The Dialectic of Reconciliation Redux

What is required to achieve unity, peace and reconciliation of the most disparate views? Many things, but one thing – the will to do so. It requires a certain attitude: that of open-mindedness and understanding. One must have the will to hear what one does not think, and just be willing to listen. For if you will not listen, I cannot speak with you but only to or at you, as with an uncompromising wall. And if you are such a wall, that wall is your strength and cannot be breached by anyone. Your wall only falls if it desires to fall, only crumbles if it desires dust instead. That is also to say, the barriers that make us deaf to each other are only broken when we would rather have no belief at all than only own belief, when we would rather be filled with the emptiness of the desert than be fortified within a castle. And unless we are willing to endure that stark and lonely desert expanse, we will never find the oasis of true belief, the paradise which flows boundlessly back into the desert, whose residents dwell transitively between perfection and nothingness.