Spiritual Conflict in the Middle East: a struggle between Power-Over and Power-With to create and support connection for all.
Question: It seems that the Middle East has been a source of so much conflict related to spirituality. Is that true? Why?
Cheryl:
This is interesting. So basically, what they would say is that when it comes to fighting, either wars or plagues, ultimately, it’s about who maintains power and specifically who maintains Power Over, because especially in the last 2,000 to 3,000 years on the planet, we’ve tended towards the Power Over struggle rather than a Power With expression. And so religion becomes just one of those ways to facilitate division and separation between different groups of people, and a way for Power Over to maintain itself as Power Over.
And it’s not that there aren’t good things in religion or spiritual traditions, it’s that often that’s the point at which things are manipulated to make us think worse of a group of people than better. And while there has been a lot of focus on the area that we would call the Middle East, this isn’t something that’s limited to that. This is something that you can go to almost any place on the planet and find this kind of Power Over struggle, especially within what we would think of as written history.
And they would say that it all boils down to, are you afraid to be alive? Or are you excited to be alive?
If you’re afraid to be alive, you’re more likely to be taken in by Power Over.
If you’re happy to be alive, you’re excited to be alive, you’re more likely to follow your Power Within and express it in the world around you as Power With, because you’re not trying to dominate. Because war is basically a motion of domination. It’s either a motion of domination or it’s a motion of elimination, right?
Either you want to be in control or you want to get rid of anybody that disagrees with your stance on control. It’s either dominate or eliminate or both.
In a certain sense, plagues do the same thing. Although, they’re saying it’s almost like it’s reversed. With a plague, it’s about elimination and then domination, but it still is about exerting a sense of control, right? In a plague, there’s that constant back and forth about what a group of people can do to get rid of the plague or deal with the plague, or whether to just let it happen, so that you get to a place where the people who bother you are gone because they died. They got sick and died.
If you are afraid to be alive, you’re much more interested in eliminating those you don’t see as part of your group. So if the plague shows up, you’re happy to take advantage of it to get rid of the people you want to get rid of.
So, it creates a certain amount of complacency towards people that you don’t approve of, or that you see as threatening your sense of security,
We saw that very clearly with the Covid pandemic, with some people not wanting to be told what to do because they were willing to take their chances that they weren’t going to be the ones that got sick and died. And so basically the idea is that it’ll take out those people that should go.
It’s why some people won’t have anything to say about a war because their perception is that there’s some way in which that domination that’s happening within the war is to their benefit. So it’s not anything that they’re going to get hot and heavy over, whereas if you’re much more interested in connection and you’re happy to be here, then the response to any sort of domination is always going to be much more, how can we create and support connection, and in that sense, it’s like, how can we all make it through this, as opposed to just the chosen few make it through.
Spiritual Conflict in the Middle East: This is a question which was asked in the Akashic Records Q&A. For more articles like this, check out Wisdom from the Akashic Records.
