The Cradle Will Rock
Letter from Mexico | April, 2003
A river watering the garden flowed from Eden, and from there it divided. It had four headstreams. The name of the first is the Pishon. The name of the second river is the Gihon; it winds through the entire land of Cush. The name of the third river is the Tigris; it runs along the east side of Asshur. And the fourth river is the Euphrates. (Genesis 2:8-14)
The area of the world where tanks were trudging through sand and bombs were exploding in the night sky is no ordinary location. Our human species was nurtured in the fertile plain between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. As early as 9000 BC, humans were cultivating wild wheat and barley in ancient Mesopotamia (‘between the rivers’), and domesticating dogs and sheep, evolving from food hunters to food producers.
Historians have always referred to the place as the Cradle of Civilization. Seven thousand years ago, people were building homes and temples there, trading with others, irrigating fields, and experimenting with government. Five thousand years ago, they were developing the skills of writing and mathematics, and making art.
A momentous turning point in human evolution happened there: we became truly human. Biblical legend places the Garden of Eden at that spot, a location symbolizing the birth of our species as thinking, feeling, self-reflecting beings apart from the animal kingdom.
Images coming to us on our television screens are showing vast destruction in the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates. Thousands of warriors are converged there with their tanks, bombs, planes, and missiles. If what we are watching were a dream, instead of real, waking life events, how might we interpret these images? If we are destroying our own cradle of civilization, what could that mean?
Taking a long view, beyond the tangled morality of this war and its grisly statistics, beyond the politics and personalities of the moment, in symbolic terms we seem to be returning to the cradle to eradicate it. We humans are destroying our nest. Could we be doing it in order to mark the end of our species childhood and the beginning of our adulthood? We may be going up to the next step in human evolution -- and erasing all evidence of our childhood as a sign that we are ready to make the climb.
Seen this way, the war we are engaged in has a meaning quite apart from the various possible motivations that have been put forth, officially and unofficially. We had thought this war might have been about ending a corrupt regime, about exterminating terrorists, about gaining another US military foothold in the Middle East, about macho posturing, or even, drawing upon mythology, about completing a father’s great task. Taking a higher road, we had also entertained the idea that the meaning of the war was to bring about a new world order built on new national, ethnic, and religious alliances.
But the cloudy motivations for this war and the driving inexorability of it make us wonder if another, larger force is at play. What we are seeing in the Cradle of Civilization may be the unstoppable movement of human evolution expressing itself forward in a mighty leap. New planetary consciousness may be ready to emerge, with the egg hatching on the spot where it first did thousands of years ago when it brought forth the present human world.
While this perspective can bring little comfort to the people engaged in the present conflict, it may lend some meaning in terms of human evolution to a situation that, no matter how it is argued, seems oddly lacking in both logic and judgment. If we are ascending as a species into higher realms of planetary peace and cooperation, the drama we are witnessing unfold between the Tigris and the Euphrates — again — is momentous. It carries with it the promise that our human future may be to dwell in the Garden of Eden that we never had, but always aspired to.
All of us at the retreat center send you our affectionate regards,
Joseph Dispenza
LifePath
San Miguel de Allende
Mexico
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