Wednesday April 26, 2006
(3 pm) More? (Or so I sense.)
It is natural to feel a sense of unease, given the conflict between the motives you ascribe to those who have the power to create wars and the motives you ascribe to those opposing the wars. The conflict is real. The question is what is the tack you can take that will best got where you want to go, given that neither you nor anyone can judge events that have not yet occurred.
Yes, exactly. If our forces and the empire are going to be defeated in any case, that’s one thing. But if the forces can be undefeated and the empire defeated (as in Vietnam) that is a second thing, and if it possible for neither to be defeated, a third. Ideally I would like to see the empire voluntarily retreat but not be replaced by something worse. Is that possible?
Ideally, then, you wish to control once you have ceased controlling. For in specifying “worse” or “better” it is of course in your judgment.
Well I guess I don’t know where to go with that.
Give over control to the other side, and live in faith. We are well able to turn men’s minds to our purpose – given that “we” are “they” as “we” are “you.”
Then whence come cross purposes?
Your lives are expressions of your threads, your values. Conflicts play out “here” and “there” – but there is nothing inherently wrong with conflict; it is just that you are tired of it. That is because the wrong conflicts are manifesting. Some conflicts are productive and some are obstructive, and which is which fluctuates according to the times and tradition. In your time, endless ideology finally devolved to a stalemate just as endless conflict about religious establishment did in the 1600s, and this present flare-up is the false dawn that is actually a sunset. We assure you no one will care about right-wing and left-wing in a hundred years, any more than they care about Catholic versus Protestant. You will have moved on to other problems. They won’t be (aren’t, from our viewpoint) arguing over nationalism, either. All sides of all current issues will be represented. None will have “won” or even lost. Is history or philosophy or English the “winner” in academic circles? Is algebra or trigonometry the “winner” in math circles? It is a matter of appropriate beliefs, appropriate priorities. Various things have to appear and be settled – if only be fatigue and indifference – before other issues can rightly arise. Are you exercised about republican versus monarchy? Or feudalism versus capitalism? Or industrialism versus tradition? Issues become settled, one way or the other.
The coming issue involves consciousness.
Of course. But it will come disguised in the leftover issues of the past, because that is where people’s mental habits remain. So, nationalism, theology, economics, ideology, power games among imperial forces – it is all distracting natural camouflage – not conspiracy, just forward-blindness. The real issue is, what shall be the new form of consciousness? Or, to put it another way, how shall the new houses of the gods be constructed? (For as Carl Jung wisely put it, the gods do not return to homes once abandoned.)