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Why Does War Exist?

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A peace researcher once said: "War is a vicarious action." And this is exactly what I also see within people: They wage an inner war which is nothing but an avoidance, a vicarious action in order to escape feeling. I am an individual, I am this small part of the whole that has to protect itself from the whole to be able to survive. Yes, every part, every small part has to protect itself against the whole, against the great, against the powerful, against the evil on the outside, against the threat, the badness of whole humanity, the terrorists, warmongers, politicians, no matter whether on the right or on the left wing. What kind of life is this? What if you have deceived yourself the whole time? What if you, in reality, are the whole? I take what a normal person calls "my life" essentially for an accumulation of vicarious actions solely aimed at escaping the essential. For the essential is something like the end of life within Life. When the essential nature appears, the individuality is finished. And that is what we are afraid of. Afraid of the loss of identity, afraid of the loss of the "I", afraid of death, afraid of the dissolution into nothingness. But do these fears tell the truth? Have we ever sincerely examined whether these fears tell the truth? We have to be ready to give up the vicarious actions on the inside and on the outside for a moment; to face it and to feel. When you give up all vicarious actions, when you stop fighting against yourself and the world, then, for the first time, you face the essential. This is your glimpse into reality.        
And then you see: I am all of that too, all of what I never wanted to be. I am the war, I am the terror, the violence, the torture. It is all here, within me. And when I admit that I am everything I never wanted to be, when I take it back to its origin from where it has arisen, when it has returned, something surprising happens, something unexpected happens. Because then there is peace. The truth is that the moment, this inner moment, in which I am serene, even with war, is very peaceful. The terror that threatens the outside world points to the urgency of the inner situation of man, the urgency in which you find yourself, which is to realize once and forever, what is real, to wake up from vicarious actions, to wake up from the nightmare of the continual inner fight that this idea of "I" goes on dreaming. There is only one possibility to wake up from the catastrophe: To realize once for all what is real. What is real and has no end. When you serve the soul instead of waging war against it, as you have done until now, you will get somewhere, you will get to what the soul is destined for. Then, you are in the peace of God.

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