I believe in Peace. Above all else. Peace over everyone, Peace by everyone, Peace within everyone. Alas, many don’t believe in Peace. I understand, but it terrifies me. I shudder to admit that I also believe in hate (we’ve all seen it, we’ve all felt it) and so I know that Peace cannot be for everyone - without revolutionary and hungrily-Divine intervention, that is. In this case, the things that are happening may very well be the things that have to happen: we may be on the verge of the double-handed "Third Great Shaking" of the world of man, to cite a term by the Hopi First Nations people; a double-edged sword that shatters realities on one side and creates mysterious new realities on the other.

It would be easier to find Peace (of mind) in times of probable war and increased global instability if we did not feel so much. But integral to the development of human affairs is the capacity to feel. Human beings feel, and actions are fueled by feeling. Feelings are both spiritual and scientific. Humans are increasingly smart, astonishingly capable of an ever widening number of things, and with this, feelings can make angels and feelings can make monsters.

Beliefs are ethereal, but they are the fuel for our feelings. Psychologist Alfred Adler pointed to the belief system of a person as being the wellspring of human emotion. A person becomes emotional around things that impact their beliefs in some way. Depending on what each of us is taught to believe, today we are either fearful and hateful and urging conflict and violent justice, or we are pleading with our hearts, for an end to human destiny being shaped by military thinking.

This is an image that I can't put aside: a hypothetical one in which my family home is near some equivalent of a decimated Iraq or Afganistan landscape. Thanks to modern military technology, that land is now contaminated with deadly nuclear radiation, a contamination that will last for the span of millennia. So much for the Sunday afternoon drives. The Iraqi oil fields are ablaze, visible from outer space, choking out the sun and poisoning air and land around the globe. My relatives are desperate and often sick, rates of child mortality and birth defects are counted in thousands over the past ten years, let alone the empty medicine chests in the hospitals, the diminishing of uncontaminated water, the failing of every social and public system. I will watch children grow up in this frightening world, as they've done under previous warring conditions, knowing, some day, that justice will be sought for their misery and the education they lack. I myself have felt so miserable for so long and I cry silently every hour.

If that's not enough, I then imagine so many people crying and suffering. Imagine animals, forests, oceans, creatures of every sort made sick and dying. And I realize that to believe in Peace, one must be crying out in pain along with them. To meditate on what a loss it is to have all this sacred life devastated, raped, snuffed out. Even if it is a so-called Divine unfolding.

Let it now be said that no matter how much propoganda is created to bolster the image of American policy, it is deeply flawed. Today it is impossible for military might to solve the weighty problems we face - because military might and blind patriotism are the weighiest. God is the ONLY One who can dare take credit for any of this, the pain of our brethren, of our planet. For God gave us the power to make choices, sometimes choices that are entirely wrong.

This American crusade to eliminate "evil" has nothing to do with the American Dream, and everything to do with fear and greed in the face of ensuing natural disaster. There is no glory for America this time. America will die screaming. We are too smart now and a twisted vision of "freedom supreme" cannot restrain spiritual progress and the expiring of our need to war. Cowboys can no longer run the world of humanity. Because the Earth herself BELIEVES in PEACE, HARMONY AND BALANCE.

People: Examine your beliefs. Re-fuel your beliefs with awareness and compassion. Feel your beliefs, and believe your feelings. Hold onto your Faith that there is a brighter future, after the "Shaking" and the shattering of realities; a future where lessons have been learned and integrated world-wide as components of a wondrous and constructive, protective and creative, all embracing array of common spiritual values. How to live, how to love, how to grow, how to heal, how to flourish in diversity.  

 

ps: Stop burning fossil fuels. Stop burning fossil fuels. Stop burning fossil fuels.