Friday, December 26, 2014

The Path is Due Process

Path

Thinking about my sometime inner conflict between, “let go and let God (or the Flow)” and “ God helps them who help themselves ( acting from inner morality, or the Te of natural justice)”, I remember I have had a recurrent vision, was it perhaps once a dream?, of walking a stony outcrop path along a mountain ridge, valleys on either side, down the hillside, mountains distant, sunny, cloudy, not difficult but have to watch my steps around the sharp outcrops of rock. A lot like the hillside behind our house so many years ago in Oliver in the Okanagan Valley in BC, that led up and away to wild mountain ridges… Contented, difficult walking, all my own space and place, strong purpose just to do it, no end in sight nor needed to know.

The Path is Due Process

 I want to highlight this, what has happened to it? If we insist on it, in all places, at all times, maybe we could find a way out of the traps we seem to be in, environmental, and societal? Let us have DUE PROCESS for all of life not just human. Not just debating what results we want, but first debating what is due process; what process do we insist on following? So our effort now ought to be in debating process, forget for now the result we want, until we get the process agreed.

Deep in the woods, by Beaver’s pond, or on a rocky hillside, I notice how “right” the process here is, how the result is always beautiful, no matter how unexpected. So when we follow due process in the way of the Tao, we would encounter the Te of natural Justice, Natural consequences, and be accepted in the Ching, the great calm ensuing.

Why do we still think, after so many millennia of failure, that we can guard the Peace with the weapons of War? Why do stern implacable faces march in solid ranks in uniforms on Remembrance Day, or to bury fallen police or soldiers? Do they seem peaceful? What are we remembering with this display? War, not Peace. We used to call it Armistice Day, for the peace we all longed for. Why is this not what we remember now?

War is a dreadful, seeming ever-recurring event. Peace is a process. We will not have an end to bloody conflict, the misery, without adopting due process. A place where all can have a say in the process, where all voices are heard, the seeming ignorant, inadequate, angry, as well as the calm and reasoned. When all speech is exhausted, the answer will emerge, the answer we will all support  and we will call it Peace. “When all conflict is ceased, when all is said and done, and calm is restored, the people will say, “it just happened naturally.” ” from the writings of Lao Tzu.