Everywhere on our planet — and I mean everywhere — the majority of people want peace, yearn for harmony, plead for an end to violence. Yet we live in a global society in which the wishes of the majority have been and continue to be constantly thwarted.
We have just emerged from the Christmas season, in which millions around the world speak and sing of Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Men. Yet we cannot seem to achieve that goal. We cannot even come close. Bringing humanity to the level of the humane is not going to be easy.
Whenever someone rises up to offer us peace, to seek a way out of turmoil and conflict, to bring an end to violence, there appear people in our world ready to silence that person…by whatever means. And they do so.
Martin Luther King Jr. was shot in the United States. Gandhi was killed in India. Ms. Bhutto was just assassinated in Pakistan. We kill people in this world who try to stop us from killing people.
I don’t know what this is about. I don’t know who we think we are as a people and who we are going to be. I do know that it is very dangerous to speak out against violence and killing. The violent killers don’t want you to.
Ismaiel Abbas was a Shiite tribal sheikh active in an effort to counter militias in his northeastern Baghdad neighborhood. Last week he was killed instantly when gunmen in two cars attacked him near his home in the Shaab Shiite neighborhood, an Iraqi Interior Ministry official told CNN.
Witnesses told investigators the gunmen were Shiite militia, but police are still investigating, the official was quoted b CNN as having said. Sheikh Abbas was part of an effort to form an armed group to combat militias in his neighborhood, according to the CNN report.
But the militia in Iraq will brook no interference. Like the mafia of old (or, perhaps, not so old), the “family” in Iraq wants to rule the streets, wants to rule them by violence, and there will be no exceptions allowed, nor any opposition permitted.
The message has been sent. Even Shiite tribal sheikhs — normally revered in Shiite portions of Iraq — are not immune to retribution. No one…no one…is to oppose the militia, which seeks to provide the real, on-the-ground governance in Iraq, and in the face of which the actual government seems to have no power at all.
What is it inside the human heart that allows us to kill one another when we don’t get out way? How has it happened that we place so little value on human life that we feel we can waste it and end it with impunity over political disagreement?
This much I know: unless and until humanity can raise itself up collectively to a new level of understanding, to a new embracing of our true identity as divine beings, and to a new ethic of honoring life above all else, we will never advance in our evolution. Never.
Evolutionary advance requires a new gold standard for human behavior. The standard has to shift from righteousness to life itself. And the awareness of humanity must also advance, from our present thought of separation to a new thought of unity. We are all one, yet until the largest number of people in our world understand that, embrace that, and function as if that were true, we will not evolve beyond our present, primitive state of collective being.
Yet what could cause such an advance?
Teaching. New teaching. We must tell our young a new story about who we are and what our relationship with each other is. We must overturn centuries and millennia of prior instruction on these subjects. We must rewrite our entire Cultural Story.
This is the job of religion, yet religion has woefully failed humanity in this regard. Indeed, it is religion itself which too often teaches a lesson of separation and superiority. What is needed is a new spirituality, a new way to hold the experience of God, of Life, and of our relationship to all of that.
And what could cause such a new spirituality to emerge? Ah, yes, that is the question, isn’t it?
(For more on this subject it may interest you to read The New Revelations and Tomorrow’s God, two books by the author of this blog.)