Why now?

By Janice Dolley

In the last few weeks of October 2023, I have been surprisingly caught up in the present conflict in the Middle East, more so than in other recent atrocities such as the Ukraine, Syria and Afghanistan. So, I ask myself, why now?

Three reasons come to mind: The first is that I have stood on the hill on Jerusalem at the church called Jesu Flavit. According to the Bible, “Jesus stood and looked over Jerusalem and Jesus wept”. Was he despairing at the lack of godliness or goodness in Jerusalem at that time, or might he also have had a vision of what would be happening in our time now? I have also stood in the playground of the ‘Hope Flowers’ school in the Gaza Strip and looked up to see the row of guns on the border pointing directly at me. Not a comfortable place for children.

A second reason might be that I was born in 1935 and lived in Bromley, Kent, which was close to the Air Force base at Biggin Hill from which the Spitfires set off every night. The Battle of Britain was fought over our house where we slept in bunkers in our air raid shelters for several years. So, I know what it is like to wake in the morning to find your neighbour’s house gone and all the people within it perished. My own school was bombed during the night. Mercifully the bomb fell in the swimming pool and the nuns rejoiced. “Praise the Lord’”, they said next day!

But the third reason is that I have realised is that this, as with many other conflicts, has been orchestrated by the global elite who are seeking to divide and rule us all. Possibly this was the case in other terrible wars? This is just all coming out now and certainly motivating those of us working for The Great Rising, however we see that.

Then I pause and think, “Why now? What if the deeper part this conflict is playing out is to wake us up now to the need to end all war? What if we focus on a new world waiting to dawn, even as the old is disintegrating?” Esoteric philosophy refers to these times as the ‘burning ground’ that we have to go through as the old era disintegrates, making space for a new era as we look towards a prophesied ‘golden age’. If this is so, we begin to see that a much-needed paradigm shift is underway from an age of separative thinking and of rampant materialism, regardless of the needs of either the people or the planet.

The good news is that perhaps we are moving towards an era of universal consciousness in which we realise the oneness of all life and recognise that all the world faiths have in common the golden rule of, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. This makes sense when we realise that there is a rich diversity of expressions of the ‘One Life’, so all is deeply interconnected.  As Chief Seattle said long said long ago, “What mankind does to the earth, he does to himself.” Maybe this is one of the reasons why the suffering of this present time is more acute for us than usual, for now we deeply appreciate that, “I am one with all my brothers and sisters, so those suffering are part of our own family, even if we have never met.”

But there is also the bad news. We are moved to especially hold the Palestinians in love and compassion.  Having today read a very honest account of the experience of a Palestinian poet, it feels like my own experience of war was minimal compared with the bombardment that they are receiving. In a piece posted by Matthew Fox, this man describes moving his wife and young family to a refuge centre further south. He then returned to his home to salvage what he could find to feed his family from his fridge amongst the rubble.

Trying not to fall into the trap of divide and rule, the death figures suggest that the number of Palestinians who have died thus far are three times the number of deaths of Israelis. Regardless of citizenship each death leaves a circle of grieving hearts.

So how might we then move forward? Maybe this situation is serving as a wakeup call for us to realise that we are all spiritual beings on a journey through this world and each of us has a part to play by contributing to a great global wide rising against tyranny that is now emerging.  In many ways, the levels of kindness, compassion, and care (at least in our own land) seem to be currently rising as we move onward and upward; our consciousness is expanding. Just as the cosmologist Dr Jude Currivan so often says in talks that she gives: “Consciousness is not something that we have, it is what we and the whole world are.” Once we grasp this, we naturally shift from a perspective focussed on ‘me’ to the greater importance of ‘we’, and this begins to be a basis for our lives.

We grasp also that there is a ‘way to live’, which in the East is called ‘the Tao’. In the West, Jesus the Christ gave us hints for living The Way, which seem relevant now. Maybe our task is to both ‘hospice a dying world’ and at the same time generate a real transition towards patterns of living that will enable both individual and collective transformation and rejuvenation. So, let’s both grasp the big picture as well as work at the micro level as we are each called to do, and together hold a vision of hope and realise that our task is to rise together and co-create the ‘Kingdom of heaven on earth now’.

The astrologer Pam Gregory says that ‘right now’ is a time of endings and beginnings, reminding us that, “our thoughts today are creating our tomorrow”.  So maybe now is the time for us to work together to overcome the dark agenda that seeks to divide and rule over us and open our hearts in the power of our divine sovereignty to the power of love, and co-create ‘the new’ that is seeking to be born, even as the old falls away.