After thousands of years of living experience and having exceptional teachers like Christ, Moses, Lau Tsu, Buddha, and the many gurus of India, we are still struggling to answer the question of exactly what we are doing here. We have made progress over the millennia, but we still have a ways to go.
Franz Kafka, the great patron-martyr of self-criticism, captured the situation perfectly when he wrote: “There’s only one thing certain. That is one’s own inadequacy.”
Some people view our present spate of problems as the harbinger of The Four Horsemen predicted by St. John in Revelations. Whether or not that is true, each of these crises are serious. They have consequences that are already raising serious hell with the foundations of our culture and if we do not give them their due, the results will be catastrophic.
When you are engaged in a conflict, you and the other person are at swords’ points, your focus is going to be on them and what they are going to do next. The last thing you want to do is to go any deeper and start investigating your own motives. We just want to get through the moment and stop.
Think about the concept of “boundary.” A boundary is to protect something from an intrusion. So the first thing we know is that the concept of boundary is somewhat antithetical to the concept of relationship.