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Creating Bridges: Spirituality & Philosophy: The Awakening Generation
War and Peace
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by Ann Marie Judge |
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In past columns, I’ve talked a great deal about change and conflict. Much of this has been on the subject of personal change, individual growth, and inner darkness and conflict. For example, “Darkness and Duality” touched on the idea that there are two kinds of conflict: the Ego Battle—the desire to overpower and inflict pain out of insecurity caused by fear—and Divine Conflict—the desire to grow and change through discourse and healthy opposition.
This month, I want to carry those ideas far, far out; out into society, into culture, and into the world community as a whole.
The Desire for Change
The desire for change and growth doesn’t just happen out of nowhere. People see a problem that has created discordance in their lives and the world, so they rally together and intentionally create conflict in order to resolve the discordance. Sometimes, it’s violent and turns to warring in the “Battle of the Ego”. Other times, it’s social, political, or ideological in form. And then there is the Divine Conflict in which healthy dissemination of thoughts and beliefs occurs.
The common factor in all of this is that there is person or group of people who desire a change, and conflict is an essential part of this process, for better or for worse.
But why do we desire change?
Safety
Humans have desired safety in every form since the birth of our form and our consciousness. Whether it is a physical sense of safety for our body or a need for community and support, it is a very natural—and arguably biological—thing to want to be safe. And now, we not only fight for our own sense of physical and emotional safety, but many of us also fight for the safety of social and cultural groups, and the earth as a whole, such as women’s rights, minority rights, and environmental issues, to name just a few.
Most poignantly, millions upon millions of people and thousands upon thousands of cultures for hundreds of years have grappled with, fought for, and dreamed of the idea of peace. And it’s far from the last thing on our minds as a global culture today. The beauty of the countless groups that exist for the purpose of peace and love is simply inexpressible, indescribable.
In times of peace, it means our bodies are safe—barring “acts of god”—our homes are warm and dry, our children grow up happy and fed, our fields and our careers are thriving and verdant, and our emotions and experiences are flowing and joyous. It is also so natural, it is arguably biological that parents and family desire a world in which their children can grow and thrive, even after they are gone.
But… I am not aware of a period of time in which a culture or community ever achieved total peace and just left it at that.
Peace is Only “Half the Battle”
Humans are incredibly intelligent; often moreso than we give ourselves credit for, in fact. Particularly, we seemed to have duped ourselves into believing that peace and harmony are the only things we desire, and once we achieve it, we will be totally fulfilled.
To the contrary, if history tells us anything about ourselves, it’s that we are probably better at conflict than we are at peace. I don’t think I need to start citing examples of this; most of us recall middle school social studies class well enough to know this!
Modern economics even show us that America does much better as a nation in time of war as we do in time of peace. Besides the last few presidents—since the rallying of peace movements and alternate methods of economic conflict management, among other things—presidential ratings used to skyrocket to the point where they were almost on a “hero” level in the eyes of the American public. People saw a cause and rallied together to oppose it, as it seems is our nature to do.
And we can’t forget all the incredible technological advances that come about in wartime. Wars don’t just bring about new technology in weaponry. They create a tangible “cause,” a very clear goal in which people have an easier time seeing. In other words, rather than just doing something for the sake of bettering it for the people of the nation/world, we had an immediate need, and many rose to the task. In everything from advances in medicine, transportation, communication, and industrial production technology, people saw a very real, very imminent need. By joining together and working towards these things in time of war, people had a good chance to attain a very real goal that would ultimately see fast, tangible results.
After reading all that, some may believe me to be an advocate of war and violence. To the contrary, I see this as falling very clearly under the category of “Ego Battle,” or unhealthy conflict. I see it as the very least effective method of change; if that is the case, think of what could we achieve by using a much healthier form of conflict!
The point is that humans are passionate and driven when they are faced with opposition. In times of personal, communal, national, or world conflict, goals and needs become imminent, and we can clearly see what our efforts would bring about. Even peace movements are in opposition to the idea of violence, war, and suffering.
Without conflict, there could be no peace. Without the perception of non-love, we could not perceive love. To desire only peace is to be floating out in space; when you have nothing to push against, you will keep simply floating in the same direction for all of eternity.
Newton’s Third Law of Motion states, “For every action, there is an equal and an opposite reaction.” Now, I’m no scientist, but I do believe that nature itself echoes humanity and our cycles. Nature tells us again and again through the language of physics that a force does not occur out of nowhere, just as change and growth does not. Anywhere that there is a force acting in one direction, there must be one acting in the opposite direction. Otherwise, the force would simply be pushing against nothing and would be entirely useless.
The “Will of God”
Even more deeply, if you at all believe in any kind of God/Goddess or guiding force of virtually any size, shape, or ideology, it should not be hard to see that if such a force desired only peace, that it would not have been achieved long ago. Our world keeps getting thrown back into chaos whether we want it or not, on every level; even if you spend your whole life in meditation and prayer, you could still fall in a hole!
For that reason, is it not slightly arrogant to believe that we know exactly what the world needs? That every single being on this planet would best learn their individual life lessons in joy and peace? While I consider myself a person very “awake” to the energies moving in the world, I still do not presume to think I know everything that is going on. Nor do I even presume to say that anything that has happened in the past—wars included—were “against the will of God.”
Maybe that’s just a throwback to my young days being raised Christian, but I’ve never understood why people could believe in a guiding force, and then say that this force only wanted them to experience half of the thing it created—such as only peace and not conflict. You never hear people in the movies praying fervently, “Why God? Why is this happening to me?” when their lives are happy and joyous.
The widely-read (and widely parodied) “Why Bad Things Happen to Good People” by Rabbi Harold S. Kushner theorizes that sometimes there are things in life that God simply has no part in, that sometimes life just “happens.”
It surprises me how many people have found comfort in this. The only way I can understand this is that people who have been Jewish or Christian their whole lives, who love their God very much, ultimately do not want to believe that He is capable of hurting them like life sometimes does. That makes complete sense: I don’t want to believe that my mother or father is capable of hurting me, either!
But, the truth is that we so fear the experience of pain and conflict that we have even justified it on a spiritual, cosmic level.
As a human race, we are so good at perceiving our fear of pain that we have built up incredible amounts of books, ideologies, religious theologies, philosophies, cosmologies, and psychologies that justify why we don’t need to go through pain and conflict. The very best of this is still just our endless shelves of publications on “conflict management and resolution.”
And yet, it persists.
“No one soul searches on a sunny day.”
A great shaman I know told me this, and it’s stuck with me ever since. And like many great natural disasters show us, after the fires and the rains and the tornados and the mudslides and the volcanic eruptions, it only means that there is a newly cleared space for life to begin again.
Nature does not judge that death or natural destruction is “bad,” or “good,” it simply repeats the life-death cycle as a pure and natural thing.
I am reminded of a little story of the Buddha that one of my teachers taught me years ago. During one of his many, many lifetimes, he stumbled across a lioness with cubs. She was starving, as were her children, who were trying to drink from her milkless teats. Seeing this, the Buddha offered himself to the lioness so that she and her children could eat and live.
This is much the same as the method of hunting that my stepfather practices. Instead of it being a battle of wits, survival skills, and speed between hunter and hunted, he goes into the woods and meditates. He asks if there is a deer that will give himself over so that my family may be sustained.
Many times a deer will simply come to where my stepfather is and lay down in front of him. He told me that a woman who also hunts in this manner once had two deer come and lie down, so that she could choose between them!
This is a Native American practice that has long gone by the wayside in favor of the battle of the wits, a hunter “overcoming the natural,” outsmarting it in order to chase down and create fear in his prey in order to reign supreme over it.
These examples of offering up life in order that others may be sustained is a perfect example of a world that does not have to exist in ego and trauma for the natural cycle of life-death and peace-conflict to remain. The cycle itself is not unnatural; it has never been unnatural. Our task as humans is not so much to fight the Lesser Jihad—the conflict of the external, but rather the Greater Jihad—the conflict with the ego in order to overcome it and its desires. Muhammed himself emphasized the Greater Jihad, saying “Holy is the warrior who struggles with himself." Islam is not the only religion to support this, either; even Jesus himself emphasized the need to “repent,” or “change direction,” to overcome the lesser desires of the ego.
Nature Just Is
It is not the conflict itself that is the problem; it is what we do with it. Nature just is, life just is, death just is, pain just is… Until we make it something. Whether we use our ego to fight our battles or if we approach opposition as a source of great growth, of making room for new life, the Jihad, the conflict will still exist. It is one of the only things about life that is certain.
Depak Chopra writes, “What does it mean to grow? It means letting life be new at any moment.” And to let things be new, you have to release the old. If you follow the natural course of your being, the conflict will become such that it exists in order to create room for new growth.
Conflict does not exist for nothing. But once you stop trying to force it out of your life and instead welcome it, desire it to be a source of growth, you fill find it is a process that creates great spaces for rebirth and newness. The winter does not exist for its own purposes. It exists so that spring can create newness every passing year.
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Ann Marie Judge
Crystal Child, Student of Life, Spirituality, & Writer
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Ann Marie graduated from high school in 2005. She attended Beloit College in Wisconsin for her freshman year of college and will be attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the spring of 2007 for photography.
Not yet old enough for acronyms at the end of her name, she considers herself a student of life, and has been deeply involved in the spiritual community since her first awakening at the age of twelve. Since then, she has had much education in the metaphysical and spiritual arts by a wide variety of teachers and healers. She was very quickly recognized as a Crystal and Indigo child, as well as a clairvoyant and intuitive.
Because she was able to begin living for the spiritual at a young age, her dream is to reach out through her writing to other young people that are experiencing similar awakenings while still being within the educational system and a society that often does not recognize or nurture young, spiritually-gifted ones. Her vision is to form a community of spiritually-minded young people so that the younger generations will be prepared to be guides and teachers as the spiritual consciousness of the world continues to rise.
Though much of her life is still largely potential, she feels this time in her life is the first step in fulfilling her dream of becoming a published writer so as to serve the children and young people of the world that feel the spiritual stirring within. As well, she hopes to educate parents on how to nurture and understand what is going on in their children's minds from a young person's perspective.
Visit her website at
www.RandomActsof
Literacy.com
to read her works, view
her art, and gain insight into the spiritual experiences of an Awakened young person."
Find the forums at
www.RandomActsof
Literacy.com/forums, as well as a link to it on the navigation of the RAOL homepage.
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