How we overcome war and find inner and outer peace
Author: Dieter Duhm
Category: Philosophy
Issue No: 92
Unresolved inner conflicts lead to manifested war on the outside, says Dr. Dieter Duhm and invites all people to participate in the construction of peace-building healing biotopes. The future lies in these local and regional centres of peace. Duhm shares with us the guidelines he has tested that make such peace villages and communities successful.
“There can be no peace in the world as long as there is war in love.”
I have long hesitated to send this text out into the world. The text is not about the geopolitical and strategic background of the current war in Ukraine, but about war in general. War is something so crazy, inhuman and wrong that one can be motivated to start all over again with the question of how it could come to such madness in humanity in the first place and how we might be able to free ourselves from this sin once and for all.
The situation
Evolution has brought forth a reflective self in which life can see itself: man. “Man is the eye of evolution”, wrote Aldous Huxley. What does this eye see? It sees two worlds: a bright world of love, togetherness and healing – and a dark world of despair, violence and war. Both worlds seem to exist simultaneously everywhere on earth. Dark world: for example, the actions against the coronavirus, which have produced more deaths worldwide than the virus itself, or now the bombings of residential areas and hospitals and the additional atrocities (butscha) in the current Ukraine war. Stunned, we stand before a humanitarian catastrophe that has now also reached Europe.
The dark world is man-made, the other comes from a divine source in the universe from which we all originally came. I have called it the “sacred matrix” in my books. It has its soul imprint in the ethical equipment of all human beings and can therefore be realised everywhere. We are currently experiencing a part of this world of light in the incredible willingness of millions of people to help the victims of the Ukraine war. All over the world, from Alaska to Australia, the blue and yellow colours of Ukraine are shining. Something historically new is happening here. Perhaps we are all at a turning point, moving from darkness into light?
The historically grown concepts of enmity and war are tending to dissolve.
They are wrong anyway, because whoever is your friend today may have been your enemy in the past and vice versa. The whole story of perpetrators and victims was historically orchestrated by an era of merciless religious, racist and political violence. How the Russian invaders of Ukraine would have loved to unite with their supposed enemies as friends and have a beer together. They would have preferred to do so a thousand times rather than follow the prescribed mass murder.
It is fundamentally wrong to fix the current war on a single person like Putin, because this war, like all others, is rooted in the structures of a wrongly programmed civilization to which we all still belong.
The Russian and Ukrainian soldiers are the same people. They have done nothing to each other, they could be friends and brothers.
Yet they shoot at each other. We will have difficulties explaining this to our children and grandchildren. We can hardly understand it ourselves. Something monstrous happened in the history of war over the last millennia, which robbed man of his strength, his truth and his courage and reduced him to an obedient subject. They had to obey in order to survive under the cruel conditions of the imperial systems of power.
War arises within
All the great systems of the present world – America, Russia, Europe, China – are equally involved in this worldwide war, for all are engaged in their own way in the destruction of human life, animal life and nature. War arises when human life no longer conforms to the elementary laws of life and to the inner life forces of human beings, to the rules of love for each other, to the rules of love for all creatures, to the rules of the great organism of life to which we all belong. In this sense, our entire civilization has been in a latent state of war for thousands of years, because through the legacy of a continuous history of war, human beings have become accustomed to many things that blatantly violate the laws of life. Just look at consumer habits and the range of goods in supermarkets. How much nature had to be destroyed, how many creatures, humans and animals, had to die so that people could compensate for their missing happiness of love through consumption?
War arises when an injury has occurred in a hot spot on the inside. Everything external comes from within.
It is on the outside that conflicts are fought out that we cannot cope with on the inside.
This is true everywhere: in communities, in love relationships and in big politics. It is on the outside that we fight the enemies that we carry within us as inner shadow figures. On the outside, the condemnations we carry within us as latent self-condemnations are distributed. This is how the cultural history of man, which we call “tradition”, runs from generation to generation. Today it is time to step out of this cultural history and prepare another.
About the author: Dieter Duhm
Dieter Duhm, born 1942, psychoanalyst, art historian, sociologist with a doctorate and author of many books (including “Angst im Kapitalismus”, “Der unerlöste Eros”, “Die heilige Matrix”), initiator of the plan of healing biotopes and co-founder of Tamera. Dieter Duhm was a mastermind of the German student movement after ’68 and coined the subjective factor with the sentence “Revolution without emancipation is counter-revolution”. He dropped out of the academic career and founded an alternative peace research centre, from which the healing biotope 1 Tamera in Portugal emerged.
This article appeared originally on the German Homepage of Tattva Viveka: Heilungsbiotope als Weg zum Frieden
