ISRAEL AND PALESTINE

Dear friends,

The plight of Israel and Palestine is a piece of hot lead in my heart this week. I believe Israel’s government is largely to blame for this extreme eruption. They did push the Palestinians into a smaller and smaller and smaller space, both literally and as neighbors. Each was unwelcome to the other, but Israel has the power of the west behind it. The Palestinians believed they had only two options, to be captives with diminishing presence forever, or fight in whatever way possible. How ironic that the “land of milk and honey” promised by Yahweh is so full of poison.

Does it begin with a time of wandering in the Sinai Desert for forty years after the escape from Egypt? Alas, Israel’s ascent into the promised land given by Yawei quickly became descent into a territorial dispute and the removal of the present inhabitants, why? In their story, as soon as Israel arrived at the promised land, they clashed with the people who occupied it. As conquerors, killing, and or subjugating the residents, they simply switched roles in what seems to have been a war between gods. Are we human beings, pawns in an upper-level chess game told in the language of myth? Or perhaps it’s a lower-level game, and the brothers all the way back to Cain and Abel set the board for this cosmic chess game. Brothers are so often deadly rivals throughout history and even at the individual family level.   

 Yahweh and Allah have much in common. Do they symbolize archetypal brothers from earliest human times? In the Bible it begins as a rivalry for God’s favor between Cane and Abel as the sons of Adam and Eve? Has nothing changed except the destructive power of their weapons?  It seems that all humanity is represented archetypally by the story of these rival brothers caught in a loop of competition for the favor of a tyrant father. After years of subjugation by an earthly ruler, one of them, Moses razed among the enslavers realizes that all are children of a God who inspires corrections that liberate the enslaved.

 But it is not easy to overcome a slavish mind and the former slaves can’t see beyond a desert where they wander in unknowing for forty years, always waiting for a promise to be fulfilled. But the wanderers are fixated on what freedom and compensation would mean to those who still think like slaves. They are trapped in a too carnal interpretation of their liberator’s promise of a land of milk and honey. They regress to their former state of mind and worship the god of their now nostalgic days in slavery. Moses has not succeeded in liberating their hearts and souls.

 To this day the promised land is still bandied back and forth through ideologists stirring up wars between brothers over and over. This spiritual/trans-historical drama has been intense throughout the age of two fish tied together, swimming in opposite directions in the same waters: the age of Pisces.

As Einstein observed, it is impossible to solve a problem within the system that created the problem. An enlightened being outside the system appears now and then to give humanity a leg up on the ladder of creative evolution.  Thus Jesus (Yeshua), the crucial one who escaped the prison of the lower mind, attached to the physical sensorium, and confined in a temporal body, came to reveal, and propose another way than the tiresome stuck-ness of this war between brothers and to show something central was being overlooked. Wars are never won no matter how just they seem. What is the real purpose of War? What is never won? It seems that every war generates fuel for the next war and the brothers switch roles again and again. Is “milk and honey” baby food laced with poison?  

Jesus (Yeshua), trans-cosmic brother of Thrice Great Hermes and child of the Original Alchemist, was born to transcend this tribal dilemma. His role was foretold by the visitation after his birth of the Wise Men from the east. Then there are the silent years between the event in the temple with the elders when he was a young boy, and the launching of his ministry as an adult. There are stories in Egypt, India, and Tibet of Yeshua (his real name) having studied in those lands.  I think we can see the crucifixion as the event when Jesus as the Christ, the liberated man, breaks free and goes trans- cosmic. This is the only way to end the horrible 3-D war of brothers. The cross of crucifixion is more than a tragedy inflicted by evil enemies, who must pay with the same degree of horror as they meted out.  This is the reverse of salvation. Jesus said to his offended disciples concerning the Roman Soldiers who fought over his garments, that punishment would do no good, because they didn’t know what they were doing. Until humans know what they are doing, they continue exchanging horror back and forth. It can never be overcome. Only complete defeat by total annihilation of all parties would halt this trajectory. That is the devil’s solution.

I’m one of those skeptics who suspect that Jesus the flesh and blood man survived the crucifixion, but I’m not sure that is an important point. He definitely survived and became transformed by ascending to a higher level of being. We humans on this earth plane will never find the way beyond our little box locked up together and attacking each other because we need someone to blame, believe we can’t get out and don’t know who put us here. I’ve seen this happen among animals confined in a small space. One of my neighbors has four large dogs in a small kennel. They get into fights several times a day and their owner (god with a small g) interferes before they tear each other apart. Peace only lasts a short time before the next explosion.  But it isn’t true peace. Can the big daddy we pray to as humans be merely the boss that stops these fights between brothers, yet is really the hidden instigator? The Gnostics believed so, and termed this lesser god the demiurge, a reduced construct between humans and the trans-cosmic source of all that is and all that is becoming.

We must be born again in an environment large enough for the body of Creation to continue becoming. It is said that war inspires creative invention, and it certainly does, but this creativity is trapped by war, and the result is more and better destructive instruments. Is the fate of blowing up the planet possibly an inverted spiral taking us back to the first breath of Creator that enlivened matter. Perhaps we will be sucked down a black hole and our whole system will go through a hard restart. That is one way of being born again. This would be the most extreme form of rebirth. The choice is ours. God, Creator gave us the potential to become co-creators and we are fooled by our small vision, the border of our skin, and the limitations of our physical garment to believe we can be destroyed, and thus that we can destroy.  Those killed in war suffer but are not destroyed, they will emerge as an enemy we must accept as brothers and sisters, because they may in fact be us. I would hate to leave this lifetime feeling that having only acquired a few bits of hard-won knowledge here and there, I may return to find Israel, its neighbors and much of the world a pile of ashes.