How does one describe a mediator or peacemaker?
One might highlight the peacemaker’s ability to recognize and spring traps.
Mediators often discover disputants are trapped in mental, emotional, or spiritual matrices. Confused, lost, and unable to move freely, they struggle like wild animals in hunters’ snares. Videos of good samaritans freeing wild animals from the jaws of traps provide glimpses of the mediator’s task.
Conflict traps render a victim unable to move, mentally or emotionally. The disputant’s reason, subjected to pain and panic, diminishes. Warring parties become entangled in the unrelenting push-and-pull of opposing interests and desires. Discordant views of reality cement positions, freezing parties in combat postures. Flexibility wanes; animus hardens.
Within a short period, parties no longer are able escape the oppositional state: they grapple like Sumo wrestlers in bondage. In the conflict embrace, neither wrestler enjoys the freedom to act outside the conflict cage. They’re “no longer themselves”: their enemy’s actions provoke repetitive responses that redefine their identity. They become their “conflict self.” Their free will plummets; they respond to provocations in a mindless, stimulus-response state .
Creative peacemakers model the situation as a complex trap, a matrix. They become skilled at pattern recognition. They take up the study of traps: How are traps designed? How are they constructed? What role does camouflage and deception play? What mental, emotional, or spiritual mechanisms trigger opposition? How does one release a trap, once its jaws are sprung?
Faith-based peacemakers pay attention to traps that litter the spiritual terrain, traps that sabotage the path salvation and block efforts to restore divine relationship.
Faith-based peacemakers ask, what tricks lure the faithful into traps? Faith-based peacemakers become comfortable navigating labyrinths. They’re ready to explore Plato’s cave or other esoteric and mystical realms. They familiarize themselves with aspects of faith or theology that frequently confuse or disorient worshipers, such as the ageless “question of evil.”
Peacemakers grasp the malleable nature of idealistic Reality, which exists as “the Mind of God.” This is a universe in which prayers work, miracles occur, and salvation is possible. Skilled peacemakers attain a working knowledge of Divine Relationship, and come understand how spiritual consciousness finds unity with divine consciousness.
As traps often have a perceptual component, conflict resolution specialists deliver “reality checks” that unearth false views. Disputants are encouraged to calibrate their worldviews—the ways in which they view reality. Mediators realize “finding common ground” requires that one first establish shared viewpoints: disputants cannot find common ground if they cannot even perceive common ground.
Peacemakers who entertain the idea that conflict is a special kind of trap work on mastering the mental, emotional, and spiritual coordinates of the World Matrix. They work on solving puzzles and decoding mysteries. They orient themselves in labyrinths, and shine light on dark terrain. They decipher deceptive signs.
Peacemakers who understand “conflict as a trap” operate as reality decoders, as spiritual rescue guides in a booby-trapped universe. Most important, they become proficient in bringing the peace that comes from escaping a trap.
If you’re a peacemaker or a disputant, consider approaching conflict as a trap from which you must gain release. Work on pattern recognition. Experiment with this model; see if the viewpoint brings new epiphanies, new success.