INsight/ The Three Poisons

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash.

Manila, 13 October 2022 — To build peace, we need to counter the three poisons. 

Story

It happened last week, as I joined a global peacebuilders practicum that opened with a quote from Albert Einstein, where the scientist pointed out that the most important requirement for peace is understanding. The participants from Asia and Africa told me that they wanted to make a difference in resolving conflicts in their workplaces, schools, and communities, including bullying, sexual harassment, violence, and the toxic exchanges that have become the norm in social media. How to build understanding for peace became the central question, a question that lies silently on the lips of many leaders and changemakers around the world.

Einstein, the brilliant scientist with a profound insight into the makeup of humanity, offered us more clues beyond pointing to the need to work for understanding. He also suggested that to achieve peace, our task starts with freeing ourselves first by widening our circle of compassion for others. Peace, in other words, starts with liberating ourselves. He also called for courage to take a quantum leap in human relations to avoid catastrophes such as we now see happening in Ukraine. A strong military does not guarantee peace, he said, underlining that building mutual trust is key. It is wise counsel that we can ponder.

Meanwhile, another story emerged last week about building understanding and trust. In the podcast The Prince by The Economist, we learn how Xi Jinping, China’s leader, first visited the US in 1985, where he was hosted in a family home in the rural town of Muscatine in Iowa. Almost 30 years later, after rising to the top to lead his country, he still fondly remembered that visit. When he returned in 2013 to meet President Obama, he asked to add Muscatine to his schedule so that he could reconnect with his hosts in the house where he had stayed as a young man. He also arranged for his Iowa hosts to come to Beijing and have dinner with him and his family. What a remarkable story about the essence of building understanding and trust by getting to know people in their homes. An example to keep in mind.

Challenge

Why is peacebuilding such a challenge? To explore this question, I decided to go beyond Einstein’s insights and Xi Jinping’s story to search for more answers in Asia’s wisdom traditions. And that’s when I discovered The Three Poisons and what the traditions say we can do to transform these poisons into something positive, starting in ourselves and rippling that out to others.

For millennia, Asia’s wisdom traditions have pointed to desire, anger, and ignorance as the three poisons that hold us back from living life as we should. They are easily observed in the conflicts that mark our world today, where there is a widespread lack of understanding and trust. Desire is about experiencing a strong attachment to our view of what is right and what we want. Anger gets the better of us when we let our emotions take over while thinking we are better than the other side. Ignorance shows when we are caught up in positions about who is right, blocking us from understanding the interests of others and how these relate and overlap with our own interests.

While these poisons generate immediate and adverse effects on our lives and the conflicts to which we are a party, their antidotes can rapidly help us to transform and liberate ourselves (like Einstein suggested), resolve conflicts, and achieve positive outcomes. According to the wisdom traditions, the antidotes are found in applying sila (good conduct and behavior), dhyana (mindfulness and awareness), and prajna (wisdom from insight and skillful means). Note how these antidotes are core essentials practiced by leaders as they work to resolve conflicts and bring people together, ever since ancient times until today.

Question

My question for you this week is about how you resolve conflicts, of which we sadly see so many in our world today. How are you countering the three poisons by cultivating the three antidotes? And, even more importantly, how are you helping others around you to become successful in resolving conflicts?

I am looking forward to learning more about this quest as I continue working with the peacebuilders in the weeks to come.  What we learned already from the first exchanges is that theorizing peacebuilding is much less useful than focusing on taking positive actions in the present, in the now. Actions that cultivate understanding and have the potential to build trust. For sure, they include practicing the skill of active listening to the other side. And to bring gifts to show appreciation, just as Xi Jinping and his team did when they visited Iowa in 1985. They carried many suitcases, filled not with clothes but with gifts to offer to the people they would meet.

In our leadership growth, we can practice a mindset of giving too. And when there is give and take, we want to make sure that we give first. The greatest gift is our undivided attention to learn more about the people we meet, with awareness and curiosity. If you are interested in becoming a leader who can bring parties together to resolve conflicts, book a free strategy call to discuss your leadership transition to get there. You will be making a big contribution to humanity that way.