Likely due to the seemingly endless wars, ‘extreme weather events’ and waves of debilitating disease currently obsessing our bodies, hearts and information feeds, there seems to be more than the usual imprecations and prayers in the cause of love, light and peace on earth.  I see and hear it everywhere, including on Eric Clapton’s current tour as he sings George Harrison’s, “Give me love, give me life, give me peace on earth” song. 

          While I recognise people’s need to express that longing in the face of the ruthless cruelty of power politics as tribes and nations jostle for position in the hierarchy of plunderers and influencers, I cannot escape the understanding, derived from the study of history and the still-newish knowledge available from thousands of past life regressions, that wars, ethnic oppression, disease, plagues, famines and ‘natural’ disasters, have never been absent from our calendar of centuries.  Despite the odd decade here and there where the combatants take an enforced rest from their hostilities, as the moneylenders and defence industries pause to rearm, it has been an ongoing carnival of power lust, pride, jealousy and no-holds barred land-grabbing for as long as history has been hatched and then promulgated by its boastful winners, while being quietly disparaged by its sore losers.

          Meanwhile that other world of international trade and the cultural exchange that accompanies it moves on, bringing us into more intimate contact with both our near neighbours and distant foreigners, showing us fascinating ‘strangeness’, new fashions in costume, decorations, cuisine and music.  As so-called ‘time’ rolls by we find less and less reason to be suspicious of those peculiar strangers with strange ways, odd habits and more and more curious about how those customs and habits developed.

         In our many lives we have witnessed, either from the perspective of the peasant, mother, merchant, priest, trader, general or aristocrat how the great game plays out, – villages swallowed by expanding towns, tribes squabbling as they swell into nations, nations sucked into the pride of empires.  Empires themselves rising and falling while jostling for their appointed niche.  Religions, with their persuasive messiahs, burgeoning bureaucracies and pushy all-powerful deities, replacing each other in some kind of mysterious rotation.  Political systems polishing their presentations with scribes and propagandists who pave the way for some decades of enforced stability while dissidents mutter on the margins.  Yet the accumulated wisdom boiled down from such knowledge, whether studied on earth or reaped at ease in spirit, can easily be neglected or just plain forgotten in the renewed struggle for health, relative wealth and a stable and somewhat peaceful life in each incarnation.

     Real enduring peace in the midst of constant social and political turmoil, it would seem, can only be accessed in times of meditation and prayer, when the suffering soul steps back from the oppressive details of the day to view the big picture.  There we can appreciate the many roles one can play in one life with all its challenges of sowing and reaping, or, if so inclined, open up the view of many lives linked by plans, desires, disappointments and the scheduled eruptions of karma, where the drop of water becomes the wave and the wave becomes the river and then the ocean, as the drop and the ocean merge in the One and then somehow slip from view.  The One can be like that: you enter as a seeker and disappear into that which has no boundaries or recognisable forms.  A radiant Nothing, pregnant with possibilities, where Everything is ready to spring to life should you press the ego switch to pulsate with premonitions of power.

     Our wishes for more ease, less stress and life as a carefree picnic can be likened to children singing “Rain, rain go away come back again another day”.  When we tire of such singing we can excuse ourselves into our heaven of choice for a well deserved vacation before returning to the fray as the planet evolves, ever so slowly, into the almost perfect paradise that was planned by its progenitors in the eons before time.

     We were advised, when we signed up for this planetary project within a then-new galaxy, that the first leg would be challenging and could be described as ‘nasty, brutish and short’, that centuries could easily pass before anything resembling civilisation could be established, never mind enjoyed, and would likely be based on the enslavement of less fortunate others.  We were also advised that the complete ‘free will mandate’ planned for us would also be given to all other life forms, from volcanoes to bears, snakes and bacteria, many of which would feed on our weaknesses, those chinks in the ego armour, to bring about a sudden demise. 

         We would be forced to continually up our game just to cope in the resulting competition for position and status and that perfecting our strategies would of necessity incur aggressively dominator procedures that would clash with the love, laughter and sharing so second nature to our vacation times in spirit.  These incompatibilities could render any mental or emotional balance thus far achieved very fragile and lead to, well, full-tilt craziness, all of which we would learn to cope with over the ever unwinding centuries.

     The coping, of course, was all part of the plan, the divine plan for the evolution of spirit in form devised by those entities graduating from other galaxies to becoming junior ascended masters, while we’d pretend to be newbies learning from the ground up.  Like all new galaxies and inhabiting species we‘d play to an agreed-on set of roles and rules, where ignorance and divorce from inner divinity would be the norm, leading us to form myths, philosophies and religions to help bridge the gap as we thrashed about in the seas of thinking, feeling and fear.

     So here we are, in the grip of our learning curve, reaching to secure the way of love and light while others continue to greedily compete for power and resources, saddening us with their ancient, and to us, almost useless, attitudes. Although we are not hermetically sealed from their appalling destructiveness, we can engineer more pleasing and productive options while maintaining our bubble with a fair degree of grace and mutual respect.  While younger more, tempestuous souls remain caught in their alluring traps, as we were centuries or maybe just decades ago, we can only bless them with loving understanding while recognising their inalienable right to be short sighted, stupid and ultimately self-defeating.  Like teenagers on a tear, they cannot be told anything they don’t wish to hear.  Who needs a moral compass when you’ve got more choice than any crowned chump in history?  Mature souls bore them and old souls are right off the map.

     Yet it’s the game we are playing, the cosmic one with the Earth Life System as base camp for the long ascent into knowing without doubt.  The game, as it is said, to end, or maybe just pause, with both the king and the pawn going back into the box.