What is going on in Israel and Palestine is nothing new. It has gone on since the dawn of man. Once the tribe was pitched against another tribe, with individuals hitting each other over heads with wooden clubs. The tribe became the village, the village the town, the town the city, the city the kingdom, and the kingdom a country. Perhaps soon we’ll have planets against planets, and then galaxies against galaxies, who knows. The wooden club was traded for a knife, the knife for a sword, and the sword soon became a gun. After that, a whole range of extremely destructive weaponry came about including tanks, battleships, fighter jets, remote control drone missiles, nuclear bombs, and the like. We’re already creating direct energy weapons, perhaps in the future we’ll have remote laser beams operating from satellites or create something akin to a Death Star.
From the prehistoric caveman fighting with rocks to the modern politicians and military officials in their suits, inwardly nothing has changed. Tribal chiefs would deliberate, elders would pass down their way of life to the young, and together they would draw up defense and battle plans. Soon enough ancient rulers were doing the exact same, scheming up ways to protect and expand their empires. Kings and queens then came along, again motivated by the same way of life, seeking to expand their kingdoms and amass the most riches. The monarchies of the world were soon replaced by governments and world wars subsequently erupted. In the last century alone the Vietnam War claimed the lives of 4,200,000 people; the Russian Civil War 9,000,000; World War I 15,000,000; Stalin’s rule 20,000,000; Mao Zedong 40,000,000; and World War II 66,000,000.
Never before has the world been so well equipped to destroy humans and cause widespread suffering. America alone is pumping over 2.2 trillion dollars into the military every year. As of January 2023, 12,512 nuclear warheads have been produced. It’s needless to say these are weapons of mass destruction, capable of destroying entire cities and killing millions of people at a time. Imagine if aliens were to suddenly arrive and look at what a mess we have created. I imagine one of their initial thoughts would be “Why are they so determined to destroy themselves?”, or perhaps, “Why are they putting so much effort into creating weapons to blow themselves up?”. It is a strange phenomenon when you take a step back. In the name of peace, we are destroying ourselves. In the name of defense, we repeatedly end up attacking. In the name of love, we foster hate for one another. Everything seems to have been inverted, as though the majority of the population is under the constant belief that it is opposite day.
It is clear that humanity is on a destructive trajectory, and the need for change is more urgent than ever before. It’s also obvious that if you divide the world into countries and arm every single country with weapons of mass destruction that mass destruction is the eventual outcome. To not realize this is utter stupidity. You don’t build a nuclear weapon to bring about peace in the world. To bring about peace you simply don’t introduce violence into the world. The conflict in the East is just another manifestation of our problematic way of living. Of our refusal, or understanding, of what it is to change. Inwardly, we have not changed from the prehistoric man or the tribes folk of thousands of years ago. All that has changed is our external circumstances. We’ve amassed a great deal of knowledge, sharpened our intellect to the highest degree, and made great strides regarding technological advancements. But all this knowledge and our sharp intellect is still missing one key ingredient, intelligence.
Man has become a victim of the knowledge he has amassed. It has become the root cause of why we are all divided among ourselves. We each create a structure of thought in our memory full of beliefs, ideologies, concepts, and remembrances, that we have grown attached to. The environment impresses a certain structure of thought upon the individual’s memory, and the individual, mistaking themselves for the memory, lives through this structure. Some individuals become Christian, others Jewish or Muslim. People succumb to different ideologies, to capitalism or socialism. They identify with certain political ideologies or philosophical concepts. Any thought, when the individual becomes attached to it, becomes a divisive force. As human beings, we are born as blank slates. There is no need to say that you are ‘x’ and I am ‘y’. To do so serves no benefit and is limited to being destructive in nature. Yet this is how we live.
For thousands of years, we’ve been in this state of hypnosis, in a trance of thought. Thought has become the puppeteer pulling our strings. We no longer see the world for what it is, but rather through the image we are presented with after filtering it through our conditioned memories. Imagine if the animals lived this way. If the bees, instead of working together to create a hive full of honey, decided to create belief systems, ideologies, and philosophical concepts. If they began to point out that some of the bees have slight differences in their stripes and attribute labels to them. If instead of working to create a hive that can sustain the existence of the whole population, they instead begin building fortresses and fighting among themselves. All it takes is natural cooperation to bring about a world akin to the hive full of sweet honey, a world rooted in abundance.
Everything else in the entire world is in perfect order. The seasons flow from one to the next. You don’t see spring fighting to prevent the summer from arriving, or the summer preventing the arrival of winter. The planets in our solar system seamlessly swing around one another, suspended by invisible and seemingly magical forces. It’s all part of the flow of life. Life is in a constant cycle, like how it rains, the water flows through the rivers to the ocean, and the whole process repeats itself. Just like how the sun rises and sets day after day. Everything is fluid, dynamic, in motion. It is this state of constant change that is order. The only static object in the entire universe appears to be within the mind of man. For it is within our memory that our ego and all the surrounding beliefs, ideologies, and other nonsense we have grown attached to are housed.
Within each of us, this structure has crystallized and set in stone. Our true task as human beings is to take out a pickaxe and destroy this structure once and for all. To be able to see the world without overlaying our false perception of the world over the top of it. To see our fellow human beings for what they are, human beings, and nothing more. There is no need to want to kill another human being until we invent a reason, a justification, through thought. Only when we divide ourselves, when we view ourselves in terms of labels, why we try to assert ourselves onto others, does any conflict manifest in the world. As human beings, we need to venture within and see how we are living. Our memories have become like an old chest caked in dust and full of cobwebs. It’s time we open it up and clear out anything that doesn’t serve us. Me and my partner have recently moved house, and she was telling me off for not getting rid of my old clothes because we don’t have space in the draws. And it’s the same thing here, to create that inner space we have to clear out all these dogmatic beliefs and illusions.
The real battlefield lies within the individual. The moment you become attached to thought you are building this castle within your memory. Being made of thought it is illusory, but day after day you mistake it for being real. And so you live in the world, patrolling the castle walls, on the lookout for attackers, constantly striving to defend. But what you are defending is the cause of all the various forms of suffering in the world, including violence. Why defend man-made labels, belief systems, ideologies, and all other forms of knowledge when, if applied in this sense, they only divide us? The answer isn’t to try to unite everyone under the same belief system, ideology, or concept, it is to set man unconditionally free from all such nonsense. Only then, when each human being has put knowledge and remembrances into their correct place will they be able to meet the present moment consciously.
Those who fail to do so will continue living in this problematic way and perpetuate the trajectory we are currently on. It’s as though each person is in a psychological trench made up of all the man-made baggage they have grown attached to. Rather than put down their weapons and step out of their trenches, bringing an end to the conflict, they instead choose to remain. They delude themselves into thinking that within the trench they have something to protect. But they don’t realize what they are protecting is an illusion, it is the very cause of division and conflict itself. It’s time for us all inwardly to step out of this psychological trench we’ve become encased in. Then, our actions no longer stemming from within the trench, will change the course of humanity and contribute to the creation of a better world.
Stripping away all the nonsense, of which there is so much, all the political discussions, the opinions, and so on, all that remains is a fundamental truth. Violence is introduced into the world on an individual level. Only when you, or your fellow human beings, act violently is violence then introduced. Only then do we need politicians, institutions, and international organizations to sit around discussing how to deal with the effects of violence that have already manifested in the world. To deal with the effects is no good, one must rip the root cause from the soil of the mind. The most any individual can do is find out what is driving them to act violently. To see the cause within themselves. Seeing the cause, they will steer clear of it, and thus no longer introduce such actions into the world. We must break free of this psychological spell we are under. Each human being must become responsible for their actions, rather than unconsciously filtering and reacting to the world through a conditioned structure impressed upon the memory by the environment.
It is so easy to get divided, and there are some awful atrocities taking place in our world. But the truth is infectious, and the more people that realize it, the faster it will spread. Do not become divided from your fellow human beings. Do not be sucked in by the confused opinions of others. Don’t hate people because of their own confusion. Don’t take sides. All of this is the most immature way of living. It’s time we grow up as a species. It’s time we return to our natural state of being, of perceiving the world for what it actually is, not the mental abstraction of what we think it is. It’s time individuals are brought back to a point where they can see an act of violence as an act of violence, free of the man-made justifications and rationalizations that surround it.
Unfortunately, we live in a world in which some people are so conditioned they are willing to die to uphold the man-made contents of their memory such as religious beliefs or nationalistic beliefs. But the best we can do is each understand ourselves. To understand what is actually driving us to introduce violence into the world. Not to rely on politicians and man-made legislation, for it is clear they are an extension of the problem, in that they only exist because we are acting in a problematic way. The answer to violence and all wars is the most simple thing, to simply not act in a violent way. Yet despite this, for thousands of years, we’ve gone on acting violently and introducing these superficial solutions like the United Nations and other organizations. One of the key takeaways from this passage is that our individual actions are of prime importance, not our thoughts regarding our actions. If you can act consciously, not introducing violence into the world, you’ve answered an age-old problem. And in doing so you are naturally contributing to the creation of a truly peaceful world, in which not only the conflict between Israel and Palestine is brought to an end, but all conflicts across the globe.
The Candlelight 
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