Not a day passes when we don’t hear about a war somewhere in the world.

According to the Geneva Academy there are 110 armed conflicts occurring in the world today. Some of them started recently, while others have lasted for more than 50 years.

There are 35 in Africa, 21 in Asia, 7 in Europe and 6 in Latin America

Referrence:

https://geneva-academy.ch/galleries/today-s-armed-conflicts

 

The English word war comes from  the High German  (“werran”) and Old English (“werre”) words that mean “confusion” or “to confuse.” If you read firsthand accounts from soldiers who have taken part in wars, you’ll recognize how accurate a description that is of what takes place in a war.

I have been researching when the first war took place. And through this research I am  of the belief that human beings are not predisposed to war.  When the first humans roamed the Earth, life was harsh and obtaining food and shelter was hard work. Humans learned that it was far more efficient to divide work among a group and to trade resources with other groups than fight.

 

If one group wanted to fight another group in early prehistoric times it was easier and preferable to simply pick up and move. According to Brian Ferguson in his article War is NOT Part of Human Nature published in Scientific America he writes,

“The preconditions that make war more likely include a shift to a more sedentary existence, a growing regional population, a concentration of valuable resources such as livestock, increasing social complexity and hierarchy, trade in high-value goods, and the establishment of group boundaries and collective identities. These conditions are sometimes combined with severe environmental changes. War at Jebel Sahaba, for one, may have been a response to an ecological crisis, as the Nile cut a gorge that eliminated productive marshlands, eventually leading to human abandonment of the area. Later, centuries after agriculture began, Neolithic Europe—to take one example—demonstrated that when people have more to fight over, their societies start to organize themselves in a manner that makes them more prepared to go ahead and embrace war.

 

There are limits, however, to what archaeology can show, and we must seek answers elsewhere. Ethnography—the study of different cultures, both living and past—illustrates these preconditions. A basic distinction is between “simple” and “complex” hunter-gatherer communities.

 

Simple hunting and gathering characterised human societies during most of humanity’s existence dating back more than 200,000 years. Broadly, these groups cooperated with one another and lived in small, mobile, egalitarian bands, exploiting large areas with low population density and few possessions.

 

Complex hunter-gatherers, in contrast, live in fixed settlements with populations in the hundreds. They maintain social rankings of kin groups and individuals, restrict access to food resources by lines of descent and have more developed political leadership. Signs of such social complexity first appeared during the Mesolithic. The appearance of complex hunter-gatherers can sometimes but not always mark a transitional stage to agriculture, the basis for the development of political states. These groups, moreover, often waged war.

 

The preconditions for war are only part of the story, however, by themselves, they may not suffice to predict outbreaks of collective conflicts. In the Southern Levant, for instance, those preconditions existed for thousands of years without evidence of war.The southern Levant refers to an area encompassed by modern Israel, Jordan, and Palestine. Canaan is the ancient name of this region, and a Canaanite culture was prominent until the Iron Age, when the kingdoms of Israel and Judah dominated.

Humans have always had a capacity to make war, if conditions and culture so dictate. But those conditions and the warlike cultures they generate became common only over the past 10,000 years—and, in most places, much more recently than that. The high level of killing often reported in history, ethnography or later archaeology is contradicted in the earliest archaeological findings around the globe.

Certainly there are geographic reasons for conflict. There are also religious ideologies that bring people into war.

However, these external reasons are all a result of the absence of inner peace. The absence of trust that abundance is not achieved through invasion, theft or battle, but in the deepest understanding of the simplest truth.

 

There is  enough. 

There is a global misunderstanding of the word Power.

Power has nothing to do with ownership, with expanding ones empire, with ruling over others.

 

 

Power is  knowing when to withdraw, when to bring things to an end, how to accommodate the ideas and desires of others . Power is the ability to discern and discriminate and separate what is true and what is false.  The power to assess the quality of our choices and the recognition when  they may come from Love or from Fear. Power involves the ability to cooperate and to tolerate and to respond to external and internal events positively and yet not be affected by them .(Wisdom learned from my time studying with the Brahma Kumaris)

War drags us all away from our consciousness.

Consciousness is the quality or state of being aware especially of something within oneself.

 

  Love- Consciousness takes this definition to another level. It is the anchoring in your heart so that you can witness during your daily activities and allows you to discern between ego and love, head and heart, illusion and reality. When we learn to discern between Love and Ego there will be no war. No need for war. No greed, fear, doubt, destruction, negativity and therefore no war.

War is born out of ego. Wanting more. Taking more. Hating the other through fear. If only those who have initiated and created violence and  war knew they are simply displaying their fear to the world.

 

Today is a day we, the Jewish people, have been given to rejoice. To be happy. To dance. It is a festival called Simchat Torah.

Grief makes rejoicing hard, but not impossible. Throwing one joyful thought or memory into the air literally swallows up a dark thought.  Joy dissolves darkness and if we want to make a difference to this world that is one powerful way to do it.