War, Reality, Narrative and Usefulness.
The death of war, the birth of meta-duality, and the third hand path.
Civilisation seems obsessed by it’s left and right, conveniently oblivious to the fact that the concepts of left and right depend on a whole something, that contains them both, and hell-bent on dividing this whole in half, casting the other half as wrong, evil and justifying the atrocities performed against it.
Humans likely have their first embodied sense of duality at around week 8, when the flat sheet of cells (that is the embryo at this stage) folds in half to form the tube that then forms the channels for our digestive system and central nervous system to develop within. Left and Right may form our most primal viscerally sensed duality that underpins all our cognitive concept of other dualities throughout life. Magical traditions speak of left and right hand paths and political factions divide into left and right. Our brains divide into left and right, our bodies have left to right symmetry and we think mostly in terms of left right patterns.
And narratives of duality tend to war and conflict.
As sad as this seems, the dualistic drive to war has existed for tens of thousands of years, perhaps far longer.
You may not like to agree, but war does seem to have an important function which I suggest below. A deeper look should not harm, and may reveal something useful.
What possible purpose does the drive to war have?
In their 80s hit song ‘War!’ Frankie Goes To Hollywood asks us “What is it good for?”. “Absolutely nothin'” they claim.
Despite claims of virtue by both victor and defeated, and the horrific costs of life and property, war provides the catalyst for growth, change and increasing diversity. It hastens the end of stasis. It destabilises vested structures in ways that spawn new opportunities. Periods of innovation, economic booms, spiritual and cultural renaissance seem to follow on the tails of both World War 1 and 2, with the ‘roaring 20s’ and the ‘baby boom’ that produced the hippy and spiritual culture shift of the 60s and 70s.
No one side really perpetrates war - it arises as an emergent property of the tensions within a whole system bursting with a hidden desire for transformation. It surfaces when the whole does not have the capacity to contain and transmute the energy tensions by conscious, intentional, alchemical means. Until they learn to channel the powerful energies of polarities intentionally, the avatars of war will rampage like children throwing tantrums, faking self importance and hungry for symbols of power.
Some claim that nature does not commit war or acts of violence, and that war started with human civilisation due to human ignorance. But when we clean the lens, we see that war happens all the time throughout nature, as species compete for energy, sunlight, water, nutrients, food, procreation, and territory.
The only significant differences between human and natural war appears firstly the capacity of our weaponry to inflict massive collateral damage, to the point of destroying ourselves and our environment completely - and secondly our obsession with fighting over fictions such as moral ideologies, religious beliefs and money.
The path to avoid descending into a third catastrophic world war, involves and act of dis-enchantment, dis-spelling the illusions of left and right, to bring our hands together as one, so to speak, perhaps discovering a third hand at play here.
But human nervous systems are wired for duality, and faced with the existential nightmare of realising the illusion of duality, untrained populations fall easily into habits of aeons past. At least this seems likely to continue until enough of our nervous systems have evolved sufficiently (or been trained in Magick) to embody a different narrative.
For now, in this century, the journey of dis-enchanting the warring left and right narratives may involve first shifting toward a new narrative of ‘reality’ vs ‘fiction’, giving the popular nervous systems something more constructive, yet still familiarly dualistic.
In fact, we can see glimmers of this emerging as fledgling currents in mainstream media, where truth and lies become the new battleground. But mainstream media misses the point there and mostly just rehashes old adversarial dualities.
“A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So he loses touch with Reality, and lives in a world of illusion.” - Alan Watts.
We can only ever know reality directly. We cannot know the truth of reality through narrative forms. Science, religions, spirituality, economics and art all exist as forms of narrative. All narrative arise as fictions. They have varying degrees of usefulness for the great work, helping us to appreciate the divine reflection that reality offers us, and real-ise our desires more intentionally.
Perhaps here we can glimpse the underlying geometry of a new duality - the recognition that:
On the one hand, we will never know reality (in truth) through any narrative form.
All dualities and narratives have the capacity to either help or hinder us in the great work of appreciating reality as it already is and intentionally manifest desire as reality.
A non-adversarial ‘meta-duality’ of: Reality - Fiction exists, and can lead us to a more useful triad of Reality, Narrative and Usefulness.
Notably, ‘Uselessness’ can provide an equally effective way of defining ‘Usefulness’. A moral doctrine of ‘usefulness’ could end up as destructive as any other duality.
From this geometry, (and perhaps optimistically) for the long-term, I imagine more cooperative, more collaborative and less judgemental, more peaceful generations of humans emerging.
Do we need a new world war to shift into the emergent meta-duality?
Perhaps world war would hasten it, but I say we do no need that. The new way of what I call ‘the third hand path’ has arrived, living, breathing, and emerging through those already ascending into power.