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.