' Who are you defending ? '...

In your arguments, debates, disagreements and disputes with your spouse, family member, friend, boss, or someone from another nationality, religion, or philosophy, who are you defending? Have you really asked this question? Have you really looked?

Thoughts arise involuntarily and spontaneously in response to other thoughts. During the heat of conflict, emotions such as anger and anxiety arise involuntarily and spontaneously in conjunction with those thoughts. The energy behind these emotions creates an unconscious contraction around the thoughts. This creates the sense of a separate self invested in the thoughts. In being right, you make the other wrong. By weakening the “other,” you strengthen the “me.”

When awareness notices this mental and emotional frenzy while it is happening, the illusion of self is exposed. What is being revealed is that, beyond that mental and emotional energy, there is no “me.” It is the energy of attack and defend that makes it feel as if there is a separate self there.

The imagined, thought-based self is constantly creating and defining itself by defending its thoughts and attacking the others, and comparing and contrasting itself to the others. Yet that separate self exists only in relation to the other. Both “self” and “other” are thoughts. They are images in the mind. The notion of “self” arises only when the notion of “other” arises. In this seeing, conflict is seen to be illusory. In reality, there is no one and nothing to defend.



-Kiloby, Scott. Reflections of the One Life: Daily Pointers to Enlightenment