Microcosms of Self, Collective, and War: Problem Solving Life's Patterns
The war ended, but not for them. The two brothers returned home, each carrying something different in their bones, something that was never spoken but shaped the house they left behind. One had fought on the beaches of Normandy, surviving the chaos of war through structure, calculation, and discipline. He studied chemistry, breaking the world into formulas, searching for the certainty that war had stripped from him and became a professor. The other had avoided the fight, not through cowardice but through a quiet skill—he could type. That talent placed him behind a desk, where he recorded the details of war but never felt its teeth. He studied art, more comfortable in the realm of stories than facts, where reality could be bent and stretched into something softer, and became a teacher.
Their younger third brother, too young to fight, grew up in the aftermath and eventually became a teacher too. He was raised in the long shadow of something he didn’t witness but felt in the rigid way one brother spoke about the world and the way the other reshaped it. The walls of their family were built with contradictions—truth and fiction, discipline and indulgence, hard lines and blurred edges.
It was a house of teachers, but no one taught him how to hold both realities at once.
The war had ended, but the question had not. It passed down, unspoken, thru the third younger brother, until it reached the girl.
She didn’t know why she was drawn to it, why she sat in the school library, borrowing tapes of old war footage, piecing together a music video that felt more like an obsession than a project. She set the images of the Holocaust to Goodbye Blue Sky, watching as history and music merged into something she could feel in her chest but couldn’t explain. In English class, she read Night and wondered how a world could demand such blind obedience that people disappeared into it. At home, her sister played The Wall over and over, its lyrics slipping into her subconscious, where they lived alongside images of marching boots, barbed wire, and the quiet erasure of self.
She saw contradictions everywhere.
She saw how authority erased the individual, how power demanded submission. She saw how some people folded into the collective so seamlessly they lost themselves entirely. Others rejected it outright, becoming exiles, untethered from anything larger than themselves. Some, like her father’s brother, reshaped the truth to fit their world. Others, like the man who stormed the beaches, refused to let the world be anything but logical, controlled, defined.
But she also saw something else.
There were moments where the individual and the collective did not destroy each other but instead created something new. Like two circles overlapping, creating a shared space that neither dominated nor erased. This was not hierarchy, not control, not chaos—it was balance. A space where structure and creativity, discipline and fluidity, truth and fiction could coexist without devouring each other.
Her father, the youngest of the brothers, took a different path. He taught health and fitness at a school for dropouts, guiding students who had already fallen outside the traditional system. He tried to teach them not just about heath, but about resilience, about finding their own balance in a world that often seemed designed to push them to the margins.
She could see herself in her father, as she sketched the shape in the margins of her notebooks, meditated on it long before she had words for it. It was like a yin-yang symbol, but layered, dimensional—a spiral instead of a loop. A path that did not trap, but allowed for growth. A pattern that was not about dominance, but movement.
She did not have the answers yet. But she knew one thing: the question had been passed to her. And for the first time, she could see the shape of it.
The war had ended. But the question had not. And it would keep passing down until someone could untangle it and finally, fully, understand.
___________________________________________
Problem Solving the Patterns in my Personal Microcosm
(The following is all inspired by the book “I am a strange Loop” By Douglas Hofstadter)
So we identify with I as an individual, but how do we identify as the I in a couple? Or the I in a family, perhaps the I as a result of the flow of generations? The above is a microcosm of my past that I look back on, to what haunted me in my youth. The past of myself, my father, and my uncles. We all have something that haunts us, questions and answers passed down to us. Are we listening?
Dualism protects the individual boundaries. We see that two people merge but also retain their individuality. Like two mandalas overlapping with shared identity yet separate as well. The boundaries need to be respected, as well as the merged collective. We can see this exemplified in the picture of two circles overlapping. the center is like a well, or collective mind, that two people can draw from. The fringe of the circle, that is not eclipsed are the individuals. We see the implications of this in other nesting dolls of relationships, family, community, collective, and even in our future relationship with AI. The persona(ego)(yang) and the soul (yin)reflect this as well within a holistic mandala of the individual deep within. (Even with our relationship with God in our inner most and outermost mandala?)
It almost looks like a yin/yang but with dimensions. Like if we could see a side view or a transparent view of the yin/yang symbol we would see two complete circles. I drew this shape and meditated on it when I was twenty. It's funny that I really haven’t thought of it much since. But then I thought it gave me a lot of peace like I had solved some sort of inner problem that I needed...to move on. I remember also thinking, so what, you drew two overlapping symbols. I guess it depends on what you focus on, the surface or the meaning based on personal perspective.
By being balanced we are reflective while seeing the individual including ourselves. Individual one sees I where the circles overlap. Individual two sees I where the circles overlap.
Can the power of our perspective eclipse the individual or collective? Can the power of our perspective respect boundaries? Can we correct an eclipse?
The universe is conscious because it has eyes and can see itself. It takes two parts to have consciousness, two parts to ....think.
This should be the starting block of all human interaction. Recognizing the individual, the manifestation of the collective, the paradox of the human condition, and of consciousness.
So if we take this into account, it means that we not only have to maintain our individual self, but we have to support and maintain a collective self. Understanding that we as individuals have mandalas, relationships also have mandalas that are a result of overlapping creating a flow of information and energy. Like a glass onion we can see the different layers throughout the nesting dolls of ourselves and reality.
I have questions inside me, like how far does it go? how far can we see ourselves thru time? How far does the information travel where we give feedback to ourselves? Does it go beyond the present moment? Instead of just fleeting manifestations of awareness of informational feedback in the moment, does it go beyond time? Do we know the full length and depth of our relationship with someone when we first meet them? Does the stories in my parents or past ancestors, speak to me personally, when I look back and complete a loop of awareness that starts and ends with I? How many dimensions of I are there? Does all this information reside in our subconscious? Accessible by introspection, contemplation, and symbolism? Is what we view as the subjective riddled with information of our future and past?
Another question is, are these loops closed, open like a spiral, maybe both depending on if our awareness can create a bridge in a spiral for feedback. What I am saying is that a spiral implies growth or regression depending on how we look at it; a constructive spiral or deconstructive spiral. In this case we would bridge the loops to receive information about the past, present, and future. The bridges would allow for the concept of control and correction, instead of blind determinism.
It was not just Hitler to blame for WW2, it was humanity’s inability to understand our collective mind and have balance with it. History repeats itself when we fail to understand the balance between individual and collective. The war ended, but the question remains: how do we break the cycle? We, the individuals, must reach into ourselves and our ancestor’s past for microcosm answers and questions deep within all of us.
______________________________________
This Symbol in Practice in My Life
We can see that having a self centered view of people, narcissistic view, we block out the entirety of the individual and only see ourselves. Having a balanced dualistic view we respect the boundaries of the individual.
In my marriage, my husband had issues with identity development, by having a mother who saw only herself in him, eclipsing his I. I learned to contain my feedback loop from him to I, I was able to leave room for him to develop his I. By withholding my I (by seeing dualistically, and not self centrally) and reflecting his back. I am only now able to put that concept into words. Maybe I could have described it to you, but not in such clear terms.
I make this sound like a simple equation, in reality, it is always a struggle, in perceptions, in health, and in life. A struggle to balance the manipulative pull and influence of other peoples reflections of themselves with in yourself. The closer they are to you, the harder it is to keep your own will separate from the whole, but necessary poles for expression and having the eye see the eye...or the I see the I. If you are one with the universe, you can’t see the universe.
Symbols take a microcosm in your life, and simplifies it to the eye. Have you ever tried to drive somewhere without a map? My first job was delivering flowers, I did not have a cell phone then and I quickly realized guessing where to go made the trip so much longer. Especially when a river was involved. Trying to get directions from people was ridiculous, when they tried to remember their lefts and their rights....or did they get confused and use their own left and right in the telling? With a nice solid map with north, south, east, and west, it was always easier. I could keep myself in context to where I was, by reading my surroundings and comparing it to the map.
Symbols create a map, they help tell us what boundaries to protect, in what proportions, and how. Symbols map out how to protect and spend our energies and give us direction. With out a map we live in a hall of mirrors and can’t connect with self. Souls spread thin over too much bread...or trapped in a loop with cycles of abuse. It is that simplified map, symbol, we use to describe the patterns we see in our head, hearts, relationships, families, and communities, that provide constructive feedback.