Changing the World

You must be the change

You expect to see in the world.

~~Gandhi~~

Western Civilization

Gandhi was once asked

What he thought about western civilization.
His response was: "I think it would be a good idea".

War is a Mind-Set

In certain cases, you may need to protect yourself or someone else from being harmed by another, but beware of making it your mission to "eradicate evil", as you are likely to turn into the very thing you are fighting against.

Fighting unconsciousness will draw you into unconsciousness yourself. Unconsciousness, dysfunctional egoic behavior, can never be defeated by attacking it. Even if you defeat your opponent, the unconsciousness will simply have moved into you, or the opponent reappears in a new disguise. Whatever you fight, you strengthen, and what you resist, persists.

These days you frequently hear the expression "the war against" this or that, and whenever I hear it, I know that it is condemned to failure. There is war against drugs, the war against crime, the war against terrorism, the war against cancer, the war against poverty, and so on.

For example, despite the war against crime and drugs, there has been a dramatic increase in crime and drug related offenses in the past twenty-five years. The prison population of the United States has gone up from just under 300,000 in 1980 to a staggering 2.1 million in 2004.

The war against disease has given us, amongst other things, antibiotics. At first, they were spectacularly successful, seemingly enabling us to win the war against infectious diseases. Now, many experts agree that the widespread and indiscriminate use of antibiotics has created a time bomb and that antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria, so-called super bugs, will in all likelihood bring about a reemergence of those diseases and possibly epidemics. According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, medical treatment is the third-leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer in the United States.

War is a mind-set, and all actions that comes out of such a mind-set will either strengthen the enemy, the perceived evil, or if the war is won, will create a new enemy, a new evil equal to and often worse than the one that was defeated. There is a deep interrelatedness between your state of consciousness and external reality. When you are in the grip of a mind-set such as "war", your perceptions become extremely selective as well as distorted. In other words, you will see only what you want to see and then misinterpret it. You can imagine what kind of action comes out of such a delusional system. Or instead of imagining it, watch the news on TV tonight.

~~Eckhart Tolle~~

Love, And Do What You Will

Laws, commandments, rules, and regulations

Are necessary for those who are cut off

From who they are, the Truth within.

They prevent the worst excesses of the ego,

And often they don't even do that.

"Love, and do what you will," said St. Augustine.

Words cannot get much closer to the Truth than that.

~~Eckhart Tolle~~

Conflict Nourishes the Ego

The content of the ego varies from person to person, but in every ego the same structure operates. In other words: egos only differ on the surface. Deep down they are all the same.

In what way are they the same? They all live on identification and separation.

When you live through a mind-made self comprised of thought and emotion that is the ego, the basis for your identity is precarious because thought and emotion are by their very nature ephemeral, fleeting. So every ego is continuously struggling for survival, trying to protect and enlarge itself.

To uphold the I-thought, it needs the opposite thought of "the other". The conceptual "I" cannot survive without the conceptual "other". The others are most other when I see them as my enemies.

At one end of the scale of this unconscious egoic pattern lies the egoic compulsive habit of faultfinding and complaining about others. Jesus referred to it when he said, "Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?"

At the other end of the scale, there is physical violence between individuals and warfare between nations. In the Bible, Jesus' question remains unanswered, but the answer is, of course: Because when I criticize or condemn another, it makes me feel bigger, superior.

~~Eckhart Tolle~~

Search for the culprit within.
The ideas of 'me' and 'mine'
Are at the root of all conflict.
Be free of them
And you will be out of conflict.

~~Nisargadatta~~

Worry

Can any of you, by worrying,

Add a single hour

To the span of your life?

Matthew 6:27

Article 51 of the UN Charter and Self Defense

The language of this article is restrictive: "Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures to maintain international peace and security." However, a threatened State, according to long established international law, can take military action as long as the threatened attack is imminent, no other means would deflect it and the action is proportionate. The problem arises where the threat in question is not imminent but still claimed to be real: for example the acquisition, with allegedly hostile intent, of nuclear weapons-making capability.

Can a State, without going to the Security Council, claim in these circumstances the right to act, in anticipatory self-defense, not just pre-emptively (against an imminent or proximate threat) but preventively (against a non-imminent or non-proximate one)? Those who say "yes" argue that the potential harm from some threats (e.g. terrorists armed with a nuclear weapon) is so great that one simply cannot risk waiting until they become imminent, and that less harm may be done (e.g. avoiding a nuclear exchange or radioactive fallout from a reactor destruction) by acting earlier.

The short answer is that if there are good arguments for preventive military action, with good evidence to support them, they should be put to the Security Council, which can authorize such action if it chooses to. If it does not so choose, there will be, by definition, time to pursue other strategies, including persuasion, negotiation, deterrence and containment -- and to visit again the military option.

For those impatient with such a response, the answer must be that, in a world full of perceived potential threats, the risk to the global order and the norm of non-intervention on which it continues to be based is simply too great for the legality of unilateral preventive action, as distinct from collectively endorsed action, to be accepted. Allowing one to so act is to allow all.

We do not favour the rewriting or reinterpretation of Article 51.

The UN High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change

December 2004 Report