinking does point to a helpful way of being with each. Trying to make someone be different than they are is utterly futile. What is far more successful is to listen deeply to someone who is different than you and to connect to them as a human being who seeks to love and be loved. When we see others in this way, we can accord them the deepest kind of dignity and respect: we accept them exactly the way they are and the way they are not. Interestingly from this place, fruitful inquiry into what all parties want, can begin.

We do not have to accept their ideas or their actions. We only have to accept their humanity. It is a place to start. God knows, in this place of discord and fear, we have to start somewhere.

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Question of Inquiry:

1. Where have you been successful and unsuccessful in getting along with people who are different from you?