THERE'S A WAR GONG ON, AND IT'S NOT WITH IRAQ. This war is on a scale so vast it's difficult to see, so ancient we've taken it for granted.

It's a war that has been gathering momentum since humanity first became conscious. It cuts to the very core of existence. It's what drives the corporations and the deep ecologists, the religious right and the lovers. It's woven so tightly into the fabric of our lives that we've accepted it blandly, without knowing there was ever a choice. It's caused untold human misery for millennia, and still it burns on, more vividly in our cyber age than ever before, as our collective awakening arches toward Armageddon — or quantum evolution.

It is the struggle between truth and heresy - between subservience and sovereignty - between opening our minds to wisdom, and clinging to what we'd prefer to believe - between following a well-worn path, and cutting a swath through the wilderness of our souls.

World Wide Web
This war marshals all of our natural resources: passion and commitment, love and communion, faith and ecstasy. If we use them well, our stores will increase. If we use them foolishly, a barren landscape is certain because this war is taking place inside each one of us.

It is a clarion call to yinify — a word that weds our masculine and feminine energies in the Mother essence, for internal and external balance, harmony and peace at every level of co-creation.
Becoming whole — embracing our assertive/dynamic/solar/yang side and our receptive/magnetic/lunar/yin side, both within ourselves and as a planetary organism — is the creative quest of our time. It's a homecoming, a re-membering — making membership again. As we are able to celebrate this marriage first in our own hearts, the joy and the love we then have available to share with our sisters and brothers increases exponentially.

Evolution through relationship defines the true "world wide web": weaving our oneness through the meeting of minds and the holding of hands.

No lasting outer peace is possible without this inner reunion. The absolution of duality is the key to living Heaven on Earth, because it means the end of judgment. As the spiritual humorist Swami Beyondanda likes to say, "Nonjudgment Day is coming."

With nothing to choose between, we are integrated, living in integrity, whole. In the seventh century, Zen master Sengstau expressed this potential eloquently in Verses On The Faith Mind:

The Great Way is not difficult
for those who have no preferences.
When love and hate are both absent
everything becomes clear and undisguised.
Make the smallest distinction however
and Heaven and Earth are set infinitely apart.

Understandably, this is not an easy task for most of us to master — or to choose to master.

Many have run, continue to run, for apparent refuge, either into religious doctrine, which tells us how to think and what to believe, or into other well-organized movements masquerading as paths to freedom. Some groups purport to focus solely on spiritual love, ignoring the truth that matter is Spirit in form. Others emphasize sex as the ideal path to oneness, omitting the sacred element, and once again it is a lie.

It can be comforting to be a foot soldier in someone else's army. You don't have to do any real thinking. You don't have to take responsibility for the outcome you help create. You can externalize your role: it's Bush, it's Saddam Hussein; it's Osama Bin-Laden; it's anybody who looks or acts or sounds different from me. This is the old, patriarchal view that's held sway for five thousand years. This Weltanschauung has run its course and is completing its earthly cycle, now.

If you choose not to acknowledge the war at all, you can still go on, raising a family behind a white picket façade, having Sunday suppers and comfortable routines that mark a life. But the time for hiding out in this delusion is deliquescing, like Dali's famous clocks. The light of universal fire is bleaching falsehood from our souls, enlightening and enlivening us, one by one, cell by cell, bringing more joy to the journey.
The astonishing truth is, we really are all equal backstage, when the make-up and the costumes and the constructs come off. We're all rays of the One Being, sharing the same life support system, Mother Earth. Our similarity is the great leveler, because it humbles our unique, snowflake selves into awareness of a greater whole.

This was brought home to me recently when I was having dinner in a Chinese restaurant where I've eaten many times. I like a certain dish on the menu, made with a sweet and sour sauce instead of the standard garlic sauce. One waiter, who is Chinese, knows my order so well he even "recognizes" me over the phone.
The other evening I ordered that same dish. The restaurant was very busy. When I went up to pay, the waiter, who was standing by the cash register, did not know me as the woman who always orders the dish with the different sauce.

I had a flash of insight and asked him kindly, "Please don't be offended, but Caucasians — do we all look alike?" With a relieved grin he said, "Yes." The Caucasian cashier was amazed by my question, but I understood. I told her, "It's like this for every race, every culture. Isn't it more difficult to differentiate between Asian or African-American people whom you don't know, than other whites?" She admitted it might be.

We're coded with an innate affinity for our own small portion of the whole. This is the ancient, limbic brain in action, defending our "territory" against invaders: limbic means, "forming a border." To bridge this chasm is the beginning of world healing. Recognizing the Other through conscious understanding takes both patience and practice.

To see the big picture we have to widen our scope, extend our artificial boundaries. There are no actual map lines on Earth, delineating this country, this language, this religion, this culture from the next. We've created it all. It's our collective game. As we become technologically proficient, the playing field shrinks to a more agreeable size, and the game starts to seem superfluous.

A meta-field is beckoning. We've called it outer space. Again, we put the cart before the horse, our eagerness ahead of our readiness. Inner space is the foreign territory we must master first. Yinification begins at home.

Deep "E"-cology
This is the potential of the Internet: to help us come home to ourselves, as a species, as a people, as one culture united through whatever we choose to call the animating energy that informs our existence. The 'Net is a universal connector, a universal translator, the key to deep ecology in the most profound sense. "Eco", from the Greek oikos, means home. "Logy" is a branch of learning or study. Ecology is, literally, learning about home!

Coming home to ourselves means owning the truth that there is no separation, except what we allow to exist, through fear. Fear contracts our hearts and minds; love expands them. Many of us learn to open our hearts through sacrifice, which means, "to make sacred." Releasing our deepest attachments is a crucial part of the initiation on our journey to self-awareness. Our gift is as great as our grief. The poet David Whyte says, "The rest of creation is waiting, breathless, for you to take your place."

We start by detaching from what numbs us, like television, and focusing on what feeds us, like "tell-a-vision," another Swami Beyondanda-ism for transmuting suppression into inspiration. The price of freedom is your voice. Begin to share your vision of the world you want to co-create! As you do, you become a "rainbow warrior," awakening and balancing your energy throughout your being, in order to realize the full spectrum of your purpose and potential.

Heaven on Earth exists in being fully alive in the infinite Now. This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, as The Fifth Dimension sang back in 1969. They were early messengers, carrying our Divine Blueprint via the medium of music.

Let's revisit the lyrics: "When the Moon is in the seventh house". In Western astrology, the Moon is symbolic of feminine, receptive energy, what we draw in; the seventh house is about intimate interaction with other people. I've dubbed this new way of relating a call to yinify: to unify in the Divine Feminine essence. "And Jupiter aligns with Mars". Jupiter is the planet of expansion, of expressing our truth through storytelling; Mars is the planet of pure desire and, when dishonored, of war. To have them align means telling ourselves a new, expansive story: transmuting war in the alchemical fire into spiritual warriorhood.
Then, as the group sang, "Peace will guide the planets/And love will steer the stars."

How clear the message becomes, once we are able to truly hear. The battle cries dim; the masks fall off. A layer of separation evaporates as we become transparent to the truth of who we are. People start to seem somehow familiar, even though we've never met them before. It's the resonant déjà vu of realizing there are no strangers. "Service with a smile" suddenly takes on a whole new meaning.

Getting there calls for a subtle shift in perception and behavior: from require to inquire, from escalate to elevate, from accumulate to appreciate. As we cease consuming planetary resources and each other at the speed of greed, let go of buying more in favor of being more, we reclaim our true heritage as Earth stewards. And then barrenness transmutes into bounty. Separation into synergy. Fear into faith. Longing into Love.

We use the expression, "Live and learn." Implicit is the understanding that what we learn, we will also teach. We become self-renewing by gathering knowledge from our experience, forging it into wisdom in the alchemical fire, and serving as vessels to share the gift that is uniquely ours, but not meant to remain arcane. Conscious evolution favors the curious and kind mind. Truth nourishes us in ways we might never have imagined. Synchronicity takes us by the hand and we laugh in child-like wonder as we witness Spirit-in-action, again and again and again. This is the Garden, and it is good. Welcome Home.

© 2003 Amara Rose

Illustration: Eagle in flight by Lauren Zimmerman

We invite you to share your experiences, opinions and questions on this article. Please visit the PLW Community and leave your comments.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Amara Rose is a guide for conscious evolution. Adept at bridging the mainstream and metaphysical, she offers individual coaching sessions, playshops, talks and teleclasses to help us integrate our feminine and masculine energies. You can subscribe to her FREE e-zine, "What Shines" through her website, http://www.liveyourlight.com. E-mail: Amara@liveyourlight.com, or call 1-800-862-0157 for more information.