War and Politics

There is a story in my early youth that made a deep impression in me. I was in first grade and that day our teacher was absent, so we had a substitute. She had to go out of the room for some minutes and left us, some 25 children, alone with some work to do. At that point I remember getting up from my seat, many of us were out of the seat anyway, and started telling every girl about how unjust were the boys treating us, and that we ought to take some action, some revenge. Thus in a couple of minutes a war ensued, and we had half the class throwing tinfoil made balls and pieces of chalk to the other half of the class. There was indeed just on girl that was not convinced by my arguments, and did not participate, but all the rest joined in the uproar.


Th substituter teacher came in in the midts of it, and took as responsible ones the usual boys that always got into mischief ...I did not come forward to assume my fault or to speak about the truth.


This incident haunted me for all my life, not just for my feeling of cowardice, but also for the working of politics. I knew politics at that time, at least these kind of politics. It was clear to me that my motives for bringing this war were very selfish, I had accumulated a resentment towards my three years younger brother, and that spilled over to all the boys of the class.


It is no different many times, in our lifes, when the motives for even some acts that we may consider just and wholesome are based on lower human nature. I am just starting to read The Karma of Untruthfulness, by Steiner, where he discusses the underlying truths about the  First World War, and it does relate very much to a question of power.


Many times, the quest for power is reigning around us, hidden under our best motives. I have seen the movement of terrorist groups in my country, where they have started with high ideals and a well-intentioned agenda of taking care of the defenseless against the big powers, and yet, little by little, the leadership of these groups turn to the same quest of power they are trying to obliterate, and violent leaders take the reins, thus transforming good into evil.

Just last Tuesday we were discussing the calling of the Spirit to take action. Sometimes we are lead by the Spirit, and we have resistance to it, just like Moses did not want to take part of the plan God had laid for him, or Jonah had fled away from the commands of the Lord. But these times are in my eyes a good sign, because if we do not want so readily to obey there are good chances that there is nothing for us to gain in it, in terms of our low human nature, no praises, no self-satisfaction, no power gained, and thus our heart would be more pure in this action that we resist to do than in others that we may feel called and are very willingly entering to. Meanwhile we can work in purifying our hearts, so our own intentions gain clarity with truth and can be cleaned of selfishness.