A couple, dear friends of mine who live in Tel Aviv, have a 20-year-old son in the army in this moment and I cannot even start to imagine their fear, concern, and trembling.
When I was living in Florence many decades ago, I had many Palestinian friends and I remember their despair and sense of impotence.
The beast is rampant in the world in this moment. The Beast is not in hell, is not in the afterlife, is not in the lies of religions and their attempts to keep us small and unconscious hoping for salvation. The beast is in each and everyone of us when we refuse, avoid, hide the shadow we carry inside. It is hidden under the pain, under the arrogance, under the need to be special, under the desire for revenge, under the blaming and our unwillingness to recognize how we keep hating ourselves and each other in the name of race, ideals, morals, bible, quran, torah and idealize a God that lives in the heavens.
This is perhaps the biggest and deepest wound that religions have inflicted to humanity: they have been spreading the fundamental lie that heaven and hell belong to the afterlife, taking away from us the responsibility and the capacity to create and live in paradise or in hell IN THIS LIFE! Treated like children, castrated and impotent but to only hope for salvation after death, we keep moving waiting for someone to show us the right path: priests, rabbis, imams, saints…and give us salvation.
The beast is in each one of us. It is here as we look at a mendicant in the street and we think: ”Get a job man!”. It is here when we hate immigrants and want to keep them away. It is in our greed and jealousy and envy. It is in our sense of being better just because we have more privileges. It is in our sense of being special. And more than in everything else it is in our constant hiding of what we judge and condemn in ourselves.
When we do not acknowledge our inner darkness, when we avoid it and project it out unconsciously, when we idealize a goodness that we do not embody, when we are not willing to feel the fragility of our humanity, we are accomplices of Hamas terrorists and the fascist Netanyahu.
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