Three Body Problem

Thich Naht Hahn's Anger is a fine book, as far as it goes. It does just fine at proscribing a technique for dealing with two-body toxic relationships, (feuding couples, warring nations, angry parents, etc). What it doesn't address, however, is the much nastier three body problem. What do you do when there is a third person involved? When there is not 1 bidirectional communication but three? Just to make it more complicated, lets make the three people span an enormous range in development both as wholes and even internally. Things get complicated. It's all well and good not to require mindfulness in your 2-body partner, but how do you balance the compassionate listener with the compassionate warrior in the 3-body case?

Wilber's Basic Moral Intuition: act to preserve the greatest depth for the greatest span. Yeah, fair enough, but what do you do in the real world when you are faced with incomplete knowledge. You know, that tricky little complication that gives political science, game theory and economics majors things to write theses about. What do you do when you need to balance the simultaneous needs of loved ones when hampered by incomplete knowledge about all three participants and when your own skills are, at best, untrained.

The answer, inevitably, seems to be that you make it up as you go. You can try and think as broad as you wish, but inevitably, it will boil down to flying by the seat of your pants in a fog without a map. And even previous experience is only so much help, because as Newton pointed out hundreds of years ago, the three body problem is unstable. Even the closed orbits are balanced on a knife edge and the slightest misstep sends things crashing into chaos.

People get hurt. And therein lies the tragedy. That's what leaves you sitting in the dark, listening to sorrow, and haunted by the ghostly echos of footsteps you might have taken.