On Battles

I bring you a battle today - mostly because it is a theme I need to revisit this month for my own purposes. War, violence, domination, winning - all part of the human psychic cocktail. Over the years I have found the odd occasion to fight a battle, and have found that my pacifist upbringing had left me with few tools to engage profitably in battle. Those childhood battles amongst siblings and on the playground left me with more of a distaste for people than a toolkit for survival - and I am still surprised when I come across bullying in any form.

I watched Ghandi on DVD the other day, and chuckled to be reminded that he used guilt as a lever to manage his followers in India via his hunger strikes. I smiled: so much like parenting ("So, when you leave the bath running, it's because you think it's OK for me to spend yet another hour working to pay for the water you've wasted?"). This works when you have a bedrock of love, as Ghandi did in his followers, or as I have in my family.

But in those times when the battle you approach is entirely hostile, entirely about needing to win, what do the mysteries say?

Pinkola Estes celebrates wildness - the knowing and the timing of the wild thing that knows when to stalk, knows when to wait, knows when to spring. Instinct. But this is too simple and little understood. Ultimately the behaviour of the wild thing is based on the desirable outcome: survival, advantage. The actions of the wild hunter / warrior is not chaotic or random. It is discrete, considered, strategised. It is based on interrogations into the nature and habits of its opponent, the lie of the land (read the Art of War), tallying of resources.

Casteneda speaks of remaining unavailable, invisible to your opponent, even as you stalk him. He speaks of storing power so that it can be used to devastating effect when you need to. He speaks of moving an individual via his circle of influence, never directly. He speaks of alertness, avoiding assumptions, applying force to a lever.

Battles in my adult life have shown me this: I am the only one who wants to fight with gentlemen's rules, so they likely won't work for me (and they haven't). I have never fought to dominate, my battles are generally about protecting my family, my home, my turf. And most soldiers who have gone to war leaving families behind know that there is nothing more worthy fighting for. Where stakes are high, the art of battle is the most important skill to have mastered. The last, most precious advantage I will not gain until my children are off my hands: having nothing to lose.

Strange reality

"The world is a mystery. This, what you're looking at, is not all there is to it. There is much more to the world, so much more, in fact, that it is endless. So when you are trying to figure it out, all you're really doing is trying to make the world familiar."

Don Juan words from Casteneda's "Journey to Ixlan".

I have this problem all the time - trying to encourage people to consider that what I describe in my experience has reality, context and relevance. That old buzz-word, 'paradigm' comes into play. It's as hard as getting a 6-year-old to understand why she can't have that pink toy in the supermarket today.

It's like this: the reality of each of us is unique. In those places where we agree to share an idea about reality, we seem to have common ground. But we are talking only "seems" here. This leads us into the dangerous territory of feeling safe with making assumptions about the world and about one-another. Having fewer expectations about the world, people, life, days lead to fewer surprises. We remain more open to grasping a situation in its totality rather than just those things about it which seem to correspond with our reality of the moment.

If I experience something that you have not experienced, this does not make my reality wrong, simply strange. And it is in the lands of strange that adventure, growth and evolution lie. Our fear of the unknown keeps us safely tucked behind closed doors, perhaps reading books, probably believing that we know how the world works. TV, the internet, books - these are repositories of the realities of others - a pity it would be to not excavate your own. It is only through going in amongst the unknown that we can gain new knowledge.

This takes some courage. The conformative pressure of commonly accepted reality has some devastating tools for the ego that attempts to describe something new.

What are your unusual experiences? What is the strange reality you walk in?