Making Peace in Gaza and In Ourselves

I have no deeply held views about the moral debacle going on in Gaza.If you dont agree with me please read Genesis 4:23. and Genesis 6:11.

The moral descent of Jews is an amazing feat: from receiving God's law, face to face at the apex of mount Sinai, to the wanton murder of innocents in the name whatever pretext or revenge in the valley of moral descent.

There is no moral justification in the Bible or teaching of Jewish sages that justifies the level of retaliatory violence that the Israel state is meting out on innocents. If it can grant 3 hours of peace why not 30 hours? 30 months? 30 years? It is a shameful act of playing God with other helpless people's lives and does not take away the moral accountability that goes with it.

Hamas and to a large extent all of the Palestinian people are dupes and slaves of the rest of the Arab world. Goading Israel into retaliation is nothing new to the Palestinians. Militants park rocket launchers near schools and store armaments and house militants in hospitals and residential neighborhoods so they can parade dead bodies in front of the TV cameras and act like innocent victims. This latest flare-up of violence in Gaza was precipitated by the recent drop in oil prices. As a pretense for raising the price of oil the OPEC countries ordered the recent rocket attacks on Israel and Hamas dutifully acquiesced rather than lose Arab support, money and arms. There will never be a resolution to this conflict until the Palestinian people throw off the yoke of Arab oppression and deal with the reality that Israel and Jews exist and that they aren’t going anywhere.

Brad, I thank you and others like you for encouraging us to consider and practice different ways of thinking and being.

As a mentor and a conscious participant in my own (!) spiritual journey, I have often found cause to pause and ask of myself and those I work with: Do I really want this (whatever 'this' might be)?

So often, we claim we want peace, happiness, a certain career, a partner, children...etc...without realizing that we have simply assumed that they are what we desire (a result of our social/cultural/historical conditioning). In other words, we have not really experienced the spontaneous desire for what we claim we want. Or if we have, it has long been overridden by our ego's demands/dictates of what it asserts will bring us happiness.

There is no 'peace' out there, whether to be made or fought for. The only peace there is is that which we naturally are underneath the layers of our conditioned beliefs, what Buddhists often refers to as our 'natural great peace'.

Your support of the personal ceasefire that we can each practice is not unlike the practice of daily meditation, where for a few minutes or hours, we allow our conditioned mind and all its deeply held beliefs and judgments to settle, to rest, like mud in a glass of muddy water. Thus is revealed the clear mind/water, that which we naturally are. That space or state of consciousness that Rumi so beautifully points us to:

"Beyond the ideas of rightfulness and wrongfulness, there is a field. I will meet you there".

May we all soften and expand into the spaciousness of our natural great peace daily, if peace is what we truly want!

In love, Lucy