It really does sound perfidious. That you can really take something perhaps positive from war. Not one person could defend themselves against what the future holds. Not even when the trend in current events is for people to wish for a return to the past, as can be seen in so many populist election results.
So it is difficult to accept and understand that there is something positive to be gained from wars. It’s not something to gloss over, but a change of perspective may help to understand!
During what I consider to be the worst of all wars, that of the Second World War, the will of the individual human being was nipped in the bud. Whenever the original human instinct arose, which is natural, it was pushed back in a perfidious way by setting the ‘prisoners’, people of flesh and blood, against each other. You have to work against your own will, against your neighbour, because otherwise you yourself will pay with your life.
Even though you know that you yourself could become a victim a few minutes later, one way or another! Between me and my neighbour there is only a fundamental hope for life, from moment to moment.
What later becomes post-trauma, as we know, will be passed on for many years, decades and inherited by later generations. A high degree of mindfulness!
What is experienced in wars on the living body is basically also what is experienced during a person’s birth, when the trauma is passed on. This is known as transgenerational transmission. Part of what Abraham Maslow described as transcendence. With regard to his pyramid of needs, the ultimate goal of which is the character development of the individual, in the sense of a self-actualising life, the transition after self-actualisation into a new life. A state that only Otto Rank describes in one of the must-have books in psychology circles, ‘The Trauma of Birth’.
In this book, Otto Rank describes the fundamental origins of individual currents, whether inherited, such as war trauma, or the emergence of primal fears and the like. What happens here in the innermost being of an expectant mother often also happens in reality during wars. From this perspective, new life emerges. And new life is always seen as a struggle. You have to and want to be able and allowed to accept the new life. But many people always want to return to the refuge of security. And we are also living this struggle globally at the moment. People, politicians and actors are playing with the lives of people who are afraid of the new world. Others, on the other hand, have long since come of age and are looking forward to the new life with great excitement.
However, Daniel Goldman describes what wars entail in his classic bestseller ‘Emotional Intelligence’, which was named one of the books of the century. He describes mindfulness, in the sense of the term ‘mindfulness’, as a continuous awareness of one’s own inner states. ‘Mindfulness is far more than just paying attention. Mindfulness refers to a self-reflective perception whose object, the experience itself including the emotions, is observed and explored by the mind’ (quote, Golemann, 1996, p. 68).
The psychologists Sternberg and Salovey defined the concept of intelligence more broadly than it had previously been recognised. Intelligence, with its definition on a scale of values, had only existed for the educational development of young adolescents and professors. However, both psychologists continued to work on expanding the concept and thus attempting to find out what the human mind needs to be able and allowed to lead a successful life.
They summarised a few central points according to which the healthiest possible life can be achieved (Goleman, 1995, p. 65).
- Knowing one’s own emotions, self-awareness – recognising one’s own feelings as they arise – is considered the basis of emotional intelligence.
- Managing emotions so that they are appropriate. Being able to self-soothe, control anxiety, melancholy or irritability. Controlling emotions against this background helps people to recover better and faster from setbacks and upsets.
- Turning emotions into action, putting them at the service of a goal. Releasing self-motivation and creativity, grasping emotional self-control, suppressing impulsiveness, putting oneself in a flowing state makes people more productive and effective.
- Empathy, the ability to know and feel what others feel. An ability that builds on self-awareness. But empathy brings two more
- Firstly, it is worth mentioning what Erich Fromm already knew how to describe: people must always practise objectivity throughout their lives, a kind of permanent state. Because objectivity is the opposite of narcissism. And if you consult the neuroscientist Manfred Spitzer, it quickly becomes clear, in his words, that ‘humans are so strongly networked internally that they have problems really accepting their external world and putting themselves in the shoes of others’ (Spitzer, Lernen, 2003). This description emphasises Erich Fromm’s elaboration on training oneself in objectivism.
- Furthermore, empathy is also the basis for altruism. Because empathy evokes altruism. Those who are empathetic are more likely to hear the hidden social signals that indicate what another person needs or wants.
- Dealing with relationships is the last point in the basics of acting emotionally intelligent. The art of relationships is the art of being able to deal with other people’s emotions. Competence or incompetence determines how we deal with popularity, leadership and interpersonal effectiveness.
Pure attention is not enough for all of this. It requires mindfulness. For Jon Kabat-Zinn from Massachusetts Medical School, mindfulness is paying attention in a certain way, being intentional, being in the present moment, non-judgemental. Such attention registers everything that passes through perception with impartiality, as an interested but uninvolved witness. At its best, Goleman writes, ‘… mindfulness is just such an equanimous perception of passionate or stormy feelings. At the very least, it manifests itself in a certain stepping out of the experience, a parallel stream of consciousness that is meta – that hovers above or beside the main stream – and perceives what is happening instead of being immersed and lost in it.’ (Goleman, 1995, p. 68).
People who are mindful are aware of their own moods and understandably show a certain sophistication in dealing with their emotional life. They are autonomous and aware of their own boundaries, mentally healthy and usually have a positive outlook on life. Their mindfulness helps them to cope with their emotions (Goleman, 1995, p. 69).
The reference to war as an obstetrician is clear here. The transition to a new, more modern world than before is the result of an adjustment that is far more than an ordinary life or experience can offer.
But the doubt about a God becomes great when the world, which not only takes your loved ones, but you are penetrated by a great fear, by a great uncertainty. Fromm described this in ‘To have or to be’ as the situation of complete godlessness. If people seem to be completely without God, completely without faith, then they would be in mortal fear. You can see why faith is not only important and necessary. Rather, one will wonder how a form of holocaust was possible in view of the belief in a God. Many described this act as a walk to Golgotha, i.e. a more modern form and in a differentiated way crucifixion, two thousand years after the actual event. Here too, it was only many years later that the world increasingly realised what it had done with its lack of understanding. On the one hand we have the damage, on the other a new world. A paradoxical situation. But we know that a force, a drive, emerges from conflict. This is the only way to explain why conflicting thoughts compel us to develop a motoric force from a field of tension, motives to enter a new world with a new perspective.
ImageSource
Archive, Pexels Pixabay, characteristic feature, mindfulness illustrated by cat’s eyes and wide-open eyes