From: Palden Jenkins [palden.jenkins@btopenworld.com]
Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2002 5:07 PM
To: Richard Giles
Subject: AFGHANISTAN and THE FUTURE

Hello Richard - thanks for your e-mail.

You wrote:

The thing that still puzzles me yet is what happened to the Taliban. We discussed that earlier. I still have a weird sense that something very odd happened in Afghanistan that doesn't have a clear explanation yet. they had control of 9o % of the country and lost it in just 60 days or less. Certainly the American bombing played a big part in keeping them on the move and perhaps sapping the moral of some, but to fall apart so totally in such a short time and to keep giving up/surrendering as they appeared to do. None of it fits. Even tho the Afghanis are very good at changing sides when the stakes alter still its a strange result. I do see in the press now and again that Taliban are still laying seige or holding control in some parts of the country, but then there's no mention of it later.

The Taliban. I have a few thoughts here, but none of them really answers the question fully. Or do they?

1. (This is no criticism:) Afghans are two-faced - they've stood between cultures for millennia - and they don't have the same kind of post-christian logical consistency that westerners do (not that westerners hold to it!). It's just that we have different kinds of hypocrisy, and the logic of it is not seen by each culture. So, from a western viewpoint, this sudden shift looks inconsistent. It isn't, to Afghans. To them, the west consistently blows hot and cold, unreliably.

2. Much of the Taliban strength was based on a testosteroney male dominance urge which didn't really hold up, when push came to shove. The adrenalin has run out. It's to do with the bewitching aspect of collective belief - convincing people that things are such-and-such, and that you're an unstoppable force, a reich to last a thousand years. Hitler was good at it - and his magic took some time and heavy 'persuasion' to break. Maggie Thatcher was good at it too - conjuring the idea that things were good when they weren't, and pulling off remarkable heists *with* people's knowledge and shoulder-shrugging acceptance - and if you complained, you got hit with her handbag, so you didn't, you played along, grumbling quietly. It has something to do with public feelings of helplessness, feeling all tied up, handcuffed by lies - such as the Serbs under Milosevic, only 20-30% of whom really supported him. When the magic collapses, it dissipates quite quickly. Mr Shrub is not so hot - he and his gang won't last too long - they've jumped in too deep. I think they're going to get a case of 'force majeur' within a couple of years. Their enthrallment is not strong enough to survive - there are stronger winds blowing.

3. The meditations and strong public feelings worked. I think we should be realistic about this. During the Afghan crisis, primed by the WTC psychodrama, the world public's feelings were, for a time, very strongly humanitarian in flavour. This change in Afgh was partially catalysed by the meditations and prayers - not just a 'new age' thing, but in the hearts of so many people worldwide, for collectively-felt personal reasons.

4. There's something fishy behind all this, something very corrupt - as many of us know. It's not as we are told. Some sort of a deal was done with the Taliban, as part of the same sequence of events over recent decades between US and the Afghans - probably through the Paki int services. The 'disappearance' of bL and Omar & Co is part of the deal - they're either useful for a later time, or they've been retired off to Socotra or somewhere. bL is dying anyway, for health reasons. They're already out of Afgh. There will be a few more symbolic arrests, and the whole thing will be moved on. It's a movie-script, right? Camera pans toward another direction...

5. Remember Lebanon - there comes a time when everyone simply gets fed up, and something else has to happen. These things can just run out of steam. It's painful, and there are occasional flare-ups, but we're watching it in Ulster at present - the best people have left, the rest are all shot-up, the old leading lights are ill, old, obsolete or dead, and people are deeply tired and fed up. They want to 'get a life'. This bottom-line, had-enough feeling is probably the biggest force for real transformation in the world today. Buddha: 'the path to enlightenment begins with the experience of suffering'.

What will happen in that country? The have a very difficult chart for the formation of the interim government and i suspect that it will not hold together too long - and then will Taliban put on their old clothes and emerge again and defy the lovely media image of a country saved by the US?

Intuitively, I believe the current regime there under Kharzai will lead to something quite good, by a classically Afghan zigzag route - and there will be difficulties too. But there cannot not be difficulties when awakening from a nightmare. I think the Taliban are finished - though there are still gunmen around and many who have known nothing other than war and stoic action. They don't know how to go home, rebuild houses and till fields. They don't know love or breakfast in bed. This will be the difficult thing, I think - it will take a generation or three to wash out. Yet I believe we potentially have another South Africa here - a country that does get through the Big One. But the twist is that consequent mayhems can break out, such as, in South Africa, the crime and AIDS issues they've faced there. In Germany and Japan in the late 20th C, affluence hit them - the pain was internalised to an extent, bringing peace by consumerism. All nations have their own definitive form of collective pain.

This is a viral thing: social dissension and civil war are viral, and they need a susceptible host to thrive. Once the host is burned up, or has developed an immunity, the virus must move on. This is why, when Lebanon quietened down, Yugoslavia started up. Thus, from a consciousness-work viewpoint, we should address the virus itself as well as the specific acute outbreaks of fever. Worldwide immunity needs developing. Strangely, the mass media and Internet are helping here, inasmuch as people worldwide are experiencing the pathos of others' extreme human situations much more quickly and intensely than earlier in history - so the experience is getting spread around, felt worldwide. As a result, the dramas tend to localise in vulnerable 'black spots', where the emotional glue holding society together is weak - and the cameras go in and siphon it out to the world. These are stage-sets - 'theatres' - for the unfoldment of a drama - with audience-participation thrown in. World War is no longer needed - the media sorted that. It's as if the collective unconscious is getting closer-knitted and closer to conscious awareness - by creeping degrees, yet in waves which lap over our resistances and indifference. This is why it's not necessarily the enormity of a crisis which attracts public attention and feeling - it's the symbolic poignancy of it - hence the death of one person, Princess Di, had a similar emotional magnitude to a hurricane affecting millions of people in central America. Hence WTC. Have you noticed how WTC historically marks the death of Hollywood as a cultural phenomenon? These symbolic events - such as the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, or the siege of Kundun - connect the collective unconscious and bring it closer to unity. It hits archetypes - buttons. Activating deeper, semi-conscious collective processes which ultimately are positive. This, surely, is one of the key evolutionary processes for humanity to go through in the 21st C - the development of greater one-minded/heartedness.

This is interesting, since the duration of events has little relation to their impact. The WTC tragedy, which took place in hours, catalysed indelible shifts of awareness and understanding which, though buried beneath other stuff soon afterwards in people's 'official awareness', nevertheless lurks there, brewing. Something shifted underneath, and the remaining time is taken up with catching up with it. The events of recent decades have shifted the collective unconscious forwards quite fast, and while things remain officially 'normal', they are different underneath. We live in an acculturalised form of controlled schizophrenia. Then, when something eventually gets accepted, it's taken to be given and normal quite quickly. This is because it had been fermenting long and hard deeper down.

It is the atomisation of this inherent psychic unity-in-diversity which enables control of the world's population - the sense of separateness from 'God', nature and fellow humanity, and oneself. And separateness of events - voided of connective meaning and context. Yet in those moments of horror, dismay or shock which come at us several times a year in the public domain, deeper connections and significances are seen, and those connections unify things. The unification or synergisation of the collective psyche at deeper levels - plus the contrasting enhancement of ethnodiversity in the world, which both increases and decreases collective viral immunity, for different reasons - surely lies at the heart of the worldwide confusion of identity we see today. Who are we, really, and what to we really believe? Nation-states and other traditional group identifications are dying painfully - yet within this we are uncovering human subgroup diversity in a new light. In this conflict of agendas, there is vulnerability, and the virus of extreme mass pain gains a foothold and creates mayhem. To the great grief of those who are victims. The light in this tunnel is that illness can become a healing crisis. In this respect we must thank our tyrants for the soul-educational, eventual blessings they bring. We must also remember that comfort, security, affluence and routine living are profound forms of suffering too - more insidious than the outright onslaught of crisis. And: history didn't have to go this way - humanity does have other means of learning and evolving available.

Coming back to Afgh, perhaps, on behalf of us all, Afghans are reaching such a point. There will be some further horrors there, but I think that country has turned the corner - it's deeply tired and just needs to rest. We need to watch out for side-spins now - places where the virus goes next. Kashmir is an obvious example - watch out for Burma too. Yet, there's hope. The darkest hour is just before dawn - and there can be infections of positivity too. Keep pumping those prayers, and work to get closer to their core! We need to be very aware of what we pray for. I believe prayer (in the widest sense) does make a significant difference, and it does reflect in events. However, the rub is, we mustn't get too attached to the specific outcomes we might seek - we cannot fully know the meaning of events and why they genuinely happen. Peace can sometimes be a suppression. Normality is a disease which grips humanity more thoroughly than hardship. It's such human qualities as goodwill, truth, cooperation, sense and forgiveness we need to focus on - and the rest follows from that.

I like your analysis/prediction of the future to 2040 with a whole new set of power blocks in the world. I'll wait to see.

A final thought. I believe that, when we look back on our time from ages hence, we'll see that it was the 20th C which was the darkest time, and that the danger, the revival, was already lifting in the early 21st C. I believe the demons are now coming out - we've entered the healing crisis. We got the medicine from the 1960s onwards, but it was highly potentised and worked through from bottom up. The problems are not solved - they're worse - but they're coming out in an intensely localised fashion - and we're on our way. We're on the bridge - look over the parapet, and it's a long way down, with steep cliffs and a raging torrent down there! I reckon we might reach the other side around the 2040s. And then the real stuff begins. You didn't think we came to planet Earth for a quiet time, did you? ;-)

Palden
Just under Chalice Hill, Glastonbury, Angleterre