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.