Live the Question

Dr. Martin Luther King said, “let no man drag you so low as to hate him,” because he understood that hatred of another person was just a reflection of deep feelings of worthlessness and suffering.

Artwork by Chloé Valdary

Think of a group of people you perceive as a symbol, whether for good or for bad. 

Do you have your answer? 

Ok great. 

Hold that thought.

This quest is one of many dripped in a spaced way in Theory of Enchantment’s consumer and business facing products. There are many quests and if you receive this quest on day 1, you’ll get it again on day 4, and again on day 7, in a way that is micro dosed which, over time, transforms the person answering the question. How?

The person who answers this and other questions like it regularly, on a daily basis, begins to be comfortable seeing the parts of herself she would otherwise not regularly admit or like to see, and she begins to become comfortable with living in the question and the realm of the unknown. She also becomes stronger, as she is able to stand in the fullness of her own vulnerability—and in doing so, invites others to do the same. 

Over time, this translates into less dogma, less absolutism, and greater compassion for the full complexity of herself—and as a result greater compassion for the full complexity of others. 

Imagine a community of people embarking on these quests. Imagine the transformation.

Are you still holding your answer? Great. Please continue to do so. 

Now, let’s talk about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 

As you read those words on the page, did something trigger in you? Did you feel anger, rage, sorrow, or general nervousness? Did your stomach tingle? Did your heart beat faster? Mine often does whenever this conflict comes up, and it is in the news now more than ever.

I ask you to simply sit with and breathe through those feelings and greet them as friends. If you do, you may notice that the feelings eventually alter, change, and pass. 

This is the nature of all things. 

I spent many years studying the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in college and afterwards. I have many Jewish and Israeli friends and I care deeply about each of them. So much so that I founded an Israel club in college and invited speakers and hosted events and festivals promoting Israeli culture, cuisine, and thought. I have been to Israel six times and have many friends who live there as well as friends of friends who were recently killed in the conflict with Hamas. 

It is important you know where I am coming from as you read my words—not that you should see me as biased and my opinion as less just. We are all biased and partial. As human beings it is impossible not to be. The trick is to be honest about those biases and remain curious—always curious—about how your biases formed, where they came from, and how they are constantly shifting through time.

But you cannot do this if you have not cultivated the courage to get curious about your own complexity. And for most of us, nothing is scarier. 

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is scary. But for many, getting curious about the depths of your own soul is much more terrifying. It means becoming comfortable living in the question about who you are, how you came to be, why you think the way you do. It means fully immersing yourself in the wonder, the awe, and the terror of what it means to be a human being. It means confronting your mortality and doing so with grace. It means staying as much as possible in the present moment whenever you feel pain until it transmutes, alters, and changes into wisdom. 

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has at times felt like a Rubik’s cube: nearly impossible to solve, not due to the difficulty of sorting out historical facts of what did or didn’t happen, but because of each community’s insistence that it is the pure, morally superior being while its enemy is the devil incarnate. 

In other words, this conflict seems intractable because we perceive each other as symbols of good and bad instead of seeing each other as human beings. 

This tendency is human. We reach for this heuristic whenever we feel insecurity or pain—especially pain that has been inflicted on us by others. I’ve done it, and so have you. It’s a coping mechanism that helps us numb pain. This is why James Baldwin said that we cling to our hatreds because we don’t know what to do with pain. 

But if we get quiet enough and observe what is going on inside us, we will be able to watch and see: When pain rises in us we often transform it into projected, directed hatred against an enemy in the form of reducing them—an enemy who in some cases has just inflicted pain on us—to the exclusive role or symbol of the bad, the evil, and the monstrous. And when we do this unconsciously, we fortify the very logic out of which our assumed roles and identities emerge. 

This happens faster than a millisecond. It would be as if someone throws a stone at another human being and that human being hardens in return, saying “If you want to throw stones at me, I will become the stone, the fire, the very earth herself—and I will thunder down on you until you hear me and acknowledge my worth.”

Such is the magnitude of the pain, and such is the magnitude of the opportunity before us.

Israelis and Palestinians are screaming at each other and at the world, demanding that we know and honor their worth. In this way the conflict is a macrocosm of what is going on within many of us individually, who relegate and deny parts of ourselves in shame while projecting our insecurity onto others as a defense mechanism. 

You might be thinking, “Wait, Chloé, What about Nazis? What about white supremacists? What about jihadists? Surely they are morally inferior.”

Yes, their behavior is morally inferior because it fails to honor the inherent worth of every human being. But in a way this proves my point, as Nazis, white supremacists, and jihadists are human beings trapped in a conception of themselves that requires them to cope with their pain by turning it into hatred—a hatred which is nothing more than a reflection of their own deep self-hatred and contempt.

Some may scoff at this and think it is false, but it is the foundational principle of the Civil Rights Movement, which we hold as the pinnacle of human social achievement in America.

It baffles my mind that people will claim to be students of the Civil Rights Movement without actually doing the deep study and self-work that was required to bring the movement into being. Dr. Martin Luther King said, “let no man drag you so low as to hate him,” because he understood that hatred of another human being was just a reflection of deep feelings of worthlessness and evidence of deep suffering.  

To reiterate, the white supremacist is trapped in a hell of his own making. In this way, though he is oppressing, he is also oppressed. 

The Tibetan Buddhists have a meditation practice to help us recognize this. I started practicing it in 2020. It is the practice of perceiving someone first as a friend, then as a stranger, then as an enemy, on a regular basis.  

This practice helps us see the constantly changing nature of all things. The Tibetan lama Thubten Yeshe writes about this in his book Introduction to Tantra: The Transformation of Desire: 

...[The] tendency to exaggerate and project is not limited to any one culture; it is a universal phenomenon. When two people look at each other through the eyes of excessive desire, each one makes up an incredible story about the other. “Oh, such beauty! There is nothing even slightly wrong here, inside or out.” They build up a perfect myth. Because of infatuation and desire, each becomes blind to the imperfections of the other and exaggerates his or her good qualities beyond recognition. This exaggeration is just the superstitious interpretation, the projection, of the mind obsessed with desire. 

To a greater or lesser extent, this tendency to exaggerate is characteristic of all our ordinary desires. We overestimate the beauty or worth of whatever it is we are attracted to and lose sight of its actual nature. We forget, for instance, that this object of our desire — whether it is a person or a thing — is changing all the time, just as we ourselves are. We act as if it will exist forever as something beautiful and desirable, something that will give us eternal joy and satisfaction. Such a conception of permanence is, of course, completely out of touch with reality and by holding on to it we are setting ourselves up for nothing but disappointment. 

Understanding this and putting it into practice is difficult, but it is possible. It will help you stop seeing others as symbols to be elevated or denigrated, but instead as human beings full of shadow and light, beautiful and flawed, sometimes noble, sometimes cruel, sometimes measured, sometimes crass. 

You cannot witness this in another group of people unless you are first able to witness it within yourself.

Ask yourself, “Who am I?”

Do you have your answer?

Great. 

Hold that thought.

That is the quest to end all quests.

Once a significant percentage of the population dares to live that question, our conflicts will end.

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