Esteemed Reader: July 2011

by Jason Stern, June 28, 2011

“Come inside. It’s dinnertime!” I called to my son, who’s four, from the front porch.

“No!” Came the definitive reply. He was riding laps around the house on his bicycle.

“It’s time to stop playing,” I hollered after him. “Come inside and eat!” My voice got louder as he disappeared around the corner for the hundredth time.

Standing on the porch alone, the sound of his no and my ineffectual response echoed in my ears. A couple laps and variations on the demand later he happily came in to eat, but I found myself savoring his clear and strong denial.

Hearing the child’s unequivocal no, I recognized how often I am lamely fighting against more surreptitious no’s in myself. Mine are more wily than the four-year-olds, hiding behind justifications, eluding confrontation, and furtively getting their way, in spite of all the reasoning, wrangling, and manipulation I can muster.

We’ve all found ourselves in comical arguments with kids which distill to “Yes!” “No!” “Yes!” “No!” We hear the same arguments in ourselves and among fellow adults. We even see it playing out on the world stage, on which little boys with big guns seek to enforce their yesses on their opponents’ nos.

This is how human beings functioning like children resolve every conflict—through the lens of domination and submission. If all that can be seen are two forces at work, for all intents and purposes, this unending conflict is the only option.

An ancient aphorism puts it this way: “Every stick has two ends.”

The tendency is to grab the end of the stick that is pleasant and desirable, and beat adversaries over the head with the other end. But the inevitable result is that the unpleasant end of stick swings around and whacks the wielder when he least expects it. Clinging to the pleasant yields automatic suffering in every case.

Examples of this abound both personally and on a global scale. Staying up late drinking wine yields a headache in the morning; imperial domination of weaker people makes them want to destroy the oppressor; trying to break habits makes them return stronger. Isn’t it odd that as consciousness of the inevitable catastrophes associated with carbon emissions and climate change grows, the whole world burns ever more dirty fuel?

But reconciling a conflict does not mean choosing the unpleasant like some kind of martyr. This is a perverse reaction to the natural impulse to seek pleasure, like the pre-enlightened Buddha’s renunciate buddies, who accused the Buddha of being a pushover for renouncing austerities and seeking the Middle Way.

Instead, reconciling opposites is a matter of holding the yes and no in dynamic tension within the sphere of awareness. It is in this effort that the force that motivates the two forces is fused through the friction of their collision. It is a balancing of the stick precisely in the middle.

Since we tend to gravitate toward the pleasant it does take a little compensatory effort to allow attention to go to the unpleasant. As the harmonizing force is called the Holy Reconciling, so too is the negative force—the no—called Holy Denying. In this sense we are invited to honor and respect that which resists us—not simply overcome it.

There is a lesson in both old and new sciences that every event is comprised not of two but three forces. The third goes by various names. In atomic physics it is called the neutron; in Christianity it’s the Holy Ghost; in Vedanta it’s Sattva; in Taoism it’s the Tao; in Buddhism it’s the Dharma; in the Fourth Way it’s the Holy Reconciling. Essentially it’s a third force that allows the yes and the no to be transcended and reconciled to effect peace.

Like the hand that holds down the fly while the other pulls the zipper up, the denying force needs to be our friend. There is only a conflict when we find ourselves identified with one or another side. When we take sides in any argument it is a clear sign that we have lost sight of the larger picture. We are missing the tripartite dynamic in our refusal to make friends with no.

“Blessed are the Peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God,” resounds the beatitude uttered on the mountain 2,000 years ago. The peacemakers are those who are able to channel the material of the Force Reconciling. Because they are established in the position of the impartial observer in themselves, they can be a channel for that peacemaking impulse in the world.