Just when did Joanna Macy make the video I post below? It was many years ago; and this is her rendition of a tale told 12 centuries ago.

History repeats itself . . . the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce, and the third time? And the fourth?

How have we evolved since 12 centuries ago? Have we evolved since then? This Buddhist (or pre-Buddhist?) tale is just so damned relevant, resonant, with our global situation at this very moment, and at so many other moments since I’ve been alive. Remember November 22, 1963? Followed less than nine months later, by the Gulf of Tonkin false flag that triggered the Vietnam War? Remember September 11, 2001? How about both Iraq Wars? Saddam’s supposed WMD? Gadaaffi’s death, October 21, 2011, and Killary’s laugh: “We came, we saw, he died”? Remember January 6, 2021 and the continuing gulag in D.C.? On and on. It never ends.

I went to bed last night at 8:30 PM and got up at 6:30 AM. Ten hours sleep? No. Maybe five hours sleep total. Up and down, the cat wanting in or out, or me to pee, or to settle my  troubled digestion with tiny amounts of apple cider vinegar and baking soda in water . . . Not even that worked. It usually does.

I couldn’t seem to find a way to help me relax. Meanwhile, hoping to fall asleep while listening (I usually can), I lay there, for hours, foolishly absorbing various interpretations of what’s going on in Ukraine and elsewhere, each seemingly more dire than the next; and meanwhile, I lay there, highly aware of the unusually heightened state we humans call “anxiety,” a toxic static permeating being. My usual breathing practices did not work. Nor did several attempts to turn off the ipad and move into imagination, hike the Teton mountain trails as I did when I lived there, in a yurt, for many years, during the final decades of the first millennium AD. Assuming, all the while I lived in that storied land, that the human race might not make it through Y2K. Just as I had assumed, all the while growing up as a World War II child born of a soon absent father and a fearful mother, and riddled, as last night, with anxiety.

So here I am, during my 80th year on this planet, poking down into the unconscious mind far enough to re-trigger the anxiety I originally absorbed from my mother and focused, post-Hiroshima, on The Bomb.

(The Bomb inside me; though I didn’t know it.)

So now, here we are, once again, in grave, seemingly increasing danger of nuclear war. Due to Putin’s demands, his adamant refusal to back down. Due to NATO/US arrogant chest beating, refusing recognize the inherent reasonableness in Putin’s demands. All covered over, of course, by incessant mainstream propaganda.

That’s what I’ve gleaned so far. But of course, I know nothing. Whatever is playing on the surface is undoubtedly just the movie “they” want us to see. It has become obvious that this crisis was a long time coming, and that all sorts of factors play into the global End Game drama humanity is now undergoing. Economic, political, historical, cultural, personal factors. All sorts of points of view represented, each of them held fiercely, or with apparent (pathological) “sincerity,”  by their owners.

And yet, let us wake up to the stark, and exceedingly simple reality of this crisis, this opportunity! As Joanna Macy says, in her rendition of the ancient Shambala Warrior Prophecy,  “these destructive weapons are made by the human mind; they can be unmade by the human mind.” Furthermore, as she points out, we don’t need to invoke grand notions of Good vs. Evil, or of alien (ET) interference. Simply: these destructive weapons, these bio-lab pathogens; these, and other Weapons of Mass Destruction, “are made by the human mind, and can be unmade by the human mind.”

The line between Good and Evil, as she reminds us, runs through each human heart. When we, as sovereign, conscious, ensouled individuals, cease our endless mental peregrinations, just for a second or two or three. Just in the nick of time. Time to invoke two principles, Love and Light, Compassion and Wisdom, by means of which we transform into bodhisattvas whose loving energy fuels the wise detachment necessary to defuse the mind stuff that makes the weapons.

Thanks, Laura Bruno, for putting this video up again on your website this morning. I’d never come across it before. Now I too, shall invoke it regularly. And the next time I wake up insomniac, I will remind myself of this wise, compassionate female elder’s rendition of what each of us must re-member, must re-mind ourselves of, daily, hourly, minute by minute, intending to remain fully present with “the radical interdependence of all existence, the web of life, the cosmic ecosystem.”