@pennyrimbaud1 I believe we must go deeper. Jesus didn't say, "Blessed are the peace-lovers". He said, "peace-makers", the true battle of learning to love the fire, the sacramental fires of transmutation. “The thing then,” N.O.Brown clarifies, “is not to abolish war but to find the true war.”
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In the visionary genius of William Blake, “War is energy Enslav’d.” To the American philosopher N.O. Brown, ‘Make love, not war,’ won’t do because they are the same thing. “Peace lies in finding the true war. Find the true fire; of which the fires of war are a Satanic parody…War is war perverted. The problem is not war but the perversion. And the perversion is a repression.” (Love’s Body X) As Blake and Milton perceive it, “corporeal war” is the lowest form of violence, the anti-Christ, the demonic parody, the death decreed to those who run away from the true battle of learning to love the fire, the sacramental fire of transmutation. “The thing then,” Brown concludes, “is not to abolish war but to find the true war.”
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Look carefully enough and we find Brown’s transmutation imperative mirrored in the deepest teachings of all authentic wisdom traditions, Axial or otherwise. Ultimately, every genuine path conjoins in a common recognition: the consciously-contained suffering of ‘finding the true war’ demands adequately meeting and transmuting the intense and sometimes desolate psychic territory necessary to birth a higher sanity and better world. No matter our culture or creed, whichever psyche-technes we apply to this end, any coherent approach provides a workable means for recognizing our own defensiveness and transfiguring awkward, habitual, natural responses (the painful obstructions of our fears, say) into a refined, positive, life-affirming metamorphosis. As even a basic practitioner experiences it, by admitting to the violence of our own hearts, for example, in an agonizing inner struggle to accept or forgive, such alchemy ultimately completes itself in peace, making our hearts whole.
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In time, we may become a wheeled hub upon which great psychic and social forces, the collective Shadow included, constellate, coalesce and, crucially, integrate, in an incarnational narrative ultimately completing itself in communal reconstruction and peace. Even as the price for this level of consciousness ultimately demands facing terror with reckless love, for however long it takes, no matter the assaults or dangers, any effort to deal with the outer socio-political ancien regime without transmuting our own, individual inner ancien regimes in this manner, is a course forever condemned to sewing more darkness, more violence, and more of the literalism of war into our own worlds, no matter how enthusiastic, engaged or long-lived our efforts to shape an ideal society may be. Do not inhibit, but transmute, say the Sages. Do not entertain the insanity of the Sages.
@pauljpastor @deanober 7/ So often, the epiphenomenal miracle of reconciliation grows out of complementarities discerningly wedded in the transmutative locus of personal experience. Where is the fundamental substrate of world peace experientially founded, after all? I’d say you’re onto something, Dean.
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