Our lives involve dispute.  We want the world to be one way.   Someone else wants it to be another.   While the world, unhelpfully, is just as it is. 

 

Using force to resolve our disputes is now (generally) considered uncivilised.  So instead of deploying arms, we deploy arguments.   Appealing to notions of "good" and "bad", "right" and "wrong", "lawful" and "unlawful" derived from religious, cultural or legal systems that we have constructed, we sharpen our arguments (or pay someone else to sharpen them for us) and then hurl them at each other.

 

If we hoped to persuade our opponent, we are likely to be disappointed.   For the "good", "right" and "lawful" position that we espouse always seems to reflect the way we want the world to be.   Whereas our opponent, invariably, will insist on defining the same terms - "good", "bad" and "lawful" - to reflect the way they want the world to be.   The judgement of "right" and "wrong" consists of each side seizing on the same concepts, but seeking to turn them to their own advantage; what the Buddha described as the serpentine dance of a dragon.  Like blind armies wheeling on a darkling plain, our opposing positions never really engage, beyond a skirmish about the meaning of terms that both sides claim to own.

 

So we take our arguments before a judge, and he or she picks the one that they prefer.  Which proves what, exactly?   Only that in the eyes of the losing party (and sometimes of both parties!) the judge "got it wrong".  The dispute is decided, but not resolved.   As a way of dealing with the dispute it is, at least, marginally less painful than beating each other with clubs.   The clubs might, however, be cheaper. 

 

Mediation can offer a solution to the dispute in the sense that the parties decide the dispute together, rather than handing the decision to a judge.  A mediated solution can thus represent a measure of genuine resolution, for if the parties have agreed to the end of their dispute, where, then, is the dispute?  Where does it go, when the parties agree?   At least in part, it is resolved. 

 

How is this resolution reached?   Mediation theory says that in taking the opportunity which a mediation affords to set out their own positions, and to reflect on the other party's positions, the parties are encouraged to go beyond those positions.   Which may be correct as far as it goes, but why do the parties surprise themselves by discovering that they are, after all, able to go beyond previously entrenched positions?  

 

Part of the answer is that the parties may reach a conscious or unconscious realisation that their arguments are just that.   Arguments.   Words.  Rival claims to the truth, one of which may be preferred by a judge, but neither of which have any unbreakable link to the truth.   The arguments may float over the world, but they are free floating and can be moved about at will. 

 

This realisation means that at the level of expediency, if a "win" cannot be guaranteed, settlement becomes more attractive because there is a risk that one may lose.   At another level, if our positions are perceived as only positions, not statements of eternal verities, there is no shame in moving one's position.  

 

Zen Buddhist practice is to sit with life as it is, not as it "should" be, and in this radical acceptance we experience freedom from our intently held positions about how the world should be, and indeed from our notions of who, or what, we are.   In the Soto Zen tradition, this liberation is practised primarily through zazen (Zen meditation).  In the Rinzai tradition of Zen there is more emphasis on koans (Zen riddles, which cannot be answered rationally, and which therefore encourage the practitioner to leap beyond rational positions). 

 

Mediation may be seen as a form of the same practice.   We dance the serpentine dance of "right" and "wrong", taking each rational point made by either party and turning it (rationally) inside out, again and again, until finally we see, not the delusion of the positions, but the dance itself.   The parties are ultimately freed from their entrenched positions to dance where they will.   And just as the Zen practitioner experiences this freedom as liberation, so the parties to a mediation often report that they found the mediation an uplifting experience that can have a liberating effect that goes beyond the resolution of a particular dispute. 

 

A mediation, besides offering a measure of dispute resolution, thus presents liberating koans of its own:  

 

Where does the dispute go, when the parties agree?  

 

What was the dispute about, if not the concepts of "right" and "wrong" in which it was framed? 

 

And who, or what, was in dispute in the first place?