“If you want to awaken all of humanity, then awaken all of yourself. If you want to eliminate the suffering in the world, then eliminate all that is dark and negative in yourself. Truly, the greatest gift you have to give is that of your own self-transformation.”
~ Lao Tzu ~

on this seventeenth anniversary of 9-11 we have the opportunity both personally and collectively to bear witness to the tragedy of our global dark night of the soul as suffering and as our fate when we fail to see what is ongoing… an orgy of violence in the outer world mirrored in our inner worlds…

at the end of the first world war, William Butler Yeats bears witness in…

THE SECOND COMING

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

    Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

    The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

~

although written ninety-nine years ago, it feels like it is describing today… breakdown, anarchy, corruption  and then he moves into a new vision leaving the outcome open-ended as it is for us…

may we have the courage to face the evil, both inner and outer, and hear the cries of the world and ourselves… may we listen to the old master and transmute the darkness within by sitting quietly, invoking the invisible reams and plugging into source energy to empower right action… the wisdom of the serpent coupled with the gentleness of the lamb…

namaste