By Bill Cottringer

It pays to know the enemy - not least because at some time you may have the opportunity to turn him into a friend.  ~Margaret Thatcher.

     The real enemy is not a person, group, country, or thing that we can easily see and fight against, but rather a compelling, persistent, and invisible illusion behind the curtain, well out of sight. A pervasive conflict, which hides the real enemy from our awareness, is the conflict we all feel between “us” and the rest of life. This all begins at our birth into this world with our own unique identity.

     What drives and sustains this bigger conflict are the two smaller ones of us vs. others and us vs. ourselves, as we experience firsthand while growing from a baby to a child to an adult. And what drives all these conflicts is the real enemy, not the obvious players in the wars such as the Israelis vs. Palestinians, Republicans vs. Democrats, one candidate vs. the opponent, criminals vs. their victims, sports teams, knowledge vs. ignorance, or even health vs. sickness.

     So, who or what is the real enemy? The obscure is usually difficult to see, but the obvious, being the best hiding place for an important truth, is always the last thing to see.  This clever, invisible enemy is so much part of us, that trying to see it is much like our eyes trying to see themselves, our tongues trying to lick themselves or our toes trying to itch themselves. Not possible no matter how hard we try!  The curtain starts to go up to reveal our real enemy, when we become humble enough to realize all that we know may not be so or start to understand that things aren’t always as they first appear. Some say God made illusions look real and the real as illusions. No wonder the confusion!

     Such is the case of seeing through life’s biggest illusions of separation and time. Of course, this discovery can dissolve our three main conflicts.  For the simplest explanation, the sense of a self being separate from everything else started back in the Garden of Eden’s original “sin” story. Or, according to Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, the survival of the fittest doctrine defined all three of the conflicts that hold us all hostage within the two illusions of separation and time. Who knows, maybe water reflections, animals, night turning into day, other Neanderthals posing dangers to cave dwellers, or visible motion in flight, all worked together to help shape this sense of separate self and passage of time for the self to move around in and experience life.

     Never-the-less, we are stuck with having this sense of being separate from everything else we interact with in time and place, defining who we are. And having a distinct sense of our selves being separated from the rest of life and the strong notion of time passing from the future to the present to the past, are as much a reality to us as anything else is. The only hint of evidence that separation and time are not illusions comes from experiencing their opposites. The opposite of separation is the belonging and unity we all yearn for but can’t reach, at least until we begin to pierce the veil of time. Only then do we start noticing all the connections and interdependence of things, as a part of the whole oneness everything belongs to. I see this as the “Grand Gestalt.” This is the place of where and when nothing gets turned into something and back to nothing and then something again, ad infinitum, in the eternal now moment that had no beginning or has no ending. Quite a mouthful to swallow, but the after-taste is phenomenal.

     Now about the illusion of time. This particular illusion seems to be perpetuated by expectations of the future, experiences in the present, and memories of the past, all of which we assume are very real, because they are the lion’s share of our existence. However, scientists can’t really measure time as a distinct object, other than by using the circular time-measuring devices of hour glasses, clocks, watches or calendars, invented for that purpose. Besides this reality check, we have all experienced moments of the eternal now of timelessness when time seems to stop. Of course, the final resting spot of a sense of time movement may be at the end point of the speed of light. At least Eistein thought so, with his theory of relativity, even if it turned out to be only half the big picture from Quantum physics research.

     There seem to be two main stages of our lives going on. First, we want to take things apart to understand them better. This splitting process results in an invented dualistic world of opposites and apparent enemies, intimately involved in the three main conflicts in life as discussed above. These two stages of our lives are similar to the two levels of knowledge, where we first know something in our heads to talk about, and then understand in our bones well enough to teach others. Or like problem-solving where you have to really understand the real problem before seeing and affecting a solution.

     Next, a time seems to come when we get the urge to reconcile these opposites by putting them back together again to work better together than they did when they were alone and apart, understanding that these opposite enemies are really just different sides to the same coin. Another way of saying this is that in our evolutionary process, we are shifting away from Darwin’s Survival of the fittest, win-lose competitive model of thinking (the selfish gene) to one where cooperation, collaboration and compromise collectively lead to win-win outcomes, and enemies become friends (the cooperation gene).  Of course, the middle ground always remains available where we can have our cake and eat it too, by competing against ourselves and cooperating with others.

Illusion and wisdom combined are the charm of life and art. ~Joseph Joubert