It is Monday morning. A mild day, at the beginning of March. I’m sitting at my desk looking at the trees along the railroad tracks in Görlitz, a town on the German-Polish border. I have lived here with my wife for fifteen years. After a turbulent and painful life, I have grown old and quiet. Now it is beautiful. I have arrived. In this old city. With this smart, strong woman. In these tasks that I love and consider important. On the way here, I met many people. They came to me because they wanted to change themselves and their lives. They gave me their trust and gave me their mistakes and insights, their knowledge and their feelings. Maybe they helped me more than I helped them. I’ve said goodbye to my childhood over the years, on and off. There is peace within me. Now.

What am I writing for? There are too many wars in the world. Within families. Between cultures. Against nature. Against oneself. All this I can only bear if I deliver to you, dear reader, a small contribution for a mutual and peaceful understanding. Every behavior has causes and goals. We can and must reject and understand everything destructive at the same time. A few years ago, my appeal was “See the human being behind everything”. It was and is important to me to see through the facades of rage, hectic, destruction and despair and to recognize what people are really about. I know that the appreciation of the inner diversity and the forces at work in our souls leads to an inner and outer peace.

Hermann Hesse wrote about this diversity: “In reality, however, no ego, not even the most naive, is a unity, but a highly diverse world, a small starry sky, a chaos of forms, of stages and states, of heritages and possibilities. As a body every human being is one, as a soul never… - Our destiny is to recognize the opposites correctly, first as opposites, but then as poles of a unity…. The unity which I adore behind the diversity is not a boring one, not a gray, thoughtful, theoretical unity. It is life itself, full of play, full of pain, full of laughter.” (Hesse, Steppenwolf, 1987).

To understand how we can unify this diversity, it helps me what C.G.Jung said: The opposition problem is a system inherent in human nature…. There is no equilibrium and no system with self-regulation without opposition. But the psyche is a system of self-regulation. (Jung, Collected Works VII, 1926).

Without inner conflict, there is no behavior. It is time to bring the conflicting parties within us to the negotiating table. …