This reflection is entitled...

On Love and War

It is isolation that is critical to war. You can't be abusive when you realize your connectedness _{- David Kadlec}

The great dilemma of our times is that America is at odds with the great coming together of mankind.

Europe is creating a great nation state and America is isolating itself with its Cheney/Bush unilateral preemptive neo-conservative war agenda.

As such, we are disconnected from the world ~ we are the last holdout.

It was Teilhard de Chardin who wrote:

" If there were no real propensity to unite, even at a prodigiously rudimentary level, indeed, even in the molecule itself ~ it would be physically impossible for love to appear higher up in the 'hominized' or human form."

It is ego consciousness that negates this universal urge to unite and we, as a nation, are still embedded in that cocoon of separateness and isolation ~ from which only love and connectedness can free us.

My friend Rita Corriel puts it this way:

" For me, the antichrist is all that negates the 'connecting principle'..It is the 'anti heart', we might say. It is that which creates alienation. Supposedly, Dante described 'hell' as a place where "nothing connects to nothing ".

With our illegal and brutal occupation of Iraq are we not approaching a hell ~ where nothing connects to nothing.

Listen to the poetic words of Manuel Valenzuela as he describes war ~

" For war – that human weakness created by warmongering leaders that send to battle the mostly young, ignorant, easily manipulated, testosterone-filled members of the lower castes of any one tribe – unleashes in human beings a most vicious animal from the deepest reaches of our psyches. The primordial necessity to kill, the hunger to maim and rape, the desire to inflict pain and suffering is therefore reborn, free to act indiscriminately, away from the menacing glow of the rule of law and the watchful eye of humanity. "

Have we not created a hell in Iraq ? Valenzuela thinks so:

" Welcome to Hell on Earth, where the devil’s excrement bleeds black and the neocon delusion dwindles into twilight. Welcome to state-sponsored terrorism breeding unending crimes against humanity, where torture has replaced torture, where human evil has replaced human evil and where tyranny has replaced tyranny. Welcome to the American Crusade and Iraq Invasion, where 100,000 innocent civilians have died, in a year and a half, at the hands of the military-industrial-complex and the killing machines it trains to push, aim, fire, direct, guide and launch its weapons of death, carnage, destruction and human misery. Welcome to Fallujah, where bombs and missiles rain down from the heavens above and cold-blooded monsters on a wanton murdering spree roam hellish streets below. "

Only love can reach the taproot beneath the primordial necessity to kill because love and the urge to unite is not only deepest within ourselves ~ it is also the driving force of evolution and we resist it at our peril.

AND THIS IS THE TRUTH THAT SHALL SET EVERYTHING ABLAZE:

The basic underlying and uniting force of the Universe is a psychic energy field of love and soul consciousness ( the Unified Field ) which lies not only beyond time and space but also beneath our deepest fears .

As such, God is love ~ an evolutionary connecting and uniting process with which we all participate as co-creators.

I have proved this truth in my own personal life and in my work, as a psychotherapist, with my clients ~ but we, as a nation, have yet to surrender to this innate relentless pull to connect and unite.

Richard Leakey spoke of this urge to unite and cooperate in The Beginnings of Mankind when he wrote " that there was no evidence that cruelty and hostility were innate in early man. On the contrary, all the evidence is for non-violence and cooperation. "

The June 1995 issue of Scientific American featured an article titled The Arithmetics of Mutual Help in which it shared that computer experiments conclusively show how cooperation rather than exploitation can dominate in the Darwinian struggle for survival ... " In the course of evolution, there appears to have been ample opportunity for cooperation to have assisted everything from humans to molecules. In a sense, cooperation could be older than life itself. "

And what else but love and this innate urge to unite could be older than life itself.

But I am not alone in singing this song of connectedness, love and hope.

Chris Hedges, award winning human rights journalist, makes this same point in his interview with Sarah Ruth Van Gelder in the Winter 2005 edition of YES Magazine: www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?id=1165

SARAH: " In your book, you say, “Lurking beneath the surface of every society, including ours, is the passionate yearning for a nationalist cause that exalts us ... the kind that war alone is able to deliver.” That yearning suggest that we’re always going to be either at war or on the brink of war. Do you see any forces that can temper that tendency? "

CHRIS: " The only force that is powerful enough to subvert the force of war is love. Love is never organized. Love is always individual love. Love is a force that is built between two human beings. In wartime, everything is done to subvert that force.

I don’t know that there’s an organized force that can stand up to the allure of war, which gives us a sense of empowerment—allows us to be part of a cause, to ennoble ourselves, to rise above our small stations in life.

The need to find meaning like that, I think, is an indication of the huge deficit of our emotional life. In conflict after conflict, those who are able to remain sane, who were never able to hate the perfidious enemy (who, in places like the Balkans, were often their neighbors), were those who had good relationships, those who were in love."

So in wartime, everything is done to subvert the force of love but in the end ~ only love prevails.

We cannot escape our destiny and it is divine.

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