What would have to change for there to be no war?

You project to the world around you what you hold within.

Peace within you is the cornerstone of peace in the world.**

Truly no adjustment of the environment around us can take place without an adjustment to the environment within us. Equally, action on the outside can be symbolic for the action we are initiating within us. Some can connect psychically enough to instigate their change primarily from within. Others require a simultaneous exercise working from both environments. For some, the change within seems to be strictly a result of the change that they instigate on the outside.

Change will lead to insight far more often than insight will lead to change.-Milton Erickson

In the US (but not, only in the US) we must cease to believe in the rhetoric of either/or, designed to sell us the disease of fear so that we will believe we have no option but to accept their designed path of a fix.

"Bush's language structure is similar to the communication structure of an abusive personality. The goal of any abusive personality is domination, to make their targets do things that they otherwise would not do." -Dr. Renana Brooks

(for more on this see and the link to Dr. Brook's article, see http://kathmandau.blogspot.com/2008/07/words-we-use-maintain-our-confinement.html )

I see this kind of exercise of motivating people through apocalyptic vision not only in our politics. It's there even in our endeavors of spirit. Why is it that we respond so much better to threat than to positive vision?

We imagine that which see before us because it is within.

As within, so without.**

Why aren't we equally driven to achieve the glorious possibilities as we are to avoid the catastrophes? Any action driven by fear uses up quite a bit energy just feeding the fear-not to mention the unstable thinking patterns that arise from such a state. Sure, it has historically (personally and collectively) brought about some positive goals, but at what cost?!

I am definitely not saying that the work of correcting this environment is strictly on the inside-we as a collective do not seem sufficiently connected inwardly to execute the process exclusively from the interior. However, while doing the symbolic work on the outside, we need also to heal that thing within us that gives us such a predilection to believe in the negative rather than the positive. Bush was not the first time (or last) this technique has been employed and successful on us.