Rest in Peace

All of the media seemed to think that the Gaza story was the big one yesterday. I could not forget the image of the young Israeli girl talking about how they had conquered these lands fair and square and they should not give them up. She even said, what do you expect us to do? Go back to 1947? The announcer spoke about their right to own the land based on prophesy. Her father was surely one of those in the back of the frame in religious garb praying fervently.

The other story was the red neck who got a chain and a pickup and decided it was a real good idea to mow down those memorial crosses with the names of the slain soldiers on them. Cindy had placed them along the road to the POTUS's ranch in Crawford.

Then, I heard someone say on national TV news that the Islamo- fascist want to take over the world and set up a grand caliphate that would take away our freedoms and make us all live like the Taliban. He said that we must defend ourselves from these oppressive forces who would take away our very way of life and that to cut and run in Iraq would only embolden these oppressive forces.

That reminded me of something I had just read in Rigorous Intuition.

Here is an excerpt from William Shirer's journal entry for August 10, 1939:

"How completely isolated a world the German people live in. A glance at the newspapers yesterday and today reminds you of it. Whereas all the rest of the world considers that the peace is about to be broken by Germany, that it is Germany that is threatening to attack Poland over Danzig, here in Germany, in the world the local newspapers create, the very reverse is being maintained. (Not that it surprises me, but when you are away for a while, you forget.)

What the Nazi papers are proclaiming is this: that it is Poland which is disturbing the peace of Europe; Poland which is threatening Germany with armed invasion, and so forth. This is the Germany of last September when the steam was turned on Czechoslavakia.

You ask: But the German people can't possibly believe these lies?

Then you talk to them. So many do. "

Today, the average American believes it is acceptable to take a military gun and kill your adversary. He believes it is acceptable to use precision tomahawk missiles on urban populations. He believes it is acceptable for a superior occupying army to lay seige on a town of 375,000 and practically level it. It is acceptable to use torture. It is acceptable to lie to your citizens and whip them into a frenzy of fear.

Daily, we bathe in a set of beliefs and concepts that make this kind of thinking and behavior acceptable.

Clearly, bathing in this kind of thinking will not bring us to Peace, no matter how long we scrub.

Here is a small part of J Krishnamurti's address to the UN as he received the Peace Medal in 1984.

"The present is not only the past, but also contains the future; the past modifying itself constantly through the present and projecting the future.

If we don't stop quarrels, struggles, antagonism, hate, now it will be like that tomorrow. And you can stretch out that tomorrow for a thousand years, it will be still tomorrow.

So it behoves us to ask ourselves whether we, as human beings, single or a community, or in a family, whether we can live peacefully with each other? Organizations have not solved this problem. You can reorganize but war still goes on.

So organizations, whether it is world organization or a particular kind of organization to bring about peace, such organizations will never succeed because human beings individually, collectively, nationally, are in conflict.

So peace cannot possibly exist on this earth if there are nationalities, which, as we said, is glorified tribalism. Nationalities give certain security, man needs security and he invests in nationalism, or in a particular ideology or belief.

Beliefs, ideologies and so on, have separated man. And organizations cannot possibly bring about peace between man and man because he believes in something, he believes in certain ideologies, he believes in god and others don't.

And we are asking deeply, if you are serious at all, whether you and I, and those of us who are involved in organizations, can live at peace with each other?

Peace requires a great deal of intelligence, not just demonstrations against a particular form of war, against a nuclear or atom bomb and so on. Those are the products of minds, brains that are entrenched in nationalism, in some particular form of belief, ideology, so they are supplying armaments - the powerful ones, whether it be Russia, America, or England or France - armaments to the rest of the world, and they also talk about peace, supplying at the same time armaments.

So there can only be peace when mankind, when you and I, have no conflict in ourselves. And you might say, "If one achieves, or comes to an end of all conflict within oneself, how will it affect the rest of mankind?"

If one applies, looks, observes, with great attention, as you look with considerable attention when you are combing your hair, or shaving, with that quality of attention, heightened, you can observe yourself - all the nuances, subtleties.

And the mirror is your relationship between human beings, in that mirror you can see yourself exactly as you are. But most of us are frightened to see what we are, and so we gradually develop resistance, guilt, and all the rest of that business.

So we never ask for total freedom - not to do what you like, but to be free from choice.

Where there are multiple choices there are multiple confusions.

If you have been going north all the days of your life, as humanity has been going in a particular direction, which is conflict, and somebody comes along and says, "That leads nowhere". He is serious, and perhaps you are serious.

Then he says, "Go south, go east, any other direction but that". And when you actually move away from that direction there is a mutation in the very brain cells themselves because you have broken the pattern.

And that pattern must be broken now, not forty or a hundred years later.

Can human beings have the vitality, the energy, to transform themselves to civilized human beings, not killing each other?

Perhaps in this case,

We should throw the baby out,

with the bathwater.

For the Earthfamily.


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