On the Origin of Conflict

A Black Mirror Episode Delivers a Gritty Dharma Lesson

---

Us vs. Them 

I am a lover of stories and unfortunately, a binger of Netflix. Since I've spent much of the past 10 years living in a Zen monastery, I occasionally binge on old shows to catch up. A while back, I landed on the Black Mirror series created by Charlie Brooker. I devoured 23 episodes in a matter of days. Most of the stories were haunting, innovative, and prescient. There was one in particular titled “Men Against Fire” that left an indelible impression because of its gritty Dharmic lesson of the origins of conflict.

The episode is set in an unnamed country, after an unnamed war has ended, where an unnamed military is protecting villagers from “Roaches”: feral, human-like mutants with swollen, disfigured faces who “speak” in screeches and squawks. These Roaches, who are infected with “sickness,” are raiding the villagers’ scant food supply and terrorizing them. The English-speaking military’s mission we soon learn is not just protecting the foreign-speaking villagers, but exterminating the Roaches.

The soldiers are gung-ho to raid an old farmhouse where a sympathetic villager is harboring Roaches. A female soldier, Raiman, warns Stripe, the new guy, about how dangerous, sneaky and filthy the Roaches are. During the raid, Stripe shoots one Roach he finds crouching in a closet with several others. Stripe is then attacked by a male Roach and the two engage in hand-to-hand combat. In an effort to defend itself, the Roach holds up a makeshift, metal wand with three small green LED lights on one end. A high-pitched screech zaps through Stripe's head, almost incapacitating him. Stripe stabs this Roach over and over until it’s dead. 

Stripe’s fierce bravery impresses his buddies and now the new guy is one of the gang. After this incident, Stripe experiences migraines, insomnia, and intense, disjointed dreams. The military doctor assures him that he’s in perfect physical health and that the disturbing symptoms will eventually pass. 

On their next mission, a Roach with an automatic rifle fires on Raiman, Stripe and their squad leader, who is killed. The two soldiers pursue the Roach into an abandoned building where Raiman shoots it. As the two soldiers walk through the rooms searching for more Roaches, a terrified blonde woman swings a baseball bat at Stripe. He assures her that he’s not going to hurt her and tells her it’s not safe because there are Roaches in the building. She runs into the hallway where she’s gunned down by Raiman.

Stripe watches in horror as Raiman blankets the rooms and hallways with gunfire, indiscriminately killing several more frightened humans fleeing the building. “You’re killing them!” Stripe shouts. When Raiman aims her weapon at a woman and a young boy cowering in a room, an enraged Stripe shoves Raiman to the ground. She shoots Stripe in the abdomen just before he knocks her unconscious.   

A wounded, delirious Stripe drives the woman and boy in a Humvee to their underground hideout where they take him in before he passes out. The woman tends to Stripe's wounds and when he wakes up, she asks Stripe in broken English if he sees her. 

"Of course, I see you," he responds.

“You don’t see Roach?”

“You ain’t a Roach,” Stripe says. “Roaches don’t speak.”

They only exchange a few words before Raiman jumps down into the hideout and kills the woman and boy. Though injured and incapacitated, Stripe is no longer confused. Through his choked voice, Stripe tells Raiman, "None of it is true." And then the amped-up Raiman, who considers Stripe a traitor, knocks him unconscious with the butt of her rifle.

What is true? Are the mother and son Roaches or are they human?

An unequivocal “yes” and “no.”

"People delight in proliferation, the Tathāgata in nonproliferation."—Dhammapada 254

Question Perception

Let's rewind to Stripe's first encounter with the Roaches in the farmhouse. Turns out the LED wand the Roach aimed at Stripe was not a weapon of destruction but a wand of disruption. It caused the neural implant, called “MASS,” that the military had inserted in his brain to malfunction. This caused Stripe to clearly see the “Roach” who tended his wounds as human woman. 

“You see us as something other when the implant works,” the woman explained to Stripe while he was in the underground hideout. 

Being treated as a traitor, an incarcerated and indignant Stripe confronts the military psychiatrist Dr. Arquette with this revelation about the implant and demands an explanation. Stripe is aghast when the doctor shows him a videotaped interview with Stripe as a cocky new recruit signing a waiver agreeing to have the MASS implant inserted and the procedure wiped from his memory. Not only does the implant distort how Stripe and the other soldiers see and hear the “Roaches,” it also deadens their sense of smell and touch, which makes it easier to slaughter their enemies.

To drive home his point of total control, Dr. Arquette replays the scene of Stripe’s heroic slaying of the Roaches at the farmhouse. With his senses fully restored, Stripe watches the replay in his MASS implant and now feels, hears, smells, and tastes the killings as though he were back at the farmhouse. Dr. Arquette offers Stripe two options: reset the MASS implant so Stripe can return to being a “normal” soldier or spend the rest of his life in prison with the horrific and vivid memory of his “heroic bravery” being replayed by the military over and over in his mind.

On the Battlefield

Before the wand of disruption liberates Stripe from his misperceptions, he has a strong sense of identity as a soldier who’s superior to and separate from the Roaches. Just like his comrades in arms, Stripe never questions the reality of his perceptions, and therefore never questions his belief that the Roaches are a pestilence that needs to be exterminated. With his senses duped by the MASS implant, he wholeheartedly buys into the military’s mission to kill the “enemy.”  

Although the villagers had no implants, their sensory perception was similarly distorted by “artificial intelligence”: the false belief that the Roaches’ bloodlines were not as pure as their own. They had bought into these societal and cultural narratives and were conditioned by the war, the military, and their own government to hate the Roaches. Although the villagers perceive the Roaches as their kin, they still wanted them exterminated. 

Turns out the enemy lies within—as a figment of consciousness and a fetter on the mind’s eye. The enemy is none other than the soldiers’ and the villagers’ distorted perceptions, and their reactions of body, speech, and mind to these distorted perceptions. If the enemy lies within, then so does the conflict, and so does its resolution. 

In the “Ball of Honey” sutra, the Buddha calls the habit of mind that leads to conflict papañca (PA-pan-cha). The American monk and scholar Thanissaro Bhikku says that the Buddha does not offer a clear definition of this word; however, he says there are some agreed upon understandings: conceptual proliferation, obsessive and repetitive thinking, exaggeration, reification, and self-reflexive thinking. The last two concepts are the pillars of papañca: the proclivity of the mind to objectivity itself as a “doer” and then reflect back on the actions, speech, and thoughts of this “doer.”

In the “Ball of Honey” sutra, the Buddha explains how even such a simple and everyday occurrence as seeing a person can give rise to papañca that leads to conflict. Although the Buddha’s analysis of the causal process is not usually linear, here’s my simplified explanation in the context of this TV episode:

When the soldiers’ eyes make contact with a form, eye consciousness arises. This contact gives rise to neutral, pleasant, or unpleasant feelings. So when the soldiers see Roaches, unpleasant feelings (sensations) arise. They feel repulsed because these feelings lead them to categorize the Roaches (phenomena) as undesirable. This categorizing of phenomena into desirable and undesirable is the incipient and insidious beginnings of papañca with the pillar of “I” at the center. What the soldiers feel, they perceive and their minds label and think about and objectify.

In “Men Against Fire,” we clearly see the ultimate effect of this process of complicating, selfing, and obsessing. The poison of aversion is so afflictive that Stripe and his buddies are propelled to annihilate the external “other” whom they believe to be the cause of their internal turmoil. Their harsh speech and violent actions act as a valve that offers only temporary relief from the mounting pressure of their inner agitation. 

The Buddhist scholar Andrew Olendzki describes the process of papañca as “the tendency of mind to spread out from and elaborate upon any sense object that arises in experience, smothering it with wave after wave of mental elaboration, most of which is illusory, repetitive, and even obsessive. [This] effectively blocks any sort of mental calm or clarity of mind.”

Even when Raiman and Stripe can no longer see or hear the Roaches, the soldiers fall victim to the insidious process of papañca because their minds are able to conjure memories and experience emotion-sensation as though the Roaches were still present. Because the soldiers share fixed views and attitudes toward the Roaches, their group-think reinforces their misperceptions of the “enemy as other.” What the soldiers think about, they “papañcize,” and the result is that the war rages on two fronts: in the field of battle and in the field of consciousness.

In both fields, the visible one and the invisible one, the soldiers are both the assailants and victims of their own perceptions, conceptualizations, and objectifications. Because the soldiers mistakenly perceive themselves as being separate from the Roaches the delusive dichotomy of “us vs them” perpetuates itself. As long as the soldiers’ focus remains on “external things” as existing independent of their sensory experience, they will continue to be ambushed by their false belief in a separate “doer.” Not surprisingly, the root of objectifying others begins with objectifying ourselves. 

What’s Your Wand?

In this futuristic story, the military’s main weapon of destruction is its ability to distort the soldiers’ perceptions through the MASS implant, which I liken to karmic conditioning. We fall victim to our karmic conditioning because most of us are never taught to pay attention to the perceptual process and how the mind projects all sorts of fictions onto reality and sets it in stone.

Because Stripe’s MASS implant was disrupted by the LED wand, his perceptions shifted, and this altered his view and attitude toward the Roaches, which changed his speech and his actions: instead of firing upon the Roaches, he saved them. Once the delusion of a separate self dissolved, Stripe's thoughts, words, and deeds—his karma—were founded upon more accurate sensory input. He was no longer blinded by ignorance, and he interrupted the cycle of hatred and harm.

In the episode, the people who had the most accurate understanding of what was happening was the Roaches. They knew that the soldiers had been programmed by the implants and that the villagers were purposely calling them “roaches” to get rid of them. As history has shown us many times, it’s often the truth-tellers who are the most persecuted. The villagers and soldiers were poisoned by ignorance.

The Pali word for “ignorance” is “a vijja”; it means the absence of accurate knowledge (vijja). At the heart of ignorance is the conceit of a thinker: a sense of ourselves as solid, independent, and abiding: a separate "I AM." In one of the Buddha's short sutras titled “Quickly,” he says the way to establish peace is to: 

". . . put an entire stop to the root of objectification-classifications: I am the thinker. . . " He goes on to say: "Touched by contact in various ways, [a monk] shouldn't keep theorizing about self. Stilled right within, a monk shouldn't seek peace from another, from anything else. For one stilled right within, there's nothing embraced, so how rejected?"  

In the “Ball of Honey” sutra, the Buddha declares that if we do not embrace or cling to this sense of a separate self, then this false self won't feel rejected. And this will end: 

“. . . the obsessions of passion, resistance, views, conceit, and ignorance. . . . That is the end of taking up rods & blades, of quarrels, [and] divisive & false speech. That is where these evil, unskillful things cease without remainder." 

Easier said than done, right? If only we had an LED wand to disrupt our karmic implants. Zap! Enlightenment.

When I first began practicing zazen, I was so identified with thinking mind and mesmerized by papañca. I was a master at complicating, obsessing, and objectifying. So for me, one of the Buddha's most transformative teachings was understanding that the mind is a sensory organ. It processes stimuli from the other five sense organs, and also perceives its own sense objects—thoughts, images, and the conceit of "I." At first, it was very painful and distressing for me to sit still. All the voices in my head were stumbling around like drunken enemies. Attacking and defending. Jockeying for position. Clamoring for my attention and validation. The papañca of it all was noisy, confusing, and a mass of suffering. 

Since we don’t have a LED wand to dissolve our karmic delusions, we’ll have to rely on the low-tech tool of zazen. Practicing zazen on a regular basis gradually helps us establish continuity of mindfulness amid our ever-changing interior and exterior lives, and illuminates how we react to what's arising. That's the key.

That's the mirror that reveals our psycho-emotional blind spots. Sitting still amid the clamor of the mind shines some light on the perceptual process, which slows down the more concentrated our body-mind becomes. More and more there’s a felt-sense of what's happening—a somatic knowing—and a sense of spaciousness arises: a non-reactivity on and off the cushion becomes more and more the mode of being for a Zen practitioner.

Gradually, zazen helps us become less and less enchanted with the stories of “us vs. them.” Gradually, zazen pierces the veil of delusion. Gradually, zazen helps us lay down our weapon of destruction and wield the wand of disruption: the Dharma.

That’s the magic of zazen.

---