View From the Top > Esteemed Reader

In a world gone mad it's hard to think right /
So much violence, hate, and spite
Murder going on all day and night /
Due time we fight the nonviolent fight -Beastie Boys

The politicians are the worst sufferers from inferiority complex. -Osho

The wars in the world and the wars within us are identical, indeed, the same event-the outer manifestation being a projection of our inner battles, only cast onto the screen of the manifest world. What we see on the televisions, read in the papers, and hear conversed on every street corner is precisely what is, with minor variations, transpiring in each person's psyche.

We have within us all the characters at play in the global political drama-the tyrants and righteous do-gooders, the prosecutors of justice, equivocators, conciliators, and apologists-all elbowing to be king of the dung heap for a day or a minute. That all these characters are contained within a single sack of skin gives the illusion of unity, when, in fact, there is in each of us, great multiplicity. The players comprising our inner lives are factious and ruthless in their pursuit of the personal pronoun, I.

We need look no further than daily drama of our inner world to see the cause of war and its solution. We can see that the much sought-after inner peace, harmony, and equanimity are as elusive personally as they are globally. Like so many monkeys in a car, our many I's fight for control-one steering, another pushing the accelerator, another applying the brake. Our inner and outer lives are characterized by incessant fits and starts, erratic changes of direction, noisy grinding of gears. The vehicle ends in crushed wreckage when the good of the whole is sacrificed to the ever-shifting urge to power.

Perceiving the warring state of our own person, the reason for world wars is also apparent. We see that the outer violence between individuals and nations is an extension of inner conflicts lacking any introspection. We see wars as the result of fractured beings projecting their inner conflicts onto the lives of countless others, simply because they are in positions of sufficient power to do so. But in a recognition of our own lack of unity, we also see the solution to war and that this solution begins with us. The perception of our violent multiplicity, once accepted, arouses the question: How can we become harmonious, concerted beings?

The beginning of an answer begins with an inspection of the cast of characters that populate the inner drama. Who do we call "I"? In a given day the personal pronoun precedes many pronouncements addressing numerous scopes of identification, from far-reaching identifications like our political persuasion, race, sex, socioeconomic standing, to the grosser psychophysical impulses (e.g. I am hungry, horny, antsy, angry, worried). More fundamentally, we are each in the possession of a picture that is a composite of the many ideas and expectations we have acquired about who we are, or more accurately, who we should be. This self-picture is the fallacious pseudo-unified image we are ever foisting upon the world so as to prevent an inward-looking recognition of the inconsistency and chaos that reigns within us.

This ego-I self-picture is the golden calf Moses found his people worshipping on returning from the mountain. Moses had been face-to-face with the Presence that answered his query with the simple statement "I am that I am" (which is to say identity, or consciousness itself, unattached to any form or object). In contrast, the golden calf symbolizes identity misplaced. It is the false god of our pictures of ourselves. It is the demiurge that tyrannizes our inner lives, making us subservient to its mutating whims, indenturing us to foist the fiction of its power on everyone around us, so as to perpetuate the myth of its existence. But the self-picture is not real, which is why it takes so much force and energy to maintain.

Extending this inner, psychological view to the players on the world stage, we can see that the battles waged by the Bushes and Husseins of the world are maneuvers designed to prevent their seeing the nullity of their own beings. These are men whose self-pictures are so fiercely defended by vanity and pride that they will wreak havoc defending them. Unless they are somehow reined in they will destroy millions of lives, communities, cultures, destroy the possibilities of a whole planet even, before they will allow themselves to introspect and shed even an iota of their falseness. They will stop at no amount of lies or degree of criminality to prevent the emptiness of their being from becoming apparent.

The first ramification of recognizing the conflict and multiplicity in ourselves is acknowledgement of the impossibility of blame. We see that blaming others, taking a side, setting up a base dichotomy of "us versus them" is yet further avoidance of a real perception of ourselves. It is only from an impartial, unreactive view of ourselves that the peace and harmony we crave can flow. Blame is yet another example of violence.

In the perception and acceptance of ourselves as we are, we see the futility of every kind of violence. We see that it arises from ignorance and can only produce more violence. Indeed in the state of re-membering ourselves, that is organizing the multifarious identities into a concerted whole, we recognize not just the uselessness but also the impossibility of violence.

Om. Shanti. Shanti. Shanti. May peace and peace and peace, be everywhere.

—Jason Stern

Department of Corrections

A photo on page three of our Hitched supplement last month went uncredited. The shot of the bride was taken by Dion Ogust. Her work can be viewed at www.dion photo.com.

In article on amateur as- tronomer Sean O'Dwyer last month, entitled "The Naked Sky," we incorrectly stated the distance to Jupiter. It is roughly one billion miles,not 30 billion miles.

A photo of the Face the Music band on page 83 of the March issue was incorrectly credited. The photographer was Jojo Ans.

Our apologies.