Friday, July 15, 2016

On dealing with conflicts and making peace possible.


The ability to manage and handle perceived or real conflict requires patience and to understand multiple perceptions. Conflicts could be simply be due to ego clashes or power tussle or tensions of interest or identity conflicts. But towards the end of the day , conflicts are also about multiple perceptions based on multiple locations of power. Hence , managing conflicts is also managing perceptions. To manage perceptions, it is often important to detach and then rise above the immediate. And when you rise above the immediate and get over the temptations to use might to settle a conflict, one moves in to a higher level of leadership. When one moves above the rest in understanding multiple layers and locations of perceptions, one also acquires communicative imagination that helps to manage conflicts. We all have temptations to react. But a bit more patience with a bit of detachment can do wonders. And ability to say a simple 'sorry' and ability to 'forgive and forget' make our journeys light, happy and peaceful. People tend to fight over small issues or little egos.
Nations fight over resources, identity and zest to wield more power. Conflicts are often destructive ; it destroys the creative possibilities of self as well as the people. Conflicts often happen due to issues of ideals, identity or incentives. Those who transform the negative energies of internal conflicts within the self or external conflicts beyond the self in to positive forces of human will and energy become great leaders. They embrace peace first within them. Those who are at peace within them only can spread and initiate peace beyond themselves to the larger society. That is why Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Mandela and Mother Theresa continue to spread peace beyond their life. And that is why they were different from Hitler or Stalin. Those ideologies that preach and practices conflict as a means to capture power in the name of proletariat or the Prophet can't change history or people in the long run
Peace prevails.Peace surpasses all knowledge. Peace is a choice. Love is also a choice. Peace and love within us make us patient and beautiful. Joy is an expression of peace within. Hence Salam and Shalom are ideals people aspire.
Peace within and beyond is possible. Peace can be the spark for human creativity.
Paradox of peace is that it is the war within and beyond that make peace divine. Life is an experiment between war and peace. Instinctively human beings get the temptations to fight but imaginatively human beings have the will to transform conflicts in to streams of creativity. We are all dealing with sristi, sthithi or samhara in our every day life.
Peace be with all of you.

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