day 13

Last night I watched the double episode of Charmed from season 7 where the sisters agree to help the avatars to create 'Utopia' a world beyond the duality of good and evil. It's a world hard to imagine but the conceptualisation of it in that episode was a bit flawed I think. People's mindsets were changed and they were happy and did not feel difficult emotions and those that persisted in troubled states that led to conflict were eliminated by the avatars, the guardians of this created Utopia. Since grief and mourning had been eliminated those that disappeared were not missed much as they were said to have moved on to a better place.

I think the biggest flaw in this idea of Utopia was the perception of conflict as violent and something that needed to be eliminated to keep peace. Peace in the Chinese I-Ching is described by the hexagram of earth being above that of heaven and denotes a state where heaven is on earth. The opposite of peace in the I-Ching is not conflict but standstill where the two hexagrams are reversed and so heaven moves away from earth. The Utopia the avatars wanted was stagnant. It was built on repression and the loss of free will and even though it felt light and happy it was in its essence oppressive.

It troubles me that so often conflict and violence are used interchangeably by the media. Conflict simply is a sign that something needs to change. It is a call to transformation. Conflict need not turn violent but often does because we have not been taught the skills to resolve conflict within ourselves, in our relationships and in our world. We would not fear conflict and suppress it if we saw it as useful.  If anything is Utopia for me it would be a state where conflict and feeling were dealt with compassionately. 

Inner Utopia would perhaps be akin to a state of enlightenment. Daniel Brown and Jack Engler in Mindfulness Meditation write that enlightened practitioners are not without conflict they simply are less defensive in the awareness of inner conflict and their reactivity to it. Internally in all of us there are states and times of no conflict but I would not want that as a permanent state of being. Inner conflict no matter how difficult makes me feel alive. 

Yes, I have a positive bias towards conflict. It has been the driving force in me to change and grow. It's made my relationships richer and more dynamic. Of course my thinking might be flawed too and I look forward to it being challenged and finding ways to grow in a permanent conflict free state.

Today is day thirteen of my experiment. I have missed writing on four days so far and the quality of the writing has been inconsistent. I am sad and sometimes self-critica; about this but I am accepting that my body is more sensitive to the haze than many others and being compassionate towards myself, spacing out my activities and giving myself more downtime. Today is a sunday and my main conflict is wanting to stay quiet and write or doing something with my husband.