No Battle Lines

Recently one of my students posted the thought that all of life was a battle between good and evil, light and dark, higher nature and lower nature. I invited him into a discussion that explored his presumption and responded with what follows:

The warrior culture mythos, that we must do battle with the forces of evil, warrants inspection! Certainly it is true that we learn by being defeated by greater and greater forces, but ultimately that defeat is not seen as a loss - rather it is a surrendering. The dynamic (mostly in Western cultures) of fighting "for" and "against" outside forces is ego madness. But the spiritual journey toward unity (with others and with the Divine) is one that eschews the ego-driven desire for conquest and possession and engages in what the 14th century mystic Meister Eckhart called "development by subtraction" - by letting go of the self-referring, self-centered, self-aggrandizement. 

Typically mystics divide adulthood into two phases: the building phase (upward and outward search for success, trophies, accolades and external validation) and the giving phase (where all the goods and lessons are given away, freely). In this second half of adulthood, which admittedly much of Western culture has not gotten to, we learn that we are not our titles, our accomplishments and bullet points on our resume, but we come to understand the power of stating simply that "I am" - not that I am this or that, not that I am defined by my results - but simply that I am because of my very existence. 

At that point, when we no longer feel a need to prove ourselves to the Divine, or to others, we finally begin to fall into the great "I Am" which is Divinity itself. And what all the mystics seem to agree on is that the Divine connection is an internal journey - that is, the Divine is actually within each one of us. That is not a discovery that will ever happen in battle, fighting for some principle of right versus wrong. At this level of awareness, there is no right or wrong, there is only is-ness and the present moment; there is no judgment, but only acceptance.

This path of development is a long, dusty trail for many people, but it does not have to be a battle road.