This article is an expanded version of an Instagram Live talk I recently did with Helena Rosenthal, where she invited me to take a yogic angle on the recent wars. The hour-long video is now available on YouTube here, however I received a lot of requests to elaborate further on some topics I could only skim over in the live broadcast. So here is the expanded version or directors cut.
In this expanded article I will analyse the historical, spiritual, psychological and political implications of 5000 years of permanent warfare. As to my qualification to talk about these subjects (today almost everybody does but often from an insufficient knowledge base), prior to my university courses in comparative religion and philosophy I also studied 7 semesters of history. Between those two courses I completed one of only four years of a training as a therapist in drug rehabilitation.
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I did not complete my university course in history because humanities history over the last five to ten-thousand years is an endless, monotonous procession of battlefields, conquests, butcheries, atrocities, and permanent warfare. Until recently evidence of systemic warfare (i.e. extended campaigns with a definite objective rather than just skirmishes as they occur between indigenous people) was accepted to be 3500years old. Some time back mass graves were discovered in Spain that led to systematic warfare being backdated to 5000 years old. I expect the advent of systemic warfare to be backdated more and more but for yogis the number 5000 years of course rings a bell. According to the Mahabharata and the Puranas 5000 years ago started the Kali Yuga (age of darkness) and one of its parameters was to be permanent warfare among people.
Each war begets 2 to 3 other wars to address shifting power imbalances. There is of course the belief that war leads to peace. An example is the wrong connotation that WW2 lead to any sort of lasting peace. What it did create was not peace but a balance of terror. Out of the ashes of WW2 rose two empires, the American and the Soviet, who through their nuclear weapons became so powerful that they could destroy the entire humanity a thousand times over. This threat has never been eliminated but continues to simmer and even increases through nuclear proliferation. Great Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan and Israel have joined the ranks of the US and Russia as nuclear powers and North Korea and Iran are about to do so or have already.
Because a direct nuclear conflict would have destroyed both the USA and USSR (and the rest of us with them), WW2 continued in the form of non-stop proxy wars. The wars in Korea, Vietnam, (the US entered both in an attempt to stop the spread of communism in Asia promoted the USSR and China), consecutive wars involving Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria (wars involving access to fossil fuels between the US on one hand and Russian/ China on the other), over an endless string of military coups, civil wars and dictatorships in South America and Africa (over competing market access and resource exploitation between the US on one hand and the Soviet Union/ Russia and now China on the other) and the breakup of Yugoslavia and resulting civil wars, to the current conflicts in Ukraine and Israel/ Palestine.
I will briefly outline how these two wars fit into the already established pattern of continued WW2 adversary before I present my main theses and hopeful solutions. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989/90, Russia and the countries of the former Warsaw Convention (such as Poland, Romania, Czech Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria, etc.) and then also former member states of the Soviet Union (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, etc.) gradually drifted out of the ambit of Russia, which during the last decade of the 20th century was highly unstable. Most of these countries (with the exception of Belarus) applied for entry of either the EU or NATO (or both) and who could blame them after surviving 70 years of Soviet dictatorship. Both EU and NATO where happy to expand eastwards as it increased their power and economic heft and stability. And again who could blame them.
Realize that in these conflicts it is not just Russians and Ukrainians and Israelis and Palestinians respectively fighting against each other. The country in which you live has a vital stake in which direction these wars go. In one way or another we are all partisan and are all involved merely by our countries being members of the American-European empire on one hand and the Russo-Chinese empire on the other, both with their shifting assortment of allies.
We need to learn to recognize narcissistic psychopathy in our leaders. It means that they are only interested in themselves and not in the nation they are pretending to lead. They talk about nation because they realize that this keeps them in power. They are happy to sacrifice any amount of their own people and any amount of other nationalities because they realize that stoking the conflict between self and others keeps them in power.
As a one-state solution, i.e. Israelis and Palestinians living together in one state, is increasingly unlikely, most efforts today focus on the two-state solution, i.e. giving each nation its own sovereign territory. A plausible model that is recently discussed involves the withdrawal of the Israeli army from the West Bank and Gaza, the restoration of both territories to their 1967 borders (both conditions painful for Israel), the demilitarisation of both Palestinian territories and their safeguarding established through an international peace keeping force (both conditions painful for Palestine and for the international community, too).
As long as both sides do not come together and accept conditions that are inherently painful for both, a solution of this conflict is impossible. Even if both sides agree it would be difficult to find nations that would send and pay for a peace-keeping force. Be aware that the country of your residence would be involved, too, and you will probably have to pay taxes towards maintaining such a peace-keeping force. The current problem is that to many major global geo-political players see both Israel and Palestine as pawns in their quest of world domination. An important part in creating a peaceful solution is to make clear to the populations of Israel and Palestine that it is they who have the most to lose if wars continue to recur.
All of these points are interconnected and important for my following attempt to delve into the psychological and spiritual implications of warfare. We need to understanding that these recent wars are not isolated occurrences but more part of a complex global game of chess with four major players and up to a hundred minor players. We all are involved.
At heart of all conflict are adversarialism and antagonism. Notice how whenever large crowds get together they usually do so through adversarialism and antagonism. The Olympic Games feature nations and athletes competing against each other, outdoing and thwarting each other. We are supposed to feel good if our nation rises up in the medals table. Football, rugby or cricket world cups are modern versions of ritualized tribal warfare. Sports such as boxing or mixed-martial arts (aka cage fighting) draw humungous crowds despite being barely concealed descendants of Roman gladiator tournaments.
Why now is adversarialism and antagonism so widespread that it forms together with competition and ambition the framework on which the fabric of our society is woven? It is because each individual one of us is deeply in conflict with themselves. Because we are not taught the tools to make peace with ourselves, our inner conflict is extrapolated as permanent conflict between self and other.
This inner conflict, this constant struggle with ourselves, is naturally something that we cannot win. As a survival strategy, the aspects of ourselves we struggle with are then externalised on others and fought against there. If we are fighting against the Jews, the Muslims, the Russians, the unemployed, the dole-bludgers, the orcs, the trolls or whoever it is, we are really fighting against a part of ourselves that we cannot admit to, that we cannot look into the eye because it has no space in our Neo-Darwinist, GDP-adoring religion.
Externalizstion of inner conflict can go to extreme lengths. A prime example is the Nazi Holocaust on the Jews. When I studied history in Germany one of the main themes of the course was to analyse and explain how a previously reasonably civilised nation could descent into industrialised mass murder of a whole people with whom they had lived together quite harmoniously and successfully for more than 1000 years (large Ashkenazim communities existed in the Rhineland already in 800CE).
Inner self-loathing and lack of self-esteem is of course not limited to Germans and Russians. It is present in all nations who have pursued colonial conquest, large empires and control of nature, landscapes, the biosphere and its own population. In other words all the nations that are the so-called success stories of the last few thousand years, all dominator cultures are to a large extent fuelled by lack of self-love.
When I use the term self-love and self-acceptance I do not mean anything that requires us to do something or to become somebody. It rather is a spiritual state in which we can sit and totally embrace who we are in essence, called the purusha or atman in the yogic texts, and sit in the presence of that and let it radiate out to our surface personality. If our surface personality is transformed to become more loving, supportive and live-affirmative with all and everything we meet, then the experience was successful, otherwise not. Yoga Sutra II.27 states that there are two major stages to be traversed through (divided in total into seven sub-stages but they are not necessary for the purpose of this elucidation). Importantly, they are called freedom from the mind and freedom from doing. Freedom from the mind because it is the mind that holds us in the robotic programming of the past (individually expressed as lack of self-esteem and collectively expressed as racial hatred, etc.). Freedom from doing means that we can reach that stage only by going beyond doing and moving into being. That means to stop (going to the shopping centre to buy that next gadget or jumping on that horse to conquer Persepolis) and just be. This is of course not just a question of spontaneously flicking a switch in the mind but it is preceded by spiritual practice (such as yoga). 152ee80cbc
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