Multiperspectivity

Over fifty years ago, when I was still in graduate school, I learned how to approach and carry big questions with multiple working hypotheses.  Ambiguity is a good thing in poetry, as multivalent speech conveys complex awareness, emotions, imaginations.  Archetypes evoke multiple interpretations, meanings.  Archibald MacLeish's "Ars Poetica" demonstrates: 

... For all the history of grief

An empty doorway and a maple leaf . ...

Thich Nhat Hanh popularized the word Interbeing: '"To be" is to inter-be.  We cannot just be by ourselves alone.  We have to inter-be with every other thing", he said in "Peace is Every Step."  

I find Interbeing congruent with my ongoing research on how a generative social field is created by several human beings consciously, and what happens when such a field is in play.  

Charles Eisenstein published an essay "The Field of Peace" on 28 February.  He begins with "let us pray for peace" and expands:  "A true prayer for peace cannot be only "Let this war end."  It must be nothing less than "Let all war end."  It would extend the sanctions against Russia to non-compliance with all militarism, including our own."   He coaches the reader to create and hold a "field of compassion in our political discourse", saying "we are in a new age of humanity -- call it an age of compassion, of reunion, of interbeing" where our peace within can indeed hasten world peace.  https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/p/the-field-of-peace?s=r 

A few weeks later, Eisenstein held an on-line Peace Building conversation.  A few excerpts: 

...When you wage a war against the self by exiling the parts you condemn as bad, then inevitably, even without any mystical causality, conflict will erupt around you.

Peace is the capacity to hold the parts that we are uncomfortable with.

In this moment where there is a war going on it is more important than ever to practice. Even if you don’t directly talk to the leaders of warring countries, in those moments when you have a choice to be peace or to be war, to demonize or dehumanize someone, or to hold them in the fullness of humanity, you can choose the latter and generate a field of peace. 

And if enough of us do that at every opportunity we get, then it is going to change the climate so that there will be a negotiated settlement. And I believe that that will happen. 

The two sides are going to make peace. And you won’t be able to prove that it was because of the peaceful thing that you did. But some part of you will know that you are part of it. Because you are declaring what the world is. Because you are declaring what is possible when you have that difficult moment and you hold peace with someone when it is hard, when the old habit was to “let them have it” and go to war against them, but instead you hold peace.  It is not the same as capitulating. It is how you choose to see them. When you do that, you are declaring what is possible for human beings to do.  

My friends, please do not be cynical. The time has come for our long-dormant naivete to bear fruit. Join me in my intention for today, to find the place within that is ready to be humbled by the enormity of implausible healing and peace-making to flower all over the world.