Headline
In what an International New York Times editorial called a change of views that is “startling,” one of Japan’s most poplar former leaders is calling for a total ban on the use of nuclear power in that nation.
Junichiro Koizumi, who served as his country’s top official from 2001 to 2006, was “an enthusiastic proponent of cheap and clean nuclear power,” the Times lead editorial on Oct. 15 noted. Now, the newspaper said, he is completely and unequivocally against it.
The remarkable reversal comes in the aftermath of the international calamity two and a half years ago at the Fukushima nuclear power plant — the effects of which are still being felt by people around the world.
An official Japanese legislative investigation concluded that the disaster was man-made, and polls in Japan show that a majority of its citizens oppose nuclear power, but that hasn’t stopped the government of current Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (often thought of as Mr. Koizumi’s protégé) from approving policies that would reopen as many nuclear power plants as soon as possible.
Such plants, now all shut down following the Fukushima catastrophe, dot the Japanese coastline from north to south — a coastline that the Japanese government itself estimates stands a 60 to 70 percent probability of suffering another massive earthquake and tsunami within the next 30 years, the Times editorial notes.
While the present government supports reopening those plants, Mr. Koizumi staunchly and surprisingly (given his past strong support for nuclear energy) opposes any such thing. Even as Prime Minister Abe asserts that nuclear power is essential for economic growth — something his country is said to badly need after an extended period of economic stagnation — Mr. Koizumi says that nuclear power is not required to produce such growth. Indeed, he says, exactly the opposite may be true.
The Times editorial points out that the former prime minister offers a compelling argument that if a zero nuclear policy were embraced by the government, Japan “would come together in the creation of a recyclable society unseen in the world.” This alone would spark a major economic recovery, he asserts.
Whether or not a zero nuclear policy would be good for the economy, there are those in Japan who argue that it is necessary for the safety of their nation — and of the world.
The government led by Chancellor Angela Merkel in Germany has already made such a determination, declaring many months ago that Fukushima was the last straw for nuclear energy, that it wasn’t worth the risks to all humankind to use such means of meeting energy needs, that new and alternative forms of energy production (including increased use of wind and solar power) would be utilized, and that all nuclear plants in Germany would be closed permanently. The public in Germany cheered wildly.
It is, perhaps, time for a serious worldwide discussion of nuclear energy, with a look at whatever people feel are the pros and cons — and so we invite that exploration here in The Global Conversation. The Japanese Diet has not so far had any such serious debate on the issue, and other nations as well (not least, the United States) have pretty much avoided making nuclear power a political issue — though it may be one of the most important matters involving the body politic of our time.
We invite and encourage your views below. We will forward your comments to officials in both the Japanese Diet and the United States Congress — and to any other legislative body in the world that you suggest.
Let the global conversation begin.
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UDATE OCT 25: Elizabeth Chuck, Staff Writer for NBC News, has reported that “a 7.3-magnitude earthquake shook Japan early Saturday,” according to the U.S. Geological Survey. “The quake was off the Fukushima region of Japan, 231 miles east off the island of Honshu. It was 6.2 miles deep, officials said, hit at 3:10 a.m. Saturday local time and was felt 300 miles away in Tokyo,” Ms. Chuck’s report said.
“The Japan Meteorological Agency reported a one-foot tsunami was observed after it issued a yellow-colored warning Saturday morning, meaning a small tsunami could reach the coast at Fukushima, site of Japan’s 2011 nuclear power plant disaster,” the NBC report additionally noted. The full report can be found at here.
The biggest mystery of life has to do with what human beings call “reality.”
What is “reality,” anyway? It is a static thing, based on “facts”? Or is it a fluid thing, based on individual interpretation of those “facts”?
Most people agree that reality is fluid, changing from person to person. This is captured in the ancient observation: One person’s treasure is another person’s trash.
If two people can look at the same set of facts and see entirely different things, then what is “real” and what is not?
A great many politicians in Washington D.C. are trying to figure that out right now. Most of the world knows that there is a huge squabble going on there right now over what is called Obamacare — or, more formally, the Affordable Care Act.
A cohort of highly conservative members of the Republican Party in the U.S. claims that the new health-care-for-all law passed two years ago will be the ruination of America. Most Democrats, meanwhile, believe that it is long since past time that such civilizing legislation was passed and such a humane program put into place in what both parties claim to be one of the greatest nations on Earth.
Members of both parties are looking at the same data and the same country and coming up with entirely different realities. Yet if “reality” is a subjectively created thing and not an objectively observed thing, the solution to this present political conflict in Washington would be to be collaboratively creative.
So, too, would this be the solution to all the conflicts — armed and unarmed, political and military, economic and social/spiritual — all over the planet.
Such a thing appears, however, to be too much to ask of people who feel they have too much to lose by stepping one inch away from their staked out positions. People remaining stubbornly and utterly inflexible in their views and absolutely unyielding in their demands make collaboration impossible to achieve…and that is pretty much the nature of things in our world today. We are a species lingering at stalemate.
Is there anything — anything at all — that can change this? An entirely new Cultural Story could and would do it. A New Idea about Who We Are (Humans, that is) and Why We Are Here (on Earth, that is) and The Purpose of It All (Life, that is) is the answer — but from where would such a new idea emerge? And who would help spread it? And who would listen to it?
The answer to the last question is: everybody. Everybody on the planet would listen to it if they felt that it offered a New Way to Be Human that was possible, viable, feasible, workable, practical, and achievable.
I believe that the 1,000 Words That Would Change the World from Conversations with God — found lower in the right-hand column of this online newspaper — would be a good place to start. Will you take a moment to read those 1,000 words? Will you then consider becoming part of the Evolution Revolution?
Let me know. We can do something quite extraordinary here. People have done extraordinary things before. Let’s go. Let’s do it again. Let’s start A Conversation That Could Change The World.
As nearly everyone in the world now surely knows, the government of the United States has been shut down by the U.S. Congress after its House of Representatives and Senate failed to come to an agreement on a budget that would have kept it open for business.
Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives have said they will not approve an annual budget for the government unless and until the controversial Affordable Care Act (known more widely in some circles as Obamacare) is completely defunded, or its implementation is delayed for a year.
Democrats have said that, as U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren put it: “It’s time to end the debate about whether the Affordable Care Act should exist and whether it should be funded. Congress voted for this law. President Obama signed this law. The Supreme Court upheld this law. The President ran for reelection on this law. His opponent said he would repeal it — and his opponent lost by five million votes.”
Given the above, many Americans are left wondering, Is this fair? The law was passed, the Supreme Court approved, the American people voted against the candidate who said he would repeal it on his first day in office — what more is needed to end this debate?
Having lost in the previous Obamacare debate when the health law was originally passed by Congress, having lost before the Supreme Court where it unsuccessfully challenged the law’s constitutionality, and having lost at the polls in the last presidential election, the far right wing of the GOP has now decided to stop the entire government from operating if the Tea Party and its followers don’t get what they want anyway and see the new health law, which took affect today, repealed or delayed for a another year.
For their part, Democrats have said there will be no repeal of Obamacare and no delay in its implementation — but that they would be ready and willing to negotiate improvements in the law, including some of the ideas suggested by the GOP regarding certain taxes that are slated to be instituted to fund it. Yet Democrats have insisted that they will not negotiate “with a gun to our heads.” They have called the GOP’s forced government shutdown not negotiation, but “extortion.”
The spiritual opportunity here is for both sides in this debate to move toward the highest good for all people (it is questionable that shutting down the government would be that), and for both sides to see their particular approach as not the only way, but simply another way to resolve the Obamacare disagreement.
Then they might take a pure, clean, and honest look to see if they can find a method of resolution that is distinctly different from the ones both sides are now employing as they position themselves around the health care issue. Yet the larger question remains: Is it fair for a minority of those both in Congress and in the United States at large to push their country into fiscal chaos in order to advance their agenda even though they’ve lost the argument three times already in every other forum available?
Is humanity creating it own reality?
Yes, say most of the spiritual teachers on the planet. Yes, they have been saying for a very long time. (“As you believe, so will it be done unto you.”) Thinking is the tool given to us to deal with events and circumstances, and thinking is the creative force that generates them.
Life will be experienced by each of us in the way that we think about its events—and the way that we think about its events collectively creates those events themselves.
The collaborative creation of our exterior reality on the Earth and the individual creation of our interior reality is a two-fold expression of Life’s Essential Energy that packs more wallop than I observe that most people understand. Because we do not understand this, humanity thinks that what is happening through us is actually happening to us. That is, we think we are the victims of some “other-than-us” — and thus uncontrollable — force.
Most humans have not yet learned the most fundamental aspects of life on Earth. Most people do not understand, for instance, that an event and one’s reality about that event are not the same thing.
Yet Conversations with God tells us an an event is one thing; your reality of it is another. Events are created by conditions and occurrences outside of you. Reality is created by conditions and occurrences inside of you—in your mind.
It is here that events are turned into data, which are turned into truths, which are turned into thoughts, which are turned into emotions, which are turned into experiences, which form your reality.
And the reality that you form within your Self can and does play its effect on all of the outside, or exterior, surfaces of your life. This is because energy affects energy — so how you think about a thing impacts the thing itself. Or as quantum physicists have said: Nothing that is observed is unaffected by the observer.
Now let me put those elements I just mentioned above in a straight line, with plus and equal signs placed strategically between them, so that you can have a way to visualize this. This allows us to focus in on the process of reality-creation a little more sharply.
As I observe it, that process works like this…
event+data+truth+thought+emotion=experience=reality
I call this the Line of Causality. This is the path the Mind travels on its way to producing your reality.
You’ll notice that on this line, Emotion comes before Experience, and produces it. Thought, likewise, comes before Emotion, and gives birth to it. Truth comes before Thought, and gives birth to that. And our prior Data about any event forms the foundation of our Truth.
FOCUS: The Nature of God and Life/an exploration of critical importance in our time
PART VI of an ONGOING SERIES
What the line does not show is that there are three kinds of truth. This is more than a little important to know, because it is the existence of these three kinds of truth that lead to the possibility of more than one Reality being created by you regarding any particular event. Those three Realities include the Distorted Reality, the Observed Reality, and the Ultimate Reality.
Put another way, if there was only one kind of truth, there would be but a single reality.
The three kinds of truth are…
- The Actual Truth
- The Apparent Truth
- The Imagined Truth
These are what I have called the Mechanics of the Mind. For right now, know that it’s really as simple as A-B-C. Each step away from “A” in the Truth Table above takes you farther from peace.
If peace is what you are searching for during this moment of change and turmoil in your life, if peace is that for which you yearn, you will want to journey upward from Imagined Truth to Apparent Truth to Actual Truth, so that you may shift your basis from Distorted Reality to Observed Reality to Ultimate Reality.
This is what personal and global transformation is all about. This is what every human who we have honored with the name of Master has done. And this is what you can do right here, right now, on this day.
In your life, has everything changed? Then change everything. Start rearranging your thinking about “reality.” Your reality is not static, it is fluid. And in our next installment in this series we will look at that more closely.
(Portions of the above are taken from the book When Everything Changes Change Everything, an important text in the CWG corpus. If you have not read this book, you are invited and encouraged to do so. It can change your entire experience of life for the better. The book may be obtained here.
In the world today a remarkable number of people believe that there is a place called Hell, and a great many of those people use the Bible as their authority in this matter.
Typical of this approach is that used by a person who posted an entry in the Comment section beneath another article on this front page, the article headlined “1,000 Words That Will Change the World.” (Found lower, in the right-hand column.)
I have chosen to lift this Comment, and my response, to the top of the page, because I believe it deserves to be a Headline Story in our world. Perhaps the Headline Story. Here is this particular comment, posted by a very sincere reader named Kim who simply wanted her confusion on one question addressed — followed by my reply.
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I have been enjoying reading Neale Walsch’s messages from God for several months now… There is one message from Neale that has brought on some question in my mind if anyone can explain this (respectfully)…
Neale’s quote here, “(9) There is no such place as hell, and eternal damnation does not exist.” I would like to know more what Neale was trying to say here because as Christians, we know there is a heaven and there is a place called hell, there is eternal damnation?? I would like to explain my thoughts using these quotes from the Bible…. my question is my confusion to Neale’s statement that there is no hell or eternal damnation… and if there were true, what is the 2nd coming of Christ about?
Are we not called to fear God? … Why would we fear Him if there wasn’t an eternal punishment for our lack of repentance for sin, if there wasn’t consequences to our lack of remorse for sin?
Jer 5:22 (NIV) “Should you not fear me?” declares the Lord. “Should you not tremble in my presence?” Psalm 111:10 “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom…” Proverbs 1:7 “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction.”
There are also many verses in the Bible which describe a place of fire…. (hell)…
Matthew 10:28 – And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.
Revelation 20:14 – And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death.
Revelation 20:15 – And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire.
Matthew 25:46 – And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.
Romans 6:23 – For the wages of sin [is] death; but the gift of God [is] eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
James 4:12 – There is one lawgiver, who is able to save and to destroy: who art thou that judgest another?
Mark 9:43-48 – And if thy hand offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched:
Revelation 20:10 – And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet [are], and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever.
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My Dear Kim…Yours is a very fair — and a very often asked — question. May I say in reply that I see that you are using, as the basis of your understandings about hell and damnation, passage from The Holy Bible. Yet these passages from the Bible would have no weight unless the words of the Bible were considered to be infallible and inerrant. That is, they are Absolutely True, to the letter. Do you believe this, Kim?
The difficulty the world has, Kim — and I say this with total respect for your view — is that people tend to quote the Bible selectively. I call this Bible Cherry Picking. They pick out the chapters and verses that support their point of view, but totally ignore, or “write off”, verses with which even THEY disagree.
For instance, Kim, do you agree with the verses in the Book of Deuteronomy, where it says that if a man marries a woman and finds that she is not a virgin, and if her family cannot prove that she was a virgin before her marriage, “she shall be brought to the door of her father’s house and there the men of her town shall stone her to death” — ?
Now you might say, “Wait a minute. This is God’s Law?” And the answer is, as it is found in the Bible, yes. The Bible also says that, if found to be in an adulterous relationship, both the man and the woman are to be taken to the city gates and also stoned to death.
And God is concerned about other real life matters as well. Apparel, for instance. A woman “must not wear men’s clothing…for the Lord your God detests anyone who does this,” the Bible says. It also says: “Do not wear clothes of wool and linen woven together.”
Then, too, only certain people are welcome in God’s house of worship. If you happen to be a child born out of wedlock, you cannot go to there. Did you know that Kim? The Bible makes this very clear. It says that no illegitimate child, “nor any of his descendants may enter the assembly of the Lord, even down to the tenth generation.”
And, did you know this, Kim…?…If a certain part of a man’s body happens to be injured in an accident or as a result of war, he may join with other worshippers of God in a House of the Lord.
The Bible says:
“If a man’s testicles are crushed or his penis is cut off, he may not be included in the assembly of the Lord.”
Yes, these are words right out of the Bible. Do they upset or embarrass you? Turn to Deuteronomy 23:1-2, New Living Translation. “Oh,” you might say, “one of those modern Bibles.” Yes. The King James Version has it this way:
“He that is wounded in the stones, or hath his privy member cut off, shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord,” but it means the same thing.
And the Bible has some startling news for women who take some of those
self-defense classes that are offered these days. They can find themselves in a
lot of trouble with some of what they learn in those classes.
The Bible says:
“If two men are fighting and the wife of one of them comes to rescue her husband from his assailant, and she reaches out and seizes him by his private parts, you shall cut off her hand. Show her no pity.”
The writers of the Bible had a real thing going on about male genitals, didn’t they? Of course, who do you suppose was doing the writing?
Oh, and they also had some thoughts about children who don’t obey their parents. These are probably not thoughts that many mothers would have. Kim, do you know what the Holy Bible has to say about children who don’t obey? Kill them.
What? you might say. But according to the Bible, God says to kill them. Now you might not believe that, but it’s right there, plain as day:
“If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who does not obey his father and mother and will not listen to them when they discipline him, his father and mother shall take hold of him and bring him to the elders at the gate of his town.
“They shall say to the elders, ‘This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a profligate and a drunkard.’ Then all the men of his town shall stone him to death. You must purge the evil from among you.”
I guess that would do it, all right…
So, Kim, you will excuse me if I am not quite totally convinced that all of our answers will be found in the Bible…or that everything we find in the Bible should be considered the absolute and total Truth, and The Way It Is.
We cannot “select” only what we want to accept from the Bible, and toss out the rest. This is called Bible Belief Cafeteria Style. Either the Bible is the Absolutely Correct and Inerrant Word of God, or it is not. Maybe it was written by well meaning, but very fallible, human beings. Do you think?
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So, does ‘hell’ exist? Is it a place to which God condemns us if we act, or do not act, in certain ways? That is the main topic this month at…
— which is intended to be one of the most intriguing new websites on the Internet.
As the threatened escalation of events in Syria seems, at least, to have simmered down, we are left with the Nevertheless Dichotomy.
The United States has apparently backed away, at least in the immediate sense, of its widely blared announcement that the time has come for military intervention in Syria by outside nations — chief among them the U.S. Nevertheless, two million people have fled the country in recent months, creating one of the worst refugee problems the world community has faced in 50 years.
Russia and the U.S. have agreed on a timetable of one week for the government of Syria to identify, and begin the dismantling of, all chemical weapons in its possession by initiating a process of turning over those weapons to international inspection, control, and destruction. Nevertheless, 10 million people inside of Syria are homeless today, thousands have been killed in the two-year old civil war that has plagued the country, and the killing goes on in this very moment.
Leaving the specifics of the Syrian crisis aside for a moment and stepping back to a larger, global picture…we see that we have created around the world a Nevertheless Society.
From the Mind of Humanity has emerged scientific discoveries, medical miracles, and technological achievements creating enhancements in human life both breathtaking and laudible. Nevertheless, nearly 700 children still die every hour on the Earth of starvation, minorities of every identity continue to be persecuted, and our species forever finds it impossible to create a global experience of security, peace, health and prosperity for any but the tiniest percentage of its members.
FOCUS: The Nature of God and Life/an exploration of critical importance in our time
PART V of an ONGOING SERIES
Our lives are today filled with modern “conveniences.” Nevertheless, for many people life has been emptied of higher meaning, grander purpose, and richer experience. And those “conveniences” — such as the ubiquitous cell phone, the ever-present laptop, the smartwatch, and now even Google glasses — have all made life more inconvenient, robbing us of what little peace and quiet and “down time” we had left. Our private moments are shrinking, even as our public persona is becoming more vacuous.
We are told that we are moving forward, forward, ever forward in our evolutionary process. Nevertheless, our path seems to be taking us backward, to a Might is Right moral code, to an Every Man for Himself reality, to a Kill or Be Killed consciousness.
This is remarkable for a species that tells itself that it has reached its highest level of awareness ever. It leads every thinking person to ask: Is it possible that there is something we don’t fully understand about Life, the understanding of which could change everything?
There are some who have said that sadness and suffering are natural conditions of the human experience. Yet my understanding is that sadness and suffering are not conditions, they are consequences. And consequences of what? They are consequences of our thinking.
Thinking is the tool that Life (read that, God) has given us with which to deal with events and circumstances, situations and occurrences in our daily experience upon the earth. Yet why do events and circumstances, situations and occurrences that produce sadness and suffering even have to arise?
The answer is circular. Thinking is the tool given to us to deal with events and circumstances, and thinking is the creative force that generates them.
Life will be experienced by each of us in the way that we think about its events—and the way that we think about its events collectively creates those events themselves.
That includes the crisis in Syria, the hundreds of dying children each day, and every other aspect of life — both good and bad — that we encounter and experience in the physical world.
How and why this is true…next in this series.
There is a way we can bring an end to the Nevertheless Society. That is what this series of articles is all about.
If the words of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry can be assumed to be authoritative, the mission of U.S. President Barack Obama and the government of the United States regarding Syria has been accomplished — and no military strike by the U.S. against Syria is or will be necessary.
Has the spiritual energy which has been focused from all over the world on avoiding this confrontation had any impact on the current state of affairs? It is firmly believed by many in the global spiritual community that it has — and I agree.
Mr. Kerry publicly asserted, at a press conference in the United Kingdom on Sept. 9 while standing alongside the British Foreign Minister, that the U.S. was planning an “unbelievably small” attack on Syria. Various media reports have him saying this:
“We will be able to hold Bashar al-Assad accountable without engaging in troops on the ground or any other prolonged kind of effort in a very limited, very targeted, short-term effort that degrades his capacity to deliver chemical weapons without assuming responsibility for Syria’s civil war.”
Referring to the much publicized proposal of President Obama to strike militarily at the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Mr Kerry described it as an “unbelievably small, limited kind of effort.” The secretary of state said, “That is exactly what we are talking about doing.”
Observers are now saying that if “degrading” the Syrian government’s “capacity to deliver chemical weapons” is the intention of President Obama’s proposed missile attack, that strike will not now be necessary. Syrian Foreign Minister told the world’s media, also on Sept. 9, that Syria embraced a Russian proposal for Bashar al-Assad to put his nation’s chemical weapons under international control — thereby making it impossible for those weapons to be used offensively in Syria. If this was the objective of President Obama’s threats to rain missiles down on Syria, we are now in a posture of: Mission Accomplished —and without the use of killing force.
Syrian President Assad has denied any responsibility on the part of his government for a chemical weapons attack outside Damascus on August 21 that the U.S. has said killed more than 1,400 people. Assad has charged that it is rebel forces — whom he refers to as “terrorists” — who are the ones responsible.
Russia and China have publicly agreed with this conclusion, suggesting that the strategy of the rebels in doing so was to frame the Syrian regime, then arouse international opinion and call President Obama on his statement, made months ago, that the use of chemical weapons by the government in Syria would be the crossing of a “red line” that would prompt a U.S. military reaction. The rebels’ objective would be to prompt the U.S. to indirectly assist their own ends by weakening the Syrian government’s defenses.
President Assad said June 9 on the American television network CBS that the U.S. does not have “a shred of evidence” that the Syrian government was responsible for the chemical weapons attack. For its part, the U.S. has said it is not taking sides in the revolutionary conflict, but wishes, separately, to disable the Syrian government’s ability to use chemical weapons. It says that it has traced missiles fired on the target on Aug 21 to positions held by government forces, intercepted voice communications between government military sources regarding the chemical weapons use, and noticed with dismay that Syrian forces bombarded the targeted area with conventional explosives for four days following the attack in an attempt to wipe out any on-the-ground evidence of its involvement in the chemical attack before allowing outside U.N. inspectors in. Based on this evidence, Mr. Obama and his administration say that a punitive and response that incapacitates Mr. Assad’s chemical weapons delivery systems is appropriate.
Now comes the Russian government to say to Syria: turn your chemical weapons over to international control, with the Syrian government saying: “We will so so.” The Russian proposal was said to have followed an off-the-cuff remark by Mr. Kerry who said, when asked what if anything Syria could do to prevent a U.S. missile strike, that all it needed to do was relinquish control of its chemical weapons, and ultimately destroy them. Mr. Kerry’s spokesperson said later that it was a rhetorical remark, and that no one — least of all Mr. Kerry — expected that Syria would even think about doing that. But Russia was said to have seized upon Mr. Kerry’s remarks, and proposed it as a formal solution to the problem of how to avoid a U.S. missile strike on Syrian military installations. As noted, Syria quickly — and publicly — accepted the solution.
That should put an end to this phase of the Syrian crisis. If the rebels did, in fact, launch the attack itself, its strategy of inciting a U.S. attack on the Assad regime will have failed — and the use of such a strategy in the future will be virtually impossible, what with all of the Syrian government’s chemical weapons presumably under international control. On the other hand, if the Syrian government did, in fact, use chemical weapons against its own people to hit back at and cripple the grass roots revolutionary struggle there, that strategy will now be much harder to employ again.
Closer monitoring of all military activities inside of Syria would now also be necessary, to stop the government there from launching a chemical attack (with weapons it has held back from outside control) and then claiming that the rebels have done it. Similarly, the revolutionary forces are going to have to be willing to allow close monitoring of their activities, to stop them from doing exactly the same thing in reverse, then blaming the government.
But we are one step closer at this moment to a non-military solution to the Syrian crisis, and the Russian initiative can be seen today as having been critical in that regard. By openly and publicly challenging the Assad regime to turn any chemical weapons in its possession over to international control, and by the Syrian government unexpectedly immediately agreeing, Russia may have given all parties a way out of this stalemate.
Now that is what is called an international political solution to a problem that was threatening to become a global military conflagration. Are we out of the woods on this? Probably not yet. Not until the Obama Administration publicly backs off of its threat of targeted missile strikes inside Syria. And that won’t happen unless Congress refuses to authorize such strikes — which it might now have more rationale to do so in the face of Syria’s agreement to accept the Russian challenge. The U.S. Congress is debating the matter this week.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Sunday, Sept. 1, that there now is no uncertainty whatsoever as to whether chemical weapons were used in the Aug. 21 massacre of nearly 1,500 people — including over 400 children — in Syria.
Mr. Kerry said that hair and blood samples from the victims of that attack, collected by first responders and provided to the United States, have tested positive for sarin, which, an NBC News report said, “is considered to be the most toxic and fast-acting chemical warfare agent.” Mr. Kerry revealed the results of those tests on the NBC program Meet the Press.
The government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has steadfastly insisted that it was not responsible for the use of those weapons, claiming that opposition rebel forces, whom the government labels “terrorists,” launched the chemical attack in order to claim that the government did so, thus to rile international sentiment against the Assad regime.
Mr. Kerry on Friday, Aug. 30 said, however, that the U.S. believes with “high confidence” that the Assad government is responsible for the attack on its own people, based on a number of highly reliable intelligence sources, including intercepted communications between regime military commanders, satellite tracking of missiles launched from government-control areas to the site of the massacre, and other intel, which Mr. Kerry said could not be detailed publicly without jeopardizing sensitive sources.
The question before the world is: What should be the response of the international community if it is proven that the Assad regime did, in fact, gas its own people to quell the citizen rebellion that has plagued it for over two years?
As well: What should be the response of the international community if it is proven that the rebel forces perpetrated the attack in order to have something to pin on the government and give the U.S. and other Western powers a justification for launching attacks on Syrian government military assets, thus weakening the government’s ability to fend off the two-year-old rebellion?
Conversations with God said in Book One that if despots are allowed to continue in their despotism, what does that teach those despots? It also famously said:
“Sometimes man must go to war to make the grandest statement about who man truly is: he who abhors war. There are times when you may have to give up Who You Are in order to be Who You Are. There are Masters who have taught: you cannot have it all until you are willing to give it all up. Thus, in order to “have” yourself as a man of peace, you may have to give up the idea of yourself as a man who never goes to war. History has called upon men for such decisions.”
This leaves me, as a person who opposes any decision by U.S. President Barack Obama to employ U.S. missile power in targeted strikes against strategic military installations in Syria, in a challenging position. If there is proof beyond a shadow of a doubt that Syrian President Assad used that nerve gas on his own people, that would make him a despot of the first rank.
As President Obama himself has implied: What is a despot being taught if he is allowed to get away with despotism? And, likewise, if the Syrian rebels actually did use sarin on their own fellow citizens in order to “frame” Assad and his regime, what would it teach them if they were allowed to get away with it?
The spiritual response to these events would be to find a way to allow growth and remembering (or what some people would call “learning”) to occur. CWG says sometimes humans must go to war. But now, here is where I notice something very important in the CWG cosmology. The dialogue does not define exactly what it means to declare war. Ah, but my dictionary does. Under “war” it offers as one of its definitions: “a sustained effort to deal with or end a particular unpleasant or undesirable situation or condition”…as in: the authorities are waging war against all forms of smuggling.
Now this is something I can agree with. We must not let those who used chemical weapons in Syria think they can do so with impunity. There will be consequences to pay, and severe ones that will not be pleasant, or easily ignored. Yet those consequences do not have to involve lethal military weapons. They do not have to involve the killing of people.
It is as Einstein said. We cannot solve a problem at the same level and with the same energy that created the problem. We cannot end killing with killing, violence with violence, hatred with hatred. Yet neither can we look the other way as despots commit despotism.
If the Syrian government is proven to have used nerve gas on its own people (and much of the current evidence points that way), the world (and yes, that includes Russia and China) can and should turn that regime into a pariah government, supported by not even its present allies. Not in the U.N., not in the international trade markets, not in the court of global public opinion, not in any way whatsoever. All imports of every kind, by any nation, should cease. Blockades ensuring that edict should be enforced. All cooperation with the government should end. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad would find out soon enough that he made not only a humanly horrific, but also a politically horrendous, error.
And if new evidence emerges that the rebels were, after all, responsible for the Aug. 21 chemical weapons attack in an effort to frame the Assad regime, then any and all support from any and all quarters now flowing to the rebels must be immediately and forever ended.
Mr. Kerry said that the second scenario is completely fabricated by the Assad government and is impossible to believe, because of the high improbability that the rebel forces could get their hands on such weapons grade nerve gas, much less have the capability of delivering it from rockets tracked by satellites to be blasting off from government held territory at the moment of the attack.
The world’s job now must be to deliver all the evidence gathered so far to allow the international community to deal with this monstrosity with certainty and sureness, bringing the perpetrators to non-violent but effective reckoning. It is possible to do this. It is just as possible as launching missiles and killing more people.
As well, as spiritual beings, we have another option: Pray. Envision. Intend.
Call it by whatever word fits into your personal understanding, but use the power of Purposefully Focused Energy to generate an expanded contextual field around the experience that humanity is co-creating regarding Syria — a field that now includes the reality of peace and safety, harmony and cooperation, joy and celebration.
This can work. Yes, it can. Along with practical measures taken on the ground in Syria. Like the establishment of War Free Zones (as suggested by Michael in his Comments Entry below), protected on the ground and in the air by nonaligned U.N. peacekeepers. And the shipping in of extensive food and medical supplies and other necessities. And the use of the same enormous expenditures that it would take to launch missile strikes against that country, to offer aid in many forms (education, social services, etc.) to the rank-and-file citizens of that country, so that they could ultimately decide for themselves who they want to govern them, and by what national approach or mechanism.
Give the power back to the people to determine their country’s future. Remove it from the warring factions on both sides, and return it to the people. Freedom is the highest expression of spirituality, because it is a characteristic of Divinity.
Divinity has two essential qualities: Unconditional Love and Total Freedom. Bring that to Syria and watch the situation resolve itself without the use of a single killing weapon.
So now it has begun.
Another escalation in international tensions is upon us as a result of the alleged use of chemical weapons by the government of Syria on its own people, and the possible response of the United States of pinpoint missile strikes against strategic military targets in Syria.
President Obama announced Saturday (Aug 31) that he would not order an intervention in Syria by the U.S. without approval in a vote by Congress. That body is not due to return from its summer recess until September 9 — but it could be called back into session by its leadership on a moment’s notice. It is unclear at this stage how much of a reprieve the world has from the threat of a U.S. military intervention in Syria.
Members of the vast spiritual communities that are spread across our planet are asking today: What can we do? In the face of the possibility of this latest and seemingly never-ending use of violence in the name of bringing an end to violence, what can we do?
The answer is that we now have to use, intently and with passionate and mighty focus, the most powerful force in the Universe — a force more powerful, even, than all the missiles and all the bombs and all the chemical weapons in all the arsenals of all the military establishments of all the governments of the world.
Prayer.
Prayer is intentioned Thought, and Thought is one of the Three Tools of Creation given to us by our Creator. Those tools are: Thought, Word, and Deed. Of these, Thought is the most powerful, because Thought is the least physical. Therefore it is the least dense, and thus the most far reaching, permeating all physical bodies, barriers and constructions.
I believe the prayer of the day should be that Congress votes against a military intervention — even a limited, air-power-only intervention — by the United States. The reasons for my belief are found in the lengthier commentary in the news article to the lower left of this website’s Home Page, under the column title Interpreting Conversations with God.
I hope you will read that article at once, and then I hope you will join me and Marianne Williamson in the Global Collective Prayer Initiative, Monday, September 2, at 16:00 GMT (that is 9 a.m. Pacific Time). We will pray solidly and intentionally for ten minutes that the U.S. will not launch air strikes on Syria, and that the larger Syrian conflict may end, at last, with peace and harmony prevailing.
With all of our intelligence, with all of our inventive genius, with all of our years of evolution, we just can’t find a way to do the simplest thing, can we…?
…We simply can’t find a way to stop killing each other.
We are impotent, utterly and completely impotent, in the face of this basic, fundamental developmental challenge.
Will it never end? Will the killing and the violence and the continual threats to world peace never, ever end?
The Western powers (U.S., Britain, France chief among them) are said on this day to be considering a military strike against the military apparatus of the government of Syria. Such a strike by these major powers would be, they say, in response to the alleged use by Syria’s government of chemical weapons against its own people.
The Syrian government, for its part, claims that the chemical weapons were used by “terrorists” who have long been agitating to upend the government.
As all the world knows, a civil war has been underway in Syria since March, 2011, with rebels seeking to overthrow the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
“As a result of the ongoing civil war, an alternative government was formed by the opposition umbrella group, the Syrian National Coalition, in March 2012,” an article on the country in Wikipedia states. “Representatives of this government were invited to take up Syria’s seat at the Arab League on 28 March 2013. The opposition coalition has been recognized as the ‘sole representative of the Syrian people’ by several nations, including the United States, United Kingdom and France,” the article goes on.
Now, the government is suspected of using chemical weapons against its civilians. US Secretary of State John Kerry has been widely quoted in global news reports as saying that it was “undeniable” that chemical weapons had been used in the country, and that President Bashar al-Assad’s forces had committed a “moral obscenity” against the nation’s own people.
“Make no mistake,” Kerry is reported to have said. “President Obama believes there must be accountability for those who would use the world’s most heinous weapon against the world’s most vulnerable people. Nothing today is more serious, and nothing is receiving more serious scrutiny.”
On Aug 27 CNN’s website headlined a report that the U.S. military was in position with warships and ready to strike on a moment’s notice should the order be given. Syria, in return, has said that the U.S. would be “surprised” by the shape and power of its response.
Must this go on forever? Must life on this planet go on forever like this? Is there no way—simply no way at all—for members of the same species…a species that considers itself to be evolved…to resolve the differences that arise between them without putting hundreds of thousands of people, if not the entire world, at risk of annihilation?
What would it take for human beings to find a way to live together in peace and harmony? What is the missing ingredient…that one piece of data that could change everything?
In Syria, the Assad family has held power for decades. The rebellion there is the uprising of thousands of citizens who say they are tired of the repression by the Syrian Government of any form of dissent. Indeed, the rebellion itself turned violent when peaceful protests in 2011 were ruthlessly squashed by the military, with intellectual leaders of the rebellion arrested and tortured—some of them now among Syria’s so-called “disappeared.”
People will agitate for freedom as long as people are alive, because freedom is a basic and fundamental aspect of Divinity, and human beings are individual expressions of Divinity. That is why revolutions have been part of human history for thousands of years. For centuries the human scenario has been a struggle between the powerful few and the freedom-seeking many.
With all the killing, with all the needless dying (not just of armed combatants, but of countless bystanders, including unarmed and nonaffiliated men, women, and children), one would think that our species as a whole would find a way to end—finally, at long last, end—the cycle of murder and violence. But we don’t seem yet to have found the key to doing that. After thousands and thousands of years, we
Just.
Can’t.
Find.
The.
Key.
What stops us, do you think? A species that can put its members on the moon, a species that can unlock the sequencing of DNA, cannot find the key to stop killing each other.
Remarkable.
Our species is in a never-ending struggle to end its own most vicious struggles. It seems powerless to end its own misuse of power.
What stops us, do you think?
