- For those of you who are having a hard time being optimistic
about the world in the face of
1)President Bush's
refusal to acknowledge the world-wide calls for peace as he pursues his
mad rush to war,
2) our Representatives'
silence as this administration shreds of our constitution and robs us of
our civil liberties in the Patriots' Act I and II,
3) the impending
giveaway of our public airwaves to a few corporations and the censorship
of the media, and finally,
4) the breakdown of our
economy,
SIT DOWN AND TAKE
A BREATH.
It might not be as
bad as it seems. These are
the End Times, after all, but they'd don't have to be the end of
everything.
As Swami
Beyondananda says,
"I
have often said there are two kinds of mystics, the optimystics and the
pessimystics. Now pessimystics seem to be more in touch with reality,
but optimystics are happier and live longer for some reason. The
pessimystics have been crying, The sky is falling, the sky is falling!
The optimystics say, No. It just looks that way because we are
ascending."
Now, to take a page from the far right Christians' favorite
bedtime story, the Book of Revelation - better know as the Apocalypse -
I'd like to bring up the turning point in that story.
It's a point that the President and his friends in "The
Family" (see Jeffrey Sharlet's article "Jesus Plus
Nothing" in the March issue of Harper's Magazine) probably ignore.
In Revelation 12: 1-4, we read:
"And
a great portent appeared in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, with
the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars; she
was with child and she cried out in her pangs of birth, in anguish for
delivery. And another portent appeared in heaven; behold a great red
dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and seven diadems upon his
heads. His tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven, and cast them
to the earth. And the
dragon stood before the woman who was about to bear a child, that he
might devour
her child when she brought it forth;"
This passage, which shows a moment wrought with great danger,
is really the beginning of the end for 'the great red dragon.'
The woman gives birth to the divine child who is protected by God
before the dragon can devour him.
And while the woman has to flee the dragon, she does have a place
prepared for her. In both cases, the dragon loses out and is finally destroyed.
So who is this mysterious Woman Clothed with the Sun?
She is, of course, the return of the great Goddess of life, the
return of the feminine spirit within men and women that we have been
experiencing now for at least the past 30 years.
And She is fully conscious and pregnant with the real 'new world
order'. And most assuredly
She is us. All the people
in the world who are working against oppression and working for peace,
who are struggling to become conscious, who are trusting in the power of
spirit. We are giving birth to a new level of human consciousness.
And this administration, and the war machines which fuel it, as
well as the terrorists and dictators who are their opposite numbers,
belong to the dragon. This
old dragon is the energy and desire to hold onto the old patriarchal
power structures, the ones that say MIGHT EQUALS RIGHT.
And this is the
beginning of the end for them.
At bottom, this is really a struggle about
consciousness - the struggle for control of mass consciousness vs. the
freedom of individual consciousness.
Isn't it interesting that both sides in this war on terrorism are
constellating fanatical religious beliefs?
We seem to be having a repeat of the medieval call for Crusade
that occurred at the end of the last millennium.
Our most Christian president calls for a crusade against the
Moslem infidels, but only the ‘terrorists’ or ‘suspected
terrorists’, while the Moslem fanatics call for jihad against the
Christian world. We are facing the End Times, the end of the old ways, and
things are probably going to get worse before they get better.
But our struggle for world peace and our civil rights will not go
to waste. We now know how
powerful our revolution of peace really is, and even if the President
plunges us into war, the whole world is seeing played out on the world
stage the empty hypocrisy and culture of greed and manipulation behind
our politics, our economic structures, and our sense of divine destiny.
Just as Might
never makes Right, so War can never bring Peace.
The cosmic energy
at this time is interesting. Reading
the present astrological signatures, it appears that we are heading into
a time when our collective hearts will be opened, when we begin to truly
understand the disparity between what we say we believe and how we
actually act. It will be a
time of spiritual revolution. It
can also be a time when people's emotions bubble up to the surface, and
so we might see great acts of violence and fear, as well as great acts
of courage and compassion. We have to remember that we are healing old, old wounds in
our humanity. Our human
history is full of war and greed and violence.
It's going to take a lot of healing.
If we truly want
to change the world and bring about peace, we have to first find peace
within ourselves, both individually and as a nation.
And those of us who want to create change have to go out and tell
stories about the possibilities of this time, and not fall into despair.
We have to be a shining example of what we want to achieve.
It will be the time in which our storytellers, musicians and
poets have the chance to awaken the best in humanity's heart.
And if we can do this, we will indeed accomplish our goal of
peace on earth, and democracy for all.
So remember, if
you're feeling pessimystic about our chances of success, think of Frodo
and Sam in Mordor. They
didn't know how the story would end, but you never do when the darkness
is deepest. But thankfully,
there's more of the story to come.
How it turns out is up to us.
