As we come together in lightworker projects – and really form together in our soul groups, I think – we operate as teams and sometimes hit it off and sometimes don’t. And when we don’t hit it off, some people are looking at how the circumstances can be overcome and others are just wondering how to live with conflict.
One thing I’m noticing in having conversations with people is a certain line of reasoning which I’ve tried out for myself and can’t make work. It may be just me and it may not.
Some people try to surmount conflict by loving the other and then they find that isn’t working and give up. For me to move from conflict to love is, quite frankly, challenging. I need an intermediate step and that intermediate step is being neutral.
If I can’t love the person I’m in conflict with, I tend to beat myself up – or more properly my ego does. The chatter in my head does, what sociologists call “the generalized other,” the voice-over, the monkey on my back.
But being neutral I can do. And being neutral, just as much as loving, is still coming from the heart, the center. The Divine is loving, to be sure. But the Divine is also neutral. Just being with another, just observing, neither leaning this way or that, neither preferring nor avoiding, but just being with, without anything added or taken away.
If loving feels like jumping over Everest to me when I’m out of sorts, being neutral returns me to my center, which is the heart, is it not? That center allows the love to arise in me. It’s not the final destination. But trying to love while in conflict is like the proverbial full tea cup. Only in the empty tea cup can love arise. Only the empty tea cup can be filled. And that empty tea cup is me abiding in the center. in neutrality.
The center is a mystical place. It isn’t like any other place that I know of. It’s infinitely penetrable. It opens up to infinite possibilities. It’s the portal of portals, so to speak, if such a thing can be. And abiding in that center is the ultimate practice for me. It may be just my bias. But I think it no accident that God located the heart in the center. Even the amoeba has its nucleus located in the center, the Earth, the galaxy, and so on.
For me that’s a clue to the nature of existence. What we seek is to be found in the center. Yes, the periphery is as much God as the center but God exists more profoundly in the center, somehow, just based on the way things were set up, I think. The ancient texts say that in the lotus of the heart exists the soul, the spark of God. And I think that that action of God’s to locate the heart in the center is reflected in every other arrangement of any weight or substance that has ever been made.
So for me it’s perhaps the highest practice that I can initiate, as opposed to the highest result that God can bestow (which would be love) to abide in the center. And it just may prove the antidote to when we as lightworkers find ourselves in conflict. Return to the center and abide there in neutrality is the way I plan to approach differences, disagreements and conflict.