Wars and Rumours of Wars

 There have always been wars so the end times prediction of wars and rumours of wars should not seem especially relevant now, and yet it does. Perhaps because wars usually have some kind of sense to them, territorial, tribal, monetary and the like. But recent wars seem to be without any sense at all and simply war for the sake of war. There undoubtedly is a reason for the current entry in the list of wars but it's hard to see why the main protagonist is acting as it is because the net benefit to that country is minimal if there is one at all. It is for this reason that we need to look beyond ordinary politics for an explanation.

The world is breaking down. When that happens the structures of civilisation develop cracks and start to fail after which the normal forces of entropy and decay take over and do the rest. Recent wars are the result of a loss of centre. The centre is the spiritual focus of a society, what it is grounded in and what sustains it. When that no longer holds then things do fly apart, as the poet says. We have had no centre for a long time in the West which is why we have pitiful replacements such as human rights and democracy but these have no real substance to them. They are feeble ideological substitutes for what we have lost or rejected and they don't really inspire anybody for long.

Wars come about because of ambition, and that is certainly a factor with the present one. But there is something else going on which is a simple desire for destruction. When the world has no meaning, and it has none without a sense of something beyond itself, we can find a crude purpose of sorts through destruction. Destruction is easy and it's exciting. It can stimulate the jaded palate and thrill the mind that has become bored and without a deeper goal. And that is just on the human level. The nature of the end times is that certain supernatural forces that work against divine being can take advantage of the prevailing currents of dissolution and breakdown to advance their agenda. The tide that flows towards matter and away from spirit is in their favour. The more matter is separated from spirit (in appearance, of course, it never can be in reality), the less it can hold the imprint of Form and so the more it reverts to its primal condition of chaos. This is why wars are happening and wars themselves hasten the process.

Jesus said that when wars and rumours of wars come about we should not be troubled because these things must be. They must be because this is the same phenomenon we can observe when a physical body breaks down after the soul has left it. The soul has left our civilisation and this is why it is breaking down. However, we need not be a part of that. We must stand apart from it and observe but not get caught up in it. It can be hard to watch the destruction of something we love but death comes to everything in this world and while it is painful it is necessary so that life may progress in a new form. Letting go of the past is required of us at this time but that does not mean embracing the present which, as it is now, is not a new born thing but a decaying corpse. It means transferring attention to the world above where eternal verities remain in their pristine form, waiting to reinvigorate the world once the current stage of dissolution has done its work and the ground has been tilled ready for new seed.

Wars are part of this process. They are not good but they are inevitable as Jesus made clear.