Wars on Earth are initiated in Heaven

About a month back, one of my Kabbalah teachers stated that wars on earth are initiated in Heaven, (as opposed to in the psychological or physical universes ; see my blog posts 'The Four Universes' and 'A Spiritual Cosmology'.)

I have taken a little while to think about this. My teacher was referring, among other things, to the role of Providence, something I’ve already touched on in this blog (see 'Vegetable, Animal and Human People'.) Wars ‘stir up’ ‘vegetable’ people, affording them opportunities to become’ animal’ or ‘human’ people. They move populations around, face them with new situations, speed up the introduction of new technology, and test the mettle of all those involved. Like natural disasters, they provide opportunities for acts of courage and love, and not just towards our family or our comrades, but towards our enemies as well.

And of course, wars are responsible for terrible suffering and loss.

How I long sometimes for the God of my childhood, for ‘gentle Jesus, meek and mild’ (his smashing things up in the Temple in anger was swiftly glossed over). God did not start wars, humans did, in strict disobedience of Him. God was Love.

Of course ‘he’ is, and a whole lot more.

Even as a child I knew that there was something awry with the view of God that my Sunday School teachers were giving me. So a lot of evil might be down to humans using their free will, but what about the natural world? Did it become red in tooth and claw because Eve ate the apple and, if so, wasn’t that a bit ‘unfair’ on animals? Furthermore, if God cared so much, why didn’t He intervene more to stop really terrible things? But it didn’t matter because, when we died, we would all go to heaven and live in bliss and splendour for ever and ever, so that was all right then.

It was via James Hillman’s writings, such as his book ‘The Soul’s Code’ that I first became aware of just how ruthless the soul can be in pursuit of its Divine purpose, and what it can put its various earthly incarnations through in the process. When I came to study Kabbalah I learned that existence in its fullness is manifested between the two opposing poles of mercy AND severity (force and form, see my blog post 'A Spiritual Cosmology') The aim of the kabbalist is to help to keep these two poles balanced, to proceed in consciousness back up through the universes, using a path centred between the two poles, to reunite again at one with the Divine, bringing with us all our experiences of those realms. And while we make our journey upwards, we act to ‘bring down’ the freedom and glory and Divinity of the upper universes to this material one.

Each incarnation is an adventure. Don’t get too attached to it, or anything in it because, like a dream, it will all dissolve. Throughout this life, and many others, you’ll win some, you’ll lose some. It is all simply a process which you can use to become more and more fully human, wiser, more loving, more aware of who you really are. Like childbirth, it’s going to hurt and, yes, you’ll voluntarily go through the whole thing again.

Honouring the gods

Life, like a pantheon of jealous gods (take the ancient Greek or Roman Gods for example) makes many and conflicting demands upon us. To deal with these conflicting demands it helps to view these gods and goddesses as representative of the deep urges embedded within us.   

According to certain psychotherapies these urges, mostly unconscious, are an integral part of our soul. Many of us feel a void at the middle of our existence because we have become disconnected from, or 'educated' away from, these urges. Others feel torn by conflicting urges.

Writers like Thomas Moore (see his book ‘Care of the Soul’) concentrate on what these dilemmas can tell us about what our soul needs. (Transpersonal psychotherapies are particularly concerned with this.  Therapies like Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, NLP and hypnotherapy, while extremely effective and useful in their place, are more concerned with alleviating symptoms.) So rather than see envy, for example, as a feeling that we have to overcome and conquer, it would be better if we stepped back for a while and consider what our soul is attempting to resolve, or gain, or draw our attention to.  To begin with, such a step allows us to detach from the envy. Secondly, it can remove the guilt and denial that stops us from exploring these feelings in the depth needed. When we are attached to something we see as unpleasant, unworthy, or shameful, we tend to deny it, which precludes working constructively with it.

Envy, like all emotions, exists for a reason. All emotions, even those deemed unworthy or dangerous, or which are banned by one of the ten commandments,  are indicators that we are paying insufficient attention to something of importance.

If we accept from the start that our emotional and spiritual lives are, by nature, contradictory and paradoxical, we are in a better position to deal with the problems that this throws up. This goes further.

We may think, for example, that all we need is a healthy relationship, somebody to love us who treats us properly, and consider ourselves bereft and incomplete, without this. But, deep down, when we reflect, we know that to love, to experience security in the affections of some-one we love in return, is to risk. Who knows what life might throw up to tear us apart? Or what we might be called upon to sacrifice for this relationship? When I was a counsellor, I had many clients who declared that all they wanted was to love and be loved. But further investigation revealed that that their feelings were actually very ambiguous. This is understandable. Having discovered the conflict, those clients could then go on to make a conscious decision about how much they were prepared to risk, and the price they were prepared, or not, to pay.

And it goes further.

Our soul needs to find some way to hold and honour all the paradoxes within us. Our soul knows that to love is to risk. It wants to expand and hold within itself the dichotomies and the paradoxes. Take for example the demands of two very powerful gods; between Apollo – rational, sober, constructive, light, male, yang; and Dionysus – intuitive, intoxicated, destructive, dark, female, yin.  Consider also that our soul needs to honour both Aphrodite - sexual, sensuous - and Artemis - pure, asexual.  If we repress one, if we ignore it and do not give it the attention and/or the respect it demands, and do not examine it as a signpost to an area of emotional or spiritual inattention/lack of respect, it may well destroy us.  Greek, Roman, Viking and many other mythologies abound in stories of how destructive the gods and goddesses can be if they’re not receiving the attention or respect they think is their due.

 “'In every corner of my soul stands an altar to a different god.” (Fernando Pessoa). If we can accept this, that with every impulse that we have there will be a conflicting impulse, and that in every impulse there is the seed of its own opposite (see the yin/yang symbol,) perhaps of its own destruction, we would not feel so short-changed by our lives. Indeed, we could use that very fact to enrich our immortal souls.