The Psychology (Theology) of War

I have not crawled through mud, under fire. I have not trekked a barren desert for days, sweating under an assailant’s eye. There are no troops under my command, and I have no marks of war. But I have seen war. I see war all around, always; and there seems to be no end to war and nor, perhaps, a beginning. War is raw. It complements peace in a non-dual manner. Civilisation, as we know it, is war; God is war; social status is war. All is war; and war is raw. No one escapes it, because it is ubiquitous in the mind, or the brain, or some such pseudo-centre. There is a plurality of wars, because no one war can exist without its preceding and proceeding counterparts; for war is in perspective, at all times—there are no solitary wars. When the individual sacrifices for the collective, there is war; when the collective forgets the individual, there are wars. When humans first looked deep into each other’s eyes, perhaps there was war then too. The working lives of men and women—they, too, birth wars. Inside oneself, civil war rages. God is within as well as without; and as the Greeks taught—the gods make war with one another. My enemy is my lover in war; we are like the protagonist and antagonist an epic film—our opposition is delusion. We are intrinsically One force, following our own tail… Our embrace is eternal, despite being internecine. Like a man and a woman, we complement one another; we fight and we fuck, both violently. One may chase the other and the other may chase the one, but both are always engaging in bloodthirsty war. War is Man, but manifests metamorphosed as woman—for example, this piece is woman, yet it is also an offensive. Woman’s war is curvaceous, gentle, but it also has the malevolence of natural disaster. She sleeps only as long as Luna crosses the sky; once morning has come, Father Sun sees no peace. War prevails. My enemy is the object I cannot fathom beyond my senses; war is our cosmic battle, incessant and infinite. Gods we stand, enlightened, insightful, erudite and strong—and united, we are ever at war.