New Outline following on the Readers' Conferences

The audience I am writing to is not specially trained (not psychotherapists for example) but is able to address material at a level consistent with a graduate level of understanding. I am not addressing people of a particular age but want to be accessible to younger audiences who might not get some cultural references aimed at boomers.

The thesis of the book, as briefly as I can state it is:

"Conflict resolution is a skill that can be mastered by the application of appropriate mechanics and persistent practice. Here are what I believe to be the appropriate mechanics with some suggestions for how to practice using them."

So what I have come to is that I am not editing the existing book, but writing a new one. It will contain some major chunks of the existing book but will have a narrower thrust. Central to the new structure is the role of the Orders of Self. I tried conceptualizing the book without the Orders and it just cuts the guts out of it. So I am making it more central to the structure of the  book.

I know it is hard to appropriate all of the aspects of the Orders of Self in the reading of a chapter, even a long one. So I am trying to separate it into its component parts and introduce them separately and at a pace that allows them to be better integrated.

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Introduction: Conflict resolution can be complicated because conflicts can be complex. We will have to understand some of the complexity of conflicts if we are to become able to address all of the aspects of the conflict in ways which move to resolution.

Chapter One: The first thing we want to notice is that there are things we can change and things we cannot change. Trying to change the things we cannot change will lead to a sense of helplessness and hopelessness. But just because we cannot change something doesn't mean it is best not to pay attention to it.

We will use the terms experience and choice to refer to the things we cannot change and those we can. We cannot change our experiences but we can change our choices. When we pay attention to our experience we create awareness. When we pay attention to our choices we create mastery. We will refer to experience and choice as our primary perspectives. [We will also be introducing disciplines #1 & 2].

Chapter Two: Conflicts arise for us in all aspects of our experience and choice. In order to appreciate the complexity of conflict we will be helped by identifying these different aspects. There are four distinct but co-occurring realms of our experience and choice. They are

• the personal or material realm,
• the interpersonal or relational realm,
• the intrapersonal or interior realm, and
• the transpersonal or spiritual realm.

Conflicts and the resolution of conflict look different depending on the perspective from which we are looking.

Having a clear sense of what we are trying to construct as resolution is a necessary step to getting there. Indeed there are a number of useful maps which will help us know where we are, where we want to go, and how to get there.

Chapter Three: When it comes to actually following a course of action which constructs the resolution of the conflict, we discover that there are some substantial barriers in our way. We will have to be able to avoid or deconstruct these roadblocks if we are to become masterful at conflict resolution.

Two of the biggest barriers are the belief that we can't resolve the conflict without getting others to change, and the belief that we can resolve conflict by not letting things bother us.

Addressing each of these barriers requires us to become more self aware and willing to act on our own behalf but another barrier is that we are not to be self-centered.

We can see that to become masterful at who we are we will have to become self-aware in a manner that is not generally encouraged by the culture in which we live. We will have to develop and greater awareness of Self.

Chapter Four: We will start by looking at some of the more general characteristics of development because they all apply to the development of the Proximal Self. These include a consideration of the nature of transformation, distinguishing states and stages, noticing that stages are sequential, invariant, and hierarchical, but that the hierarchy is one of complexity and not of valuing. We also want to note that transformation is a movement to a more complex perceptual map which simplifies what we are looking at. It thus includes all of the earlier perspectives but also transcends them.

As we have identified the four realms of experience and choice we can see that we have at least some memory of being in a state of mind which observed from each realm. We thus have a state experience of each of the four realms from each of the two primary perspectives. This gives us eight perspectives (four realms from two primary perspectives).

When we look at how our sense of who we each are develops as the Proximal Self we find that it is actually a developmental sequence. While each perspective is available as a state of mind, being able to hold to this perspective as a durable mental construct is a stage of development.

Our ability to resolve conflict increases as we move to a higher stage of development and it is the resolution of conflict which propels us to the next level. Thus, the appearance of conflict in our lives is a developmental opportunity.

Becoming masterful depends upon overcoming the barriers and refining the skills as we use the best perceptual or cognitive maps. This is what the remainder of the book is and the existing structure still works with significant editing. It is in the same order except that Chapter 12 is very different than I originally conceived of it.

For most of us the leading edge of our development is in the Interpersonal or Relational Realm. We are struggling to master 4° [Interpersonal-relational: choice]. For that reason we are going to take a closer look at the structure of relationships [Chapter 5 introducing discipline #3], relational abuse and oppression [Chapter 6], and Assertiveness as a primary skill for addressing conflict with the addition of the material about non-violence [Chapter 7].

Trying to show up differently at Fourth Order is complicated by the more subtle workings of the Intrapersonal or Internal realm so we will look at how to move into a deeper awareness of our interior 5° [Intrapersonal-internal: experience] [Chapter 8 introducing discipline #4] and how our childhood experiences construct barriers to Fifth Order awareness and 6° [Intrapersonal-internal: choice] mastery and thus healing [Chapter 9 introducing discipline #5].

Because each of these realms overlaps, we will want to be able to construct what we need at all of them simultaneously. We will consider some maps for clarifying what we need at the Personal (boundaries or health), Interpersonal (trust or accountability), Intrapersonal (compassion or wholeness), and Transpersonal (justice or shalom) realms [Chapter 10].

While this theory will show that conflict resolution is possible, readers will want something to indicate what it might look like. So I will have introduced the Mindfulness Disciplines as we move through mechanics and will introduce the Practical Disciplines in Chapter 11.

Then in Chapter 12 I will move to the question of getting others to change and show how when we transform ourselves we construct a space which supports the transformation of others and how doing that is very powerful when we have done our own work. The more facility we have at each of the orders, the better able we are to evoke the transformation of the world