“Then perhaps on the Earth also, would begin to exist the eighteenth personal commandment of our COMMON CREATOR which declared: ‘Love everything that breathes.’”
—An Objectively Impartial Criticism of the Life of Man, G. I. Gurdjieff
As a new war emerges, I see myself checking the news feeds more often than I should. I send messages to friends and family living in Israel and Iran. My brother in Jerusalem says, “Just got out of the shelter…again. Serious psychological warfare, messing with my sleep.” Apparently the reality of air raid sirens and explosions in the distance bring a soberness bordering on boredom.
My friend who lives in Mashhad, Iran’s second largest city, responds in a culturally characteristically fashion, with mystical poetry. I use a website to translate his message delivered in Farsi and suspect some of the poetic nuance is lost in translation.
The war of the seven nations excused everyone
Because they did not see the truth, they followed the path of legend.
Whoever becomes Noah, his love is the captain.
Give him safety from the waves of the storm
Whoever becomes homeless in the path of love
He will be given home in the land of friends.
In the face of the horrific barbarism of psychotic, power-possessing men I am reminded of two principles that are certainties beyond any doubt.
The first principle is that nothing of any value is achieved through violence of any kind. Violence only begets more violence and destruction. The means to achieve anything must be congruent with the desired ends. Peace and harmony can only be the result of peaceful and harmonious means, which must necessarily begin with coming to an unconditional acceptance of myself and my own suffering.
Beholding the monstrous acts of leaders, it is difficult to fathom how a human being could decide to inflict such destruction on his fellow human beings. There can only be a form of psychopathy at its root; wounds so deeply buried and lies so defended that murder and destruction are the only recourse to prevent experiencing one’s own pain and self-deceit.
The second principle is that, however common, the tendency of human beings to destroy one another’s existence is not normal. The phenomenon may be frequent but it is not sane. You and I wouldn’t choose to drop bombs on neighborhoods nor would we train and order soldiers to machine gun groups of starving people searching for food. No one I know would do that. This tendency, evidenced not by ordinary people, but rather by psychopathic power-possessors, is a malignant disease.
The tendency for humans to kill each other is also not as common as our history books would have us believe. There is a lot more history of harmony than violence, only the story we tell and retell, for some odd reason, is a history of crime. Most people, most of the time, live peacefully and harmoniously together. The periods of mutual destruction are the rare—albeit highly publicized and promoted—anomaly.
The mantra of my Jewish childhood was “never forget.” It referred to the most recent account of attempted extermination. The Holocaust story was the latest chapter in a series of books including the Torah, the Megillah, and the Haggadah, which we ceremoniously read and reread every year. All these books told stories about an evil power bent on enslaving or eradicating our tribe. Around my bar mitzvah, I learned of “self-fulfilling prophecy.” It struck me that recounting our attempted annihilation seemed to guarantee its recurrence, and this victim narrative would justify similar actions against other groups.
The mantra was implanted and continued to resound. Never forget. Was there something I was meant to remember? Not a recapitulation of horrific events of antiquity. Rather I wanted to remember something that might lead to the harmony and peace that is the normal state for human beings living in community with one another. Never forget. But what?
Never forget that no violence of any sort, even an unkind word, has any use. Never forget that my suffering is my own to transform and no one else is responsible. No one is to blame. Never forget that all life is one and everything that lives is holy. Never forget that I came to be born in human form for one purpose only—to learn to be able to love. Never forget to strive to remember myself always and everywhere.
This article appears in July 2025.
