To the editor:
When we look out at the world, we see systems dissembling. We see the residue of the old. Politicians, ideologies, governments dividing us through blame, threat, retribution, and, most of all, fear—as well as through greed, corruption, and the warring that fear creates. We see fear and confusion, people reacting in fear and spreading more.
We are not in need of a revitalized political party or a new political party or ideology. Politics and ideology are furthering division and conflict around the world.
We are not witnessing the coming of a new political order. We are seeing the very, very old. The ancient choosing of war. And it is a choice, a choice made in the belief that we are separate from our neighbors next door or from those on the other side of the world, and a belief in fear and lack and the desire to dominate and grab what others have. And it is a choice made in acquiescence to the expectation and the idea that we will and must war because it is what we have known.
Our old systems have been created to value some over others, to protect us from those we have been taught and conditioned to believe are unworthy and our enemies and that if we don’t attack them first they will attack us. They are systems and thinking designed to perpetuate power and control.
As many have observed by now, this is a time of reckoning. This reckoning is happening because we cannot continue to ravage the Earth or continue to choose war when we have developed weapons of mass destruction. We are seeing our personal and collective inheritance that was developed in the belief that we are separate from those beside us and separate from the source of all things.
The old is coming up to be seen for us to realize what we have contributed to and produced in order to release and clear ourselves and our world from the perpetuation of fear, and its religious and ethnic hatreds, its racism and misogyny, its wars and genocides and famines, its inequity, inequality, and injustices.
We need to be willing to compassionately look within—not look away—to see the judgment, mercilessness, greed, selfishness, blame, lack of forgiveness, shame, guilt, and unworthiness that has accumulated from this long inheritance.
This is the time to feed and to shelter those in need and to speak what must be spoken. May those who need to speak rise to speak with the power of mercy, generosity, kindness, and caring, not with the divisiveness of old rancor, blame, and the seeking to punish. In our individual hearts and souls and in the light of our collective voice, we need to claim our freedom and to know the true peace of our natures and say, “No more.” No more will we be in agreement to the separation of fear, greed, intolerance, and its walls, borders, prisons, and wars.
It is time to claim our own worth and right to be and the worth and right to be of each and every one of us and the worth and right to be of all living things. We are one species among many, and we are one with all our brothers and sisters. We are in a process of clearing our hearts so that we may move toward holding the high vibration of love that embraces all without exception. We will not choose conflict or war because we will know we are one.
We are moving through fear and confusion toward knowing what has been so obscured but that in the depth of our hearts and souls we know is the truth. The truth that we have always been in unity. We have never been separate from one another, never separate from our source by whatever name it has been called or none. We have been living a lie for countless generations. To releasing and rising above fear, separation, and history to a new epoch and the freedom from fear of a new world we have not known.
Gina James
Great Barrington
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