For most of us it is quite simple. We are seeking revenge or justice or attempting to secure the future or some combination of these. We are rationalists and being rationalists it is just common sense to strike back. Not to reply in like manner is to send the wrong message, a message of weakness. The world is obviously a dangerous place, and the weak, once identified, like an old caribou, becomes the target of other rationalists on the hunt. We can not allow our buildings to be toppled by violence, or our people killed by our enemies, or our children starved by our enemy's policies, or the enemy's troops to camp on our soil, or allow the friends of our enemies to go through life without being called to account.
     But we are not all rationalists. Some of us have a more metaphysical bent. The psychoanalyst, Carl Jung explained the difference between introverted and extroverted types in his essay on psychological types.

     "...in one case an outward movement of interest towards the object, and in the other a movement of interest away from the object to the subject and his own psychological processes. In the first case the object works like a magnet upon the tendencies of the subject; it determines the subject to a large extent and even alienates him from himself. His qualities may become so transformed by assimilation to the object that one might think it possessed some higher and decisive significance for him. It might almost seem as if it were an absolute determinant, a special purpose of life or fate that he should abandon himself wholly to the object. But in the second case the subject is and remains the center of every interest. It looks, one might say, as though all the life-energy were ultimately seeking the subject, and thus continually prevented the object from exercising an overpowering influence. It is as though the energy were flowing away from the object, and the subject were a magnet drawing the object to itself." (The Essential Jung, P131)

     Jung spent his life studying and elaborating on the psychological types as well as the implications of these. Though he argues that all people have elements of both types, he goes on to say that in each individual one type is dominant. In our culture, and perhaps in most cultures today, the dominant type tends toward the extroverted (objectivist) rather than the introverted (subjectivist) consciousness. For the most part one might say that the 92 percent or so of the American people who are in support of the war are at the moment thinking with an extrovert's mind in that we  identify with the nation, our energies move out towards that object. On the same hand Osama bin Laden and his supporters throughout the Muslim world would also be extroverts in that they identify with their religion. Quotes from the Koran such as "Kill your enemies wherever you find them," or from the Bible, such as "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," tend toward the objectivist's philosophical realm in that they create an us/ them paradigm with all of what the us is attached to forming the object. One places this object, no matter how abstract, on that level of higher significance and special purpose. At the extremes one is willing die for the object.
     The introvert's mind works in the other direction, more concerned with the mental processes. At the extreme we would find the Hindu idea of Maya, the idea that by meditative movement inwards one would find enlightenment and the understanding that the phenomenal world is illusion. This is in fact a common experience in all mystic traditions. Even Plato believed that the real world was the numenalogical world and that the phenomenal world was a corrupted mirror image of that real world. The extrovert's idea of the real world is the exact opposite of what Plato proclaimed. Where the extrovert experiences the world as faction, the introvert experiences the world as a oneness. Thus Haykal, echoing Plato, writes in his Life Of Muhammad:

      "It seems to me that polytheism has been the strongest appeal to paganism to weak souls in all times and places. The weak soul is by nature incapable of rising high enough to establish the contact with total being, and in a supreme moment of consciousness, to grasp the unity of total being represented in that which is greater than all that exists, in God, the Lord of Majesty. The weak soul stops at one of the differentiated phenomenon of total being, like the sun or the moon or the fire, and awkwardly withdraws from rising beyond it to the unity of being itself." (Page 18-19)

     Transforming Haykal's reasoning from the religious to the political world, the  continued fractious nature of religion today, especially as used in a political context, seen from the introvert's viewpoint, would merely be the continuation of the polytheistic  experience. But the same argument would hold when applied to nationalism itself, that it is merely the inability of weak souls to make contact with the oneness of humanity; and though the hierarchical nature of the introvert's argument may be open to the extrovert's logical criticism, at the very least the extrovert can not deny that the mystic tradition seems to have always been with us, and carries with it a certain practicality, at least in the life of the individual if not in the life of the state.
     Who, for instance, has not experienced in their own personal life an easing of pain and suffering when one finally forgives one who has done an injustice? The mystic tradition  sometimes seems a naive ideal to the extrovert and yet most people know on the personal level that compassion and forgiveness, if never practiced, would lead to a world absolutely intolerable, where there would never be one moment's peace, and security would be next to nil rather than relative. And yet Christ's teaching that we love our enemy, and turn the other cheek (turn inward), seems an impossibility to the extrovert when it comes to the affairs of state. Perhaps this is due to the more personal experience being closer to the border between the two realms, whereas the attachment to the larger abstractions is so far out there that any practical nature to Christ's vision seems unadaptable.
     From the introvert's perspective then, there is only one humanity and one must extend compassion and forgiveness to all. The division of mind that allows us to proclaim good and evil instead of seeing warfare in general as an extreme form of psychosis is nothing but maya. That Osama Bin Laden sees the United States as the personification of evil is only the projection of his own repressed introversion, an attachment, even an obsession, to an abstraction. On the same hand the United States willingness to wave flags rather than to do some hard soul searching of our own is no different. If at the one extreme we can place those who believe in conquest of the phenomenal world, people like Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler, Bin Laden, George W. Bush, on the other there would be Buddha, Christ, Muhammad, St. Francis, Lao Tsu, those who concerned themselves more with the numenon. People such as Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi, though dominated by the extrovert's consciousness, were nonetheless living more on the border between the two realms. This is the middle course, or very close to it, taught by the Buddha as the right path for most of humankind.
     If the extrovert's understanding of the world is that the Twenty First Century is bringing us a new kind of war, then the introvert's challenge is to bring us a new kind of peace. If the new kind of war that is now taking shape seems difficult for even the extrovert's themselves to define, it would appear that the new kind of peace that is demanded must be even more in its infancy. For the time being the 8 percent of the nation, (and who knows what percentage of other nations?), who think and feel in this manner are also at our extreme, attempting to make deeper contact with total being, trying to get some insight into how to respond. We are praying, meditating, searching our souls for an answer. Eventually we will take our small unarmed forces back to the border for the real confrontation. At the risk of sounding prophetic I say unto you; we have seen terroristic acts of great imaginative technological jujitsu, and we have seen mighty technological missiles and bombs drop from the sky. But the world has seen nothing yet. Great armies of peace will soon be on the horizon, in numbers so great that war will become an impossibility.
     That is the message I hear when I turn the other cheek, when I move from my  dominant extroversion and take even one step over into the interior realm. No doubt those who have not done so will have a little laugh at my expense, a little uneasy chuckle at what we could only imagine would be a kind of new war on two fronts, one even more indefinable than the other. But even my most patriotic, extroverted, attached to the objective world ego can not shake of the vision now. The world has changed. The future is one of even greater chaos than we have before known. The nation will win battles and more than likely will also suffer defeats. In the end only one thing will remain universal, only one realization will dawn. Love is the only answer humanity has. All else is maya.

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