Adam’s Peace

Kara-Leah Masina, who owns the eponymous blog klmasina.com, asked me a very difficult question, one which, so far, I have at least two different answers for. Kara-Leah certainly seems to have a knack for stretching the minds of those she meets, whether it is in asking a deceptively simple question, or through her writings, both of fiction and of her own journey in her blog.

The four word question, for which I need to delve deep within the human psyche and far into the philosophical and spiritual words to answer, is this:

Why is there war?

War seems to be one of the central themes of life, recorded in the earliest human histories, and passed down by oral tradition from prehistoric sources. The Christian Bible is full of war, and even suggests that weapons of war have existed in the earliest ancestral memories of the people in the middle eastern region, with the flaming sword barring the way to the Garden of Eden. Even the Tao te Ching discusses war and its practices, despite its otherwise pacifistic philosophies. Beowulf, one of the earliest oral stories from England, includes war as one of its themes.

Even some of the States which now form the United States had marched against each other, during the brief time when the former colonies were all united as a confederacy, after claiming their freedom the the British Empire and before adopting the Constitution of the United States of America. Afterwards, of course, the American Civil War also showed us that, even with the unity of over 80 years as one nation, war could still be fought between brothers, and fathers and sons can fire at each other in battle.

The easy answer is the psychological one. There is war because groups of people will fight other groups of people over resources. This has been the primary reason throughout history, with land being the most common resource fought over. The Spanish fought the native Americans over gold and land… Citizens of the United States also fought native Americans over land, mostly for their farms. The most recent land-grabbing war was World War II, with Germany, Italy, and Japan being chief among those hoping to spread their territories. Another popular resource is people, particularly when those people can then be called slaves.

There are other wars, though. These wars are over intangible ideas. One of the most common of these intangible ideas is liberty in one of its various forms. Another intangible reason for war is to exert ideological supremacy, sort of an anti-freedom. The difference between the two is very hard to see, and it’s almost impossible to know the difference while the war is still raging on. Both of these types of wars come as an internal revolution, where groups of citizens overthrow their current government. One shining example of a liberating war is the American Revolution, but I think that many Americans would be surprised if I also mentioned that the Bolshevik Revolution was also a shining example of a liberating war. In both cases, the citizens who led the uprising were living under a government that had lost touch with the needs and desires of the most common citizen, and those people fought for an ideal that, on paper at least, promised greater freedom and equality. The problem with the Bolshevik Revolution wasn’t the revolution itself, it was the leaders who came into power afterwards. The founders of the United States understood that corruption in office was inevitable if the people did not hold their representatives accountable, and they remembered that it was their own people they were fighting against. In Russia, the Bolsheviks overthrew a monarchy, so didn’t recognize the threat of corruption that anybody faces. In America, however, the Patriots had overthrown another democratic government, so had seen what becomes of people who hold office when there aren’t enough restrictions in place. (King George still had some power at the time, but the decision to tax the colonies without their vote came from the Parliament… Those involved in politics at the time knew this, but it was easier to use a single, seemingly corrupt person as a scape goat.)

Is there a good reason to fight a war? Well, perhaps. An analogy of war is of a hot iron or poker. Simply sticking a hot iron into someone’s arm will cause a lot of damage, but if the hot iron is stuck into a deep wound, it will prevent the person from bleeding to death and remove some of the infection. If the burn isn’t kept clean and taken care of afterwards, a new infection can spring up, though, and may undo all of the good of the original poke. War is never a good thing, but sometimes, it is better than the alternative. Fortunately, now, we have antibiotics and surgery, just as we have diplomacy, embargoes, and the United Nations, so just as cauterizing a wound with a hot iron is obsolete, war is also becoming obsolete.

Now on to the hard part of this question.

I am assuming a lot about people’s spirituality here, so let me make is clear as to where I’m coming from and what assumptions I’m making.

From what I’ve observed, the most common view of divinity is of a creator, or a small group of creators, who has humanity’s best interests at heart. Now, from that perspective, why would it be in humanity’s best interest for war to exist? Why is it in my best interest to have knowledge of war?

Well, from a spiritual perspective, the only thing that we keep with us after we die is our knowledge. This leads me to believe that the purpose of living is to learn. Why are we learning? What will we do with this knowledge later? Well, that is up to you to decide… I won’t be pretentious enough to say that I know what goes on in the spiritual worlds, since my knowledge is filtered through my senses. I see what I expect, so I don’t want to change other people’s expectations, since there is a chance that I could be wrong.

Whatever goes on after we die, since we retain our knowledge and our purpose here is to learn, I would say that the purpose of war is to suffer. Nobody directly benefits from war, we only benefit from what happens after the war. Those who participate in the war, whether as a soldier, a refuge, or a spectator, learn about the suffering.

This leads to another question… Why is there suffering? Can’t I learn about good things all of the time and, since that is the whole of my experience, only do good things?

Well, there are two underlying dualities in the world. The opposite of peace is suffering, and the opposite of passion is indifference. If we have a lot of suffering and passion, we call that emotion hate. If we have a lot of peace and passion, we call that emotion love. Unfortunately, the more indifference we have, the less of either peace or suffering we have. War, as one of the figureheads of suffering, helps to push us away from indifference, so that we can experience a broader range of emotions. It isn’t easy, and may even be impossible, to climb out of indifference simply by staying on the side of peace or suffering, but by swinging back and forth, we can progress steadily.

Yes, I’m saying that suffering is good… but it is only good for those who are able to take themselves fully out of the subjective mindset, or have fully embraced the model of subjective reality. In other words, suffering is good if you don’t have an ego. For the individual, suffering is very, very bad. It is one of my most firm beliefs that an individual should never try to cause suffering in other people, simply because there is enough suffering in this world that people bring on themselves. The cycle of overcoming suffering and bringing on more suffering to overcome is how humanity grows.

I would love to see war stop altogether. War seems to be unnecessary suffering, but humanity as a whole would have to step up to a higher level of consciousness and realize that everybody is a human, with feelings, desires, and the capacity to suffer. Everybody is your neighbor, even if they live eight time zones away. Once we realize this, we’ll be able to stop pushing our suffering off on other people, and deal with it personally, and it will be the end of war, but as I said to Damian, that day will probably be in the distant future, and we’ll never be able to know exactly when that day has come.

Strive for peace, but do not ignore suffering. They are both opposite sides of the same coin, and while they are opposites, they are also the same.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, May 6th, 2007 at 6:00 pm and is filed under Inner Peace, Consciousness, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.