Welcome to the new edition of the Sophia Journal

The theme this time may seem to be of an unorthodox nature, and maybe something you would rather not think about.

WAR

War is extremely unpopular.  Our thoughts and ideas are almost totally negative, our inner response an abhorrent drawing back, our hearts dismayed and shocked.  That we live in a time when war is still so prevalent speaks of the cultural inability to respond to humanity as human beings, from a place of empathy, compassion, forgiveness and understanding.  We are still governed by our own desires, our own judgment and expectation, our own passion for our own ideas.

But we do not intend this to be a critique of our society and its relative levels of spiritual maturity, but rather a phenomenology of the being of war itself.  We open this theme out of an inner sense of the need to develop new capacities around the nature of war, and the intricacies of it's presence in the world.  Not being able to perceive the depth of the meaning of war, we psychologize and systematize, analyze and criticize.  Rarely do we enter into the images of war as something emerging to be perceived spiritually, or on levels other than political or psychological.  Being so acquainted with the "game of war" we think it is only happening now, to specific people, in a designated place.  I would ask you to entertain the idea that when war occurs, it happens everywhere at the same time.  This is not so difficult.  What is more difficult to understand is that war, any war, every war, is never 'over'.  Every war that has ever happened is still happening.  We may not see the fighting or grasp the significance of the being of that war, but the presence is still with us.  It is not just through our cultural memory, or historical understanding, it is most evident through our relationships with each other and with the earth itself.  We continue to engage in the spiritual wars of all time through our capacity to destroy and decimate.  Our consciousness is completely filled with the power of conquering and controlling.  Even in the 'alternative' movements of conservation, ecology,  and all the efforts that want to return the earth to its 'original' state of what is thought of as  'health and vigor'.  Some who fight for this do so out of a kind of world nostalgia, others out of fear, most sincerely trying to help, but for all there is the imagination of accomplishing this through management, scientific control, and political activism.  While all of this is good intentioned, we are yet 'waging war' and accomplishing the same imaginative goal of 'winning' by getting what we want out of our activity; by overcoming something that can be  literally beaten. 

Our need to re-imagine war is our need to re-imagine community, relationship, religion and what is not war.  We are caught in a spiral of continual growth at any cost, which in essence constitutes continual destruction and overpowering greed.  There is no way out of the cycle without war to interrupt and interpret the markers of whether we are inflating or receding.  We need war to delineate our accomplishments, and establish the baseline of our new growth.  To continue in the current manner, the only actual accomplishment will come with complete and utter global confrontation and the ultimate war of all against all.  The economic imagination, which is also our most prevalent religion, will drive us to destroy the earth to achieve the last phase of 'growth' and demonstrate our complete power.  War is not a psychological phenomenon we can understand through empirical psychology and politics, economics and culture.  War is the spiritual announcement of the soul's inability to speak the creation of the world, and thus we destroy.

Why we keep trying the same tactic says more about the human heart than the relative intelligence of human beings.  We follow the spiritual currents that flow through us as faithfully as we learn the lessons of the previous generation, only to repeat them with our own unique character in each.  What we do not know is that there are spiritual currents and being influencing us, and that they are also 'at war' and we are destined to follow them as long as we insist on remaining unconscious of their presence and power.  Here, in this small way, we hope to awaken to some of these spiritual currents that have such influence on our soul and in consciousness.  It may not be enjoyable, but we promise it will be of enormous interest.  Please let us know what you think, and perhaps we can begin a conversation that can include Ares/Mars in such a way that he won't have to keep fighting just to get and keep our attention.

--Cheryl Sanders-Sardello