(This is Part 3 of a series. Go back to Part 2.)
But there's a deeper level, too, much more fundamental than anything discussed so far in this article. And that is that the real battle is going on in the minds of each of us. When we indulge in Manichean thinking we are engaging in the very kind of thinking which has helped to bring this world to its current perilous state.
Yes, there is a kind of war being fought between good and evil. But it's not being waged out there somewhere. It's being "fought" in the human mind and the human heart. When we use black-and-white thinking—locating an enemy somewhere and demonizing them while basking in our own self-righteousness—we are helping to perpetuate one of the primary sources of "evil" in the world. It's the thinking itself that is doing it, magnified to governmental and national scale.
Do we want to do something fundamentally helpful about the world out there? It starts with our own minds, by catching ourselves when we're using Manichean thinking, separating the world into blacks and whiles.
When we observe ourselves thinking that way, there's no need to reject it, no need to make war on it. That would just be even more of the same. Instead, the very observation itself begins the healing. It's like noticing that our fist is clenched: it automatically unclenches.
Each time we really observe ourselves utilizing Manichean thinking—"they're with the forces of darkness, we're with the forces of light"—our tendency to buy into such simplistic stories becomes flimsier. And to that extent the world moves towards healing, towards wholeness.
It's no use waiting for the politicians when we have our own versions of what they do. Ultimately, the world cannot move towards love through any amount of warring, whether internal or external. Only love can bring about love, and that begins with us, in our own internal world.
Another way of talking about this is that when two sides have separated each other into light and dark—each side imagining itself as "the light" —a greater light is needed, a light bright enough and warm enough to melt those frozen internal and external positions. That light can be greater understanding and love, or it can be a common, greater goal.
What would happen, for instance, if we woke up enough to see that the planet really is endangered and then embarked, worldwide, on a crash program to save our lovely planet? My guess is that the various "good" and "evil" actors would put aside their differences for the common goal, the greater light.
But we needn't wait for that. We can start today, right here, by bringing more love—a greater light—to the various rejected and unwanted and "dark" parts of our own minds, not to buy into them, not to act them out, but simply to befriend them with love and acceptance. Then the healing of the world begins.
—jim sloman, 11.3.06
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