August 18, 2014

August 18, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

It is wonderful to be without conflict and to be able to avoid conflict. People keep having conflicts, because they don’t know how to avoid them. In other words, people don’t know that conflicts can be avoided. They keep having conflicts, because they think that conflicts are inevitable. They have been having conflicts all along and so, unknowingly, they expect, seek, create and maintain them.

  

Strange as this may sound, no individual is actually having a conflict. There is no one inside of us to have a conflict. The idea that we are persons, who have experiences, is false. Experiences come and go, but there is no entity, no self, that possess them, that has them, is affected by them, gains them, abandons them, let’s them go, seeks them, creates them, enjoys them, hates them, wants them, destroys them or revives them. Because we think we are somebody, we keep having conflicts.

I am not without conflicts, because I have arranged it that way. As far as avoiding conflicts, I am basically not any better than anyone else. The reason I am not that concerned with or preoccupied by conflicts, is because behaviorology has taught me that behaviors are maintained by variables in the environment. I do or I don’t do things, because of where I am and who I am with. This knowledge is is changing me. Since most of us don’t know this, most of our behavior stays the same.

Because of conflicts with others, people are conflicted with themselves. It is only due to conflicts with others that people seek to change themselves. This process, in which an individual supposedly works on him or herself and then is presumably capable of changing his or her own behavior, is utter nonsense. Nobody has ever succeeded and nobody will ever be able to change his or her own behavior. That  many people, perhaps most of us, believe in this doesn’t make it anymore true. 

Being without conflict depends on a good night’s sleep. When we stop trying to be something, we are without any conflict. Each night, when we go to our bed, once we fall asleep, we are without any conflict. Our sleep doesn’t require us to do anything. The same is true for all our behavior; we don’t need to do anything.