Thirtysomething years ago I had the privilege of working with a bunch of (for want of a better term) cosmic beings called the Council of Nine, compiling and editing a book for them, ‘The Only Planet of Choice‘. They dropped in loads of remarkable insights and here’s a bundle or two of them. Some readers might think this stuff far too way out, or utter garbage – so use your freedom of thought and intuitive discernment here.

Planet Earth is very different from other worlds. One factor affecting this is its gravitational density and the intense physicality of our lives on Earth. This has had a troublesome, diversionary and downward-pulling effect on human consciousness, with the result that we tend to forget why we came and what we are here for. We get lost in the daily round and in our psycho-emotional stuff, losing our connection with spirit. It has made human history into something we can be proud of and also we ought to be ashamed of it.

Over the centuries and millennia we have institutionalised this situation, making it our default behaviour, such that waking up to the heart of the matter has become an exceptional, dissenting thing to do, with difficulties and sanctions attached. This is further exacerbated by historical factors such as the control agendas of dominant elements in society and the compromised submissiveness and conformity of the majority. We’ve given power to fear, guilt and shame, clamping our spirits and clipping our wings.

There’s another issue too. As a planetary race, we did not start our evolutionary journey together as one tribe or family, originating from one single source, as is the case (according to the Nine) with many worlds, cultures and civilisations throughout the universe. Humanity has physically evolved in a Darwinian sense, with periodic non-Darwinian seedings and tweaks from outside, as part of a hybridisation project. Such discreet interventions have helped us evolve in consciousness, culture and technology too, though in quirky and sometimes dangerous ways.

The aim was to breed a new kind of conscious being that could be at home in denser and more experientially-diverse conditions than ever before. The idea was to draw influences and souls from throughout the universe, throwing us together on one planet, in the hope that we might co-create something new, different and never done before. We were to become a new kind of individualised, enspirited, dense-physical, humanoid-type being.

So Earth has become rather like a New York or a Singapore in experiential terms – naturally and intentionally multicultural. Living in different cultural realities and localised mini-worlds, we have been bumping up against one another throughout history, becoming changed in the process. The end-game of the modern phase of Earth’s history is to get all these cultures and individuals to come together as one planetary race – a race that is capable of managing its own world and making something of it.

So now, by 2025, we have created a world system, criss-crossed with cables, shipping and air lanes, and humanity now needs to catch up with all that this means. Nationalist and isolationist feelings are a symptom of a stop-the-world reaction to this historic mega-trend. As usual, we walk into the future facing backwards, more concerned about what we’re losing than what we’re gaining.

Also, life on Earth is always a mixed bag, and experiencing this is part of the grinding process that hones the soul. It faces us with choices – sometimes big and deep ones – and that’s what we came for.

They called for volunteers – this wasn’t conscription – saying that living on Earth would be difficult though potentially rewarding – a fast-track way of honing the soul. We would be given individualised free-will – a capacity to do whatever each of us feels best. As incoming souls, we felt that we could maintain consciousness sufficiently to fulfil our purposes in signing up for this project. At first we had that kind of clarity about life that you sometimes get when you’ve been on holiday, done ayahuasca or been on a meditation retreat – but then, when you get home, the pressures and complications start, and the main agenda gets set aside for another day, when there’s time… and we get lost again.

Over time, more and more souls came, as individuals and as groups, creating a population explosion in modern times. It has become a mass-migration, rising into billions, and fresh souls are still coming. (At one point the Nine said that Earth’s optimum population is around 200 million, not 8-10 billion, though they also reckoned we could manage such high numbers if we did it right.)

We now have a situation where we have billion of souls on one planet, yet in very different worlds. Multiplicities of them. This diversity happens on the same street, even within families. Diversity doesn’t have to mean dissonance yet currently dissonance is strong, and this matter is going critical. Not least because, on a deep psycho-spiritual level, dissonance makes divide-and-rule easier, and arguing has become pandemic in scale.

The consequences of dissonance have been highlighted in Gaza. Palestine/Israel is a microcosm of the whole world – divided, and not just two ways. This microcosm business is a key reason why this conflict matters so much to so many people. It holds the world down. Around 12 million people are holding 8,300 million back. Yet equally, if it is resolved, it could lift up the whole world. And this isn’t really just about Israelis and Palestinians – at root it’s about people and the Megamachine.

Neither is it a simple equation of one side as badguys and the other side as goodguys – it’s far more subtle and convoluted. Yet it polarises around Israelis and Palestinians because we have a habit of dehumanising others, lumping them together into a mass of horrible, fundamentally different people who threaten our happiness or our very existence.

Israelis and Palestinians, bless them, live in very different worlds, to the extent that people on either side just cannot see what it’s like being on the other side – except for some brave souls on both sides who are willing to step outside the confines of groupthink. We all variously do this dehumanising thing, justifying ourselves by making others wrong, but Israelis and Palestinians have an acute and persistent case of it.

They aren’t even in the same conflict, though they live close together in one small ‘holy’ land. It all boils down to the way we see things – especially when we get het up, losing our patience and tolerance.

This is why, in peacemaking, it isn’t possible to propose nice, sensible diplomatic solutions to which everyone can easily agree and comply, point by point, so that we can all go home and forget it. They’re fighting different wars, committing different suicides. This stuff, this shadow, goes so much deeper.

Plenty of shadows lurk in the collective psyche of virtually every country and social grouping worldwide – some of these ghosts are dormant, some simmer and some are heating up.

At present, globally there are few encouraging signs of mass healings and breakthroughs, and this leads to a creeping sense of disillusionment and disappointment across humanity.

If anything, the main factor currently pacifying conflicts seems to be exhaustion – sheer weariness. That’s not resolution and healing, but it can allow feelings to cool to manageable levels. Social-cultural healing can take decades, but there comes a point where both sides see that healing is cheaper than the price of continued conflict.

So it’s all a matter of what happens after open conflict ends, and whether a momentum of progress can be built up. It requires a time of confidence-building where each side has to restrain itself, even during touchy moments. In some respects this demands more bravery than in times of war, since there’s a courageously resilient madness to warfare that subsides with peace, once people get used to sleeping safely in their own beds.

Deep down, many Palestinians understand the pain Israelis feel over the pogroms and the Holocaust, but it was Europeans who did this, yet Arabs are being punished. The Arabs of Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem and Israel are divided by circumstance, permits and walls. There’s a tug-of-war between negotiators (Fateh) and resistance fighters (Hamas), and neither is winning or compromising. Recent events have stumped the negotiators and decimated the resisters, and many Palestinians feel rudderless and stuck in a tightening vice of diminishing options. Top to bottom, Palestinians are hurt, dismayed, upset, unsure what to do next.

Meanwhile, Israelis feel deeply hurt and shocked, and for entirely different reasons. Zionists, centred in Jerusalem, are hurt and angry since their God-given right to the land of ‘Greater Israel’ is being obstructed by an interfering world filled with Jew-haters – and Arabs ought to get out of the way. Meanwhile the ‘peace camp’ centred in Tel Aviv, themselves hurt, diminished and stumped, have lost much of their trust in everything and everyone, preferring life inside a missile-protected beachside bubble.

Historic Jewish insecurities have genuinely been reawakened, with some Israelis lashing out, others recoiling in dread and many stuck, confused and afraid. Something fundamental has dislodged in the Israeli and the international Jewish psyche, and something ill-judged and disproportionate has welled up in the attitudes of non-Jews toward Jews.

Israelis and Palestinians sit in fundamentally different worlds, each with different ways of dehumanising the other. As do those who support either side, around the world. Palestine activists need to stop belly-aching about genocide and rights and actually support real-life Palestinians directly with friendship, money and contact. Meanwhile, those who bang on about anti-Semitism need to forget it, and those who deny or ignore it need to remember it, deep in their hearts.

It’s a reality-conflict, projected on others yet reflecting what’s going on inside all of us. It’s about far more than just Palestinians and Israelis.

But there’s a flipside. Conflict and hardship can be so crazy, tough and senseless that it leads to a kind of rapid de-traumatisation, an epiphany, a deeper change of heart and optic. This happened after WW2, with the founding of the UN, the EU, the welfare state, the beginning of decolonialisation and of the urbanised modernity we now take for granted.

That ‘rules-based order’ is now getting shaken up and we have entered a slippery phase in which things are accelerating to a point where none of us really knows where we stand any more. We’re being forced to let go of past structures, habits, heroes and normalities. We’re being ground down.

The key issue is that we need to get on with each other.

Otherwise nothing else can get resolved. So, from a planetary-evolutionary viewpoint we’re at a really critical tipping point in history. We have come from very different worlds across the universe, developing very different cultures here on Earth, and we now have urbanised ourselves into multicultural melting-pots – 60% of humanity lives in artificial cities over half a million in size. This, plus increasing global migration, is humanity meeting up with itself.

The whole universe is watching, and it means a lot to them – not least because we’re their relatives. They will not intervene unless it is absolutely necessary (think of the ‘prime directive’) because intervention will override the purpose of the whole planetary project – to find out what happens in a dense-physical world run according to free-will rules.

Besides, I don’t think they really know what to do with us. They really need us to sort ourselves out.

We humans have become hyper-reactive, complex and dangerous – we even fight over toilet rolls. When they give us prompts, gifts and clues – subtle interventions – as a whole we tend to ignore, corrupt or misuse them. Or we resist. Or we create complex diversions and avoidances.

It’s all to do with seeing beyond our own little worlds, stretching ourselves and seeing things from another viewpoint. This is difficult right now, since our divisiveness has gone viral. Every society has a kind of concussion, dogged by past trauma and by the intensity of change happening now in these times. All societies have a consensus problem, a solidarity problem and a leadership problem. Old answers aren’t working, even though we keep grasping for them. Yet, strangely, this parlous situation is a necessary part of the change process – and there’s further to go.

We no longer need a rules-based order. We need an integrity-based order.

Some are moved to weaken and destroy the old rules-based order, but on the whole they do not know how to create a system based in integrity. Meanwhile, oligarchies cannot reform systems from which they themselves benefit, and which protects them from a latently angry world public.

So change needs to start from bottom up, and increasingly, fitfully, valiantly this is happening more and more. But to do so, ‘the mass of humanity’ needs to develop a certain maturity, forgiveness and a set of basic common standards. The Hindu rule of ahimsa or non-harming is one such standard.

This is why the imagery of devastation emanating from Gaza stirs so many people worldwide. Such devastation has been seen before but Gaza hits a nerve in the global psyche – especially in the Global South. Gazans have hit bottom. A fuse is close to blowing in the world psyche and in the geopolitical arena. Gaza is like a magnifying glass, exposing all sorts of agendas, shadows and cobwebs underneath.

At present there’s even a possibility of a sudden, house-of-cards tectonic change in world geopolitics – as a pragmatic and rapid adaptation to an avalanche of facts. This might lead to coffee and toilet roll shortages: it will affect everyone and force changes that, if truth be known, really need to happen.

We humans are up against the consequences of letting things pass when we know we should have drawn a line, many times throughout history. The ‘war to end all wars’ should have been like it said on the tin. We’ve got ourselves into a global-scale historic mess, imprisoned in self-created default behaviours, laws, regulations, systems and self-defeating patterns.

This has framed itself around Israel-Palestine because it’s not just about Palestinians and Israelis. It’s about the world’s capacity to decide what’s best. This hundred-year conflict would not exist without the interventions and manipulations of foreign powers that have fuelled it and failed repeatedly to address it. Too many bombs, too little wisdom.

It boils down to a touchy geopolitical question that we face in coming decades: the capacity of nations and the ‘international community’ to interfere in the sovereign affairs of individual nations, when necessary. And who decides?

Take this a level deeper, and it concerns our capacity as a planetary race to run and organise our planet. Doing so involves facing all of the big and small problems we have – an enormous task, yet it’s unavoidable. This would be a critical step in human evolution – a rite of passage and a triumph of global solidarity, based in disagreeing agreeably, bridging differences and staying focused on the main priority – getting the world back on track and making it a safe, fair and happy enough place to be.

There is a solution to all of this that the Nine mentioned quite often, and it isn’t new. It’s a simple, easy-to-understand yet profound method for achieving an integrity-based order, and it applies to everyone, at all levels of the human pyramid.

Treat other people as you wish to be treated yourself.

If we did just this, Earth would be a very different place.

With love, Paldywan
www.palden.co.uk

The pictures are from Planet Earth. Quite a remarkable place. Worth a visit.