This is http://www.essayz.com/a9207231.htm Previous-Essay <== This-Essay ==> Following-Essay Click HERE on this line to find essays via Your-Key-Words. {Most frequent wordstarts of each essay will be put here.} ========================================================== %TRANSCEND DETACH CONFLICT VIOLENT QUESTIONS ISSUES 920723 We need to understand what is likely to be involved in resolving long standing patterns of violence and conflict. It may not be what we expect! Often we are stuck in compulsive preoccupations with a particular set/pattern of: conflicts, questions, and issues. We are often equally stuck with old images of how we can win the conflicts, answer the questions, and settle the issues. We are preoccupied with OUR winning, OUR answers, and OUR settlement positions. OUR paradigm often compulsively involves us in OUR language, words, concepts, and friends TO THE EXCLUSION OF COMPLIMENTARY OTHER languages, words, concepts and friends. Getting un-stuck and extracting ourselves from our long standing patterns of violence and conflict is likely to involve something other than additional and/or more sophisticated and powerful: techniques, technologies, experts, systems, and allies. The key to getting un-stuck and transcending our long standing patterns of violence and conflict is likely to involve transcending and letting go of some of the very techniques, technologies, experts, systems, and allies which we have regarded as essential to our success. We need to let go of old questions and old answers to old questions; and emotionally detach from them so that we can be free to openly and honestly consider the possibilities of asking totally new questions which transcend the presuppositions, assumptions and prejudices of the old. We need to be free to think about, talk to, and listen to new questions and new responses to new questions by new friends, allies and experts who are complimentary to our old ones. Our exclusivities have often been our worst enemies. We need to let go of old dishonest friends and old dishonest relationships involving old friends; and emotionally detach from them so that we can be free to openly and honestly consider the possibilities of of being intimate with totally new friends in open and honest relationships which transcend the old collusive games of mutual self deception, addictions, and codependencies which have lead us in disintegrative ways. We may not need to totally give up old friends and friendships; but we do need to give up compulsive and exclusive preoccupations which revolve around and focus upon them in blinding ways. We need to let go of our blind commitments to old positions which we and others have taken, and which have defined our conflicts, resentments, distrusts, and violence; so that we may be free to cooperate in efforts to find WIN-WIN ways to GET TO YES in new relationships of mutual trust and risk which are balanced and healthy. We are not free of the old unless we are free to consider new alternatives to dysfunctional old patterns. We need to let go of compulsive preoccupations with: 1. Being in control, and who is in control. 2. Perfection and imperfections in us and others. 3. Flaws, mistakes, blunders, blame, and shame. 4. Personal judgments and rejections. 5. Fixations upon personal fixes. 6. Manipulative technologies and systems. 7. Laws, rules, regulations, morality, immorality. 8. Being first, best, on top, the most. 9. Winning and losing in battles and competition. 10. Keeping score in endless personal contests. Such compulsive preoccupations imprison us so long as we are preoccupied with the foci of their attention in either positive or negative ways; or in pride of how disdainful we are of people who are preoccupied with them in ways different from how we are preoccupied with them. We need to let go of and become emotionally free to view in a transcendent way our old wounds, hurts, animosities and resentments; so that we can be free to focus our attention, creativity and energies upon cooperatively building a new future through new friendships and new alliances. Instead of being committed to winning the most we can for ourselves at other people's expense, we need to explore ways in which we can cooperate with those whom we have been trying to defeat; so as to increase what we can win together for us together. Instead of limiting ourselves to our language and its associated limited set of words, concepts and ideas; we need to become free to be informed of, by and with---other complimentary languages which can facilitate transcendent considerations of new challenges and opportunities in our changing environment. If we do not change, we will most likely fail to respond wisely to changing environmental conditions. We need to let go of the old images which have been the focus of compulsively exclusive dreams, visions and desires; so we can be free to discover/invent additional new images which will widen the scope of alternatives from which to choose new dreams, visions and desires to work to fulfill. We may not have to give up the old images which are familiar; but we will have to give up the patterns of exclusivity which have often been associated with them. The patterns of exclusivity imprison us in double-binds. (c) 2005 by Paul A. Smith in (On Being Yourself, Whole and Healthy) ==========================================================