Once again, we are confronted with atrocities beyond our comprehension. Bullets, bombs, rockets and outrage have overwhelmed the natural order of our lives. When horror and incomprehensible suffering confront us, the tendency is to succumb to simple formulas and emotion-driven responses. The war continues in words, in rival flags and in clenched fists and demands for action. Are one side’s words meant to beat the other side’s words?
Because my tendency is to look for the big-picture themes, I have delved into esoteric sources and commentaries that draw us way back from the daily details of this current episode. At the risk of inviting scorn and skepticism, I can add some of those themes to the conversation.
First of all, what is happening on this planet is critical not just to we who live here, but to the galactic cosmos as well. The cosmic history of Earth is pivotal to realms well beyond what we call the known universe.
Great forces have woven through thousands and millions of years of cosmic time, leaving their imprint on the collective consciousness of humanity. In the oldest teachings on the planet, these forces are contemplated and elucidated by mystics and advanced beings—masters—who incarnate to share wisdom. Contemporary figures continue this deep investigation, but these days they are not given much opportunity to inform any but the ardent seeker. The imprint they could give to the current conversation is absent.
One common theme in esoteric thought is that evolution is a factor of energetic waves that exist as cycles, evolving out of and building on each other. In India they are called Yugas. The Mayan mystical teachers left mathematically coded records of thematic cycles, as did other ancient cultures. In the spiritual texts of all major religions, references are made to these cycles and their consequences.
Indigenous teachers worldwide have taught similar truths through story and myth. Prophecy came out of those teachings, and there are common themes running through these prophecies that unite them more than divide them. A prevailing one is of the end of a long, dark age and the birth of an age of light. The New Age movement is an articulation of that prophecy.
These expressions of the larger purposes of humanity exist in the background of today’s traumatic times. The birthing of a new cycle coincides with the dissolution of the old cycle. There is resistance, there is regression, there is confusion and fanaticism. What held the old theme together is falling apart and a new transformational theme is barely perceptible in the chaos.
In the Middle East, layers of political history rest on ideological and spiritual history that seep through at every level. The polarization of the forces of good and evil, materialism and spirituality, right and wrong are embodied in the physicality of the Holy Lands.
However we characterize what is going on there, we cannot ignore that today’s headlines rest on thousands of years of a fundamental tension that has never resolved.
If that is true, how does that knowledge help us cope with the endless awful news, cofounded with the awful news of the Russia-Ukraine war? I study the literal news of these political events to the best of my ability to grasp what is going on, but I also look for every sign and hint of the new energy latent in this drama.
The contemporary masters’ teachings around the horrors of war instruct us to look within for the parts of ourselves that are caught in the old dynamic of dividing ourselves into polarity stances—and to reconcile them. They say that this effort by each of us is as significant in bringing about peace as if we were playing a major role in the external conflict. They say that what we see outside us is also ourselves. We hold hatred, we yearn for action to fix grievances, we rush for revenge, we decide what justice means by how it feels to us.
When we overcome those patterns of thought, rooted in the age of duality in its degenerate form, we are bringing in the new age of light. We don’t need to judge the old ways; we need to read the signs telling us that something new is being born in the tempest of these times.
Elizabeth Whitney is a longtime local journalist and commentator.