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CHAPTER 5

The flesh, the war!

The human being

The flesh is this psychological part of our soul that originates in the animal world, our human genetic descent, which will necessarily lead us from birth, and more or less throughout our life. From our conception, it will begin to be educated by power struggles, and submit to what dominates it. It will extract of it images that will allow it, by assimilation between them, to bring out what it will interpret as being good or evil.

According to education and experience, it will therefore be for each one, his good, and his evil. That's why it's so hard for us to understand each other. If we imagine two individual situations originating from the same starting point, as the majority of twins are, since the experience since gestation cannot be perfectly identical, the ends, although nearly similar, are obligatorily a somewhat different. In this particular case, the differences do not necessarily appear in broad outline, because the bases of education, the environment frequently similar, and the external society often remaining the same, the sources of conflicts are smaller and above all manageable without real clashes by the subjects between them.

In childhood, everyone will have more or less difficulties in accepting limits to his self-centeredness, necessary for his own survival in the group. This is why the conflict will be more or less stormy according to the child, and of course, depending on how parents approach it.

As much renewed by the Spirit of God this carnal part will be it, that we will always have access to it, if we give reason to it. From the conception of the embryo, this construction appears and grows by adapting itself to the necessities of survival of its environment, while keeping a more or less good harmony with its fellows. As long as the contact with this environment remains in the higher part of the values received, this construction will assert itself, consolidate itself in a presumption of fundamental truth of its values, and will remain acceptable for the entourage in question. As opposed to this dimension, the problem will come when this environment will no longer correspond to his understanding of the received image, then will be born the: Conflict!

As children, it's thus that some more sensitive, can be corrected simply by the word or a significant gesture of calling into question for them, and others will have to be corrected more severely. The incidence of a mild or severe method will not necessarily appear on the behavior and the character of the adult person in a favorable atmosphere, because the carnal of this one having been more or less subject to an image to which it will have normally given reason, it will know it must not go beyond this limit in its reference context. These are the limits that are so important for the balance of the child and the adult, which are variable depending on the individual and his environment. The carnal part, human, therefore, will have been rationalized by a moral or physical suffering in order to be able to coexist with his fellow men, without biting them too much, without over-attacking them, without seducing them hypocritically, without too much dominating, without too much to let crushed,  while remaining in a good balance of oneself.

Although conflict is essential to the construction of our soul, according to its management, it will produce a stable or unstable result. In a desire for tranquility, we would generally like to avoid this conflict as an adult, but it is a mistake to flee it. For some children it will settle by a simple movement of the look, and for others a little more severely. From the fetus stage, the child will begin to receive signals that will make it all the easier for him to make the distinction, that the conflict will have been addressed calmly and at the right time.

In this animal world of the flesh, there can be no education without a conflicting situation, without relations of initial power. Although difficult to manage, these conditions are necessary, which is why they must be approached with serenity on the part of the adult. Each of these conflicting situations is the food of the soul, in the construction of our initial individual logic. The conflict will have been positive when it brings the child to a submission that will elevate him to the values of respect for the other. It will be negative, when it brings him to either an uncontrolled dominant attitude or to a crushing of its personality.

Thus is how our soul resembles a mountain stream, near of which we would stand on a bank, and that we should cross every time we  a given come across a situation. In each situation encountered one or more bridges would make it possible to pass from one side to the other of the valley. When this situation is known and controlled, we always take the same bridge and that suits us. The difficulty arises, however, when we are challenged in our usual actions or we meet with unknown situation, especially if we must interpret it quickly. According to our position of the moment, of the attitude of mind in which we find ourselves then, we use one or the other of these bridges.

The higher they are at altitude near the source, the more stable and sturdy they will be, because they are easily hung on solid rock. Their length will not be very large, because the stream is small, and the mountains close to each other, but they will remain fundamental values. If they are poorly built, it will be more difficult to go up to them, their altitude being higher, but will still remain the main communications channels. These are the bridges of our first understandings, created by each of our relationships and parental conflicts in our early years. They are fundamental for our balance in the received context, since solidly fixed to a solid rock lacking in major part of sediments that little by little become our personal analyzes.

Conflicts will not always have come into sight to the parents, because in the relationship parent’s children, they will have often been lived in a more or less mild and sometimes unconscious way of the adult, in the only interpretation of the child in look at parental behavior. Others, on the other hand, treated in a strong manner, to see too hard, will be able eventually to go as far as to create disorders of behavior misunderstood later. This is indeed the art of being "parents", this art, already taking birth in our earliest childhood, for the future parent.

To the mild manner of authority, it is indeed often easier to substitute the hard way. Although it may sometimes be necessary very occasionally, it is easier to make it too hard, rather than balanced. To this opposite, it is quite obvious that to sit a bridge between two mountainsides, the tool used is not the brush, as could be a reproving smile, although compassionate. Conceived to withstand for many years the floods of the strong torrents of life, it would otherwise be quickly destabilized from the first rising waters, or even as soon as it was borrowed as reasoning, especially in adulthood.

In the mountains, a bridge is generally built on two rocky escarpments, nearest possible to each other than can be the other parts of the slopes. They are for the child, the main time of parental contacts from which the child will keep images and limits of behavior in relation with the remainder of the society. The "tools" necessary for the preparation of both mountain slopes are provided available to parents. They range from encouragement in the manifestation of love of the child, to the more or less severe reprimand.

If it is normal to take tools corresponding to the work to be done, it is generally not useful to use the dynamite which would destroy the bases of the said escarpments, and the points of reference of the child. This dynamite is often only an unexpected anger or violence from one or both parents sometimes even between them. In its egocentricity, the child then sees it as a personal implication of which it does not necessarily understand the meaning. A gaping hole can then occur, in the soul of the child, which can go as far as to sweep one or more existing points of reference.

The parent-child relation which could have existed naturally by the circumstances, and which would have produced an additional reference, according to the power of the explosion, will at least distance the slopes of the mountain from each other. The more this explosion will have been strong, the more it will contribute to confusion and fears of respect for parental rules, to see society in the soul of the child. A torrent of high mountains, obviously does not cross only one rocky escarpment, and from escarpments in escarpments, other bridges, other images, can be created, necessary for the individual's construction.

Here we are simplifying the problem by bringing it back to the unity of a person or a group. If we add to these family and fraternal circumstances, the external environment or the simple disunity of the couple, we would soon realize that what one person can strive to build in one way, it is easy for another to sweep it by any deformation of already accepted references, individual or collective. This multiplies all the more the complexity of our individual reactions.

The initial bridges are the very foundations of the individual and will in general be very frequently used and therefore very stable. For other people, it can go from minefields to others minefields. If the one who lived these minefields found in adulthood the momentum of his first years it will see the both mountainsides not too distant, to the point that he would like to take the step towards possible parental references for example. He will however reject them most often, for fear of finding a suffering identical to that experienced in childhood that he could not bear anymore. The more time is spent, the more the river will be enlarged, and the less easy it will be to cross it, but the more likely it will be to feel rejected in its refusal of personal acceptance. If he tries to apply what he thinks he perceives from a distance, his actions will be so vague and influenced by so many other received values that they will further distance him from his aim: The recognition and the love of his parents for example!

That's why it's so important to live from a very young age, a happy parents-children proximity, because from before the birth, these kind of bridges are built. The rocky escarpments are then as numerous as there can be reciprocal contacts, and more bridges will have been constructed and will have been often used, the greater the "parental" dimension of the child then of the adult will be. It will therefore be easier for this new adult to accurately assimilate situations seen on the other side of the valley, and to use the bridge corresponding best to the diversity of his analyzes. However, it is good that the limits created are balanced, allowing everyone to flourish in his share of childhood and personal analysis, without causing smothering of his personality.

The first youthfulness passed, not many bridges will be again built, and the majority of those already existing will be used, can then strengthen themselves in their presumption of truth or be deteriorated. The valley will have widened, the mountains will less higher, and the cultivable land of reasoning will often produce a more unstable construction of those that may eventually be created. The torrent will generally be less impetuous, but as it will be more abundant, it will not be less difficult to cross.

The topography of the terrain has changed, the mountains are lower, but the length of the bridges has increased, and their anchor on the ground has become more difficult. The shores are more varied, and the universe of discoveries has expanded. They appear through the out-of-school environment, in which the child begins to put into practice according to a personal analysis, then in the adult. If they may seem easier to access at first glance, it is not really so, when the sediments of life have come to both to hinder the construction, and especially later, access. The understanding of déjà vu will eventually establish itself to give an opening to the construction of a new bridge, but the "land" to evacuate to establish the foundations will be more or less difficult to remove. This ground which is none other than our reasoning due to our subconscious, will make more perplexed those having previously lived difficult contacts. They will then find harder to differentiate themselves from their behaviors and will have a harder time accepting the change in attitude. The positive conflict will therefore be more difficult to manage with those who have experienced many minefields, often because of their fear of being abused again, just as for their inverse, with those who have been maintained in too great presumption of truth for lack of having received certain limits.

So that all these bridges built through the upheavals of life to remain durable and reliable, it will be necessary to remove more and more alluvium of reasoning to sit on firm ground, at the risk that their own weight makes collapse them. This is one of the reasons why, when we meet God, we have to become like a child again. These are often very difficult circumstances or failures that have led us to God, which is why the conflicts generated by this situation must be managed in a positive way to be beneficial to the establishment of a new bridge. The generality is unfortunately quite different, and produces more often the destruction or the great deterioration of the bridges primitively used by the individual, without any other bridge coming to open a new path of access with new reasoning. Many of them become then the excluded of our society, which we find in a great idleness in the streets, for lack of having been able to bear the pitfalls of their failures.

We are indeed much more fragile than we can suppose when everything is fine; for example, because we have suffered from misunderstanding of a father or mother in our childhood, or have simply believed it, we will have condemned them and will retain this condemnation unconsciously as an adult. We will reproduce, if need be, by opposing but equally extreme attitudes, situations similar to those of our parents. It is in this that God gave His fifth commandment, (Exodus 20-12) Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.//

To honor one's father or mother, indeed brings these basic references, indispensable to the construction of every human being.

If this advice is given to children, others are given to parents: (Ephesians 6-4) And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.//

Because the logic of man is created by conflict, suffering and misfortune, it does not allow him to meet love in its true dimension!