We are in the period of the unfoldment of the final war. This final war is also the original war that is memorialized in the Bhagavad Gita and in many other ancient texts that deal with the transformation of consciousness from an impure mental state—the overcoming of that state’s resistance to the truth, beauty, love, and power of the Real . . . the victory of God-Consciousness over the ego that has become demonic in the antagonistic and negative nature of its darkness in terms of thoughts, emotions, beliefs, and attitudes—and a return of the blissful light of God.
And because the world operates on the fractal system of self-similarity at every level of consciousness, what is going on at the macrocosmic level in the global geopolitical arena (visible to some extent to everyone) is not different from what is going on at every other level, whether institutional, communal, or your own individual mind (if you still have an individual mind). As we have said before, the ego mind tends to be either too fast or too slow. We can see that at the geopolitical level in this new theater of war that has opened up between Israel and Iran and that may soon include other parties in a very direct way. One party is perhaps too passive, too slow, too naïve, too afraid, and too trusting, while the other is too aggressive, too quick, and too filled with guile and deceptiveness for its own good.
So you have this situation where all parties are making mistakes (tactical, strategic, political, diplomatic), because there are internal conflicts within each government. There are factions that are hawks, there are doves, there are those who are in favor of lining up all the ducks before you start shooting, there are those who say “Go for it while the iron is hot,” and there are those who are more concerned with the economic than with the military. All of the various factions, in their conflicting drives, have an effect of producing either a deadlock or an overly aggressive reaction to events that ends up with additional senseless slaughter of the innocent and senseless destruction of infrastructure and of civilian life. We are seeing all these messy approaches to a conflict that really (of course, to any sane mind) should not have happened in the first place and is nothing short of a criminal activity that will very likely not meet the goals of any of the parties. But there is no way back.
In the same way, there is no way back for any of us in our own attempt to overcome internal conflicts and incoherencies, because life in that state has become unmanageable—too filled with suffering that has become, or will soon become, intolerable—forcing us to choose between the lower death drive and the upper. In the geopolitical realm, the lower death drive is, of course, the one that has already been chosen. Hopefully, yogis will not make the same choice on their individual levels of struggle against the regressive tendencies of the ego, choosing the illusion of agency, the illusory power of the limited ego, the illusory security and defense mechanisms, and the illusory projections that support its patterns of repetitive suffering and self-defeat. So this is the situation that everyone must face internally and externally.
Events are accelerating rapidly and in fact are out of the control of any of the parties, in the same way that your own mind is not under your control if you are in the ego. If you are identified with the mental apparatus of the ego, thoughts arise even when they are unwanted. Even when there is a desperate need for peace and meditative silence, it’s hard to come by because the mind simply does not obey. It rebels against the pseudo-authority of the I-thought and simply creates more impotence, dissatisfaction, and a sense of of being out of control and in a purposeless, nihilistic attitude toward the world that is being depicted by an out-of-control mental apparatus.
The ego’s sanskaras from the past cannot easily be overcome, whether those sanskaras relate more to anger, fear, grief, anxiety, or some other emotional tendency or tendency of hysterical meltdown. Once they are loose and out of control, these sanskaras tend to gain more and more traction and more power. If the ego is not leashed by an awareness (an awakening of the soul) that countervails and loses interest in the ego’s machinations, turning to God with devotion and surrender, then the ego tends to bring about the worst possible scenario that ultimately enacts its worst fears . . . and its most secret jouissance that turns out not to be what the ego expected and results in a kind of internal state of ruin. We see many people suffering from that kind of ruin, because they’ve acted out in ways that they cannot then morally accept or forgive themselves for, so they end up in very self-traumatizing and even suicidal kinds of attitudes.
So the lower death drive is much more powerful than most people think today. And it’s very easy to be taken by surprise when it erupts if you have not opened to the higher power of the presence of the Self and surrendered your agency (your will) to that power to make the decisions and determine the way in which life unfolds. But this, too, is a matter of grace, not of the ego’s own willpower. So everything comes down to grace, and grace comes down to the willingness to love and to renounce the identification with the ego.
