Peace meditations and Kosovo by Palden Jenkins posted on Internet, 13 October 1998

In principle I agree with what your correspondents say about the importance of social and spiritual peacebuilding and the risk of damage in Kosovo from military intervention, and the success and value of meditations earlier this year on Iraq. The suspicions voiced about the shady motivations of the military-industrial complex are partially correct, in my view, though not wholly so. I have a reservation about the statement that military intervention is 'bad' and meditation is 'good', and I think a few blanket statements are being made which need re-evaluating.

It's indeed true and demonstrated (at least within our community of believers) that a dangerous situation in and around Iraq was successfully headed off by the use of meditation earlier this year. Yet the problem around Iraq is still not resolved, and in this the outcomes of the meditation might be in question: there are still deadly nukes and biological weapons in Iraq, and these can still be used in a variety of contexts (watch out for Iran and Turkey), and the West has not learned its own lesson from all this either. From my own inner meditative-psychic researches I've discovered that Saddam Hussein is not such a bad guy as he is commonly demonised to be, yet he's also not the world's wisest man either - and he can still play havoc with millions of people. So, with regard to the current problem, Kosovo/Serbia, the focus perhaps needs to be on sorting out the problems on both or all sides of the equation, and not just using the occasion to click into default protester mode or rigid new age peace-ideology, and just to rail at capitalists, military men and media types – that's just one side of the equation! The fact is, the Serbs are committing crimes against humanity, and there's some serious malignancy going on.

The material you sent out from Jan Oberg in Sweden (entitled "Human Rights and Peace Forums in Conflict Areas" from Transnational Foundation TFF tff@transnational.org) is valuable, important and valid, and I agree with it and work with this stuff myself. However, I'd suggest we're talking about different things here, and distinctions need making. This is like the difference between complementary therapies and invasive surgery/heavy pharmaceutical treatment. The former is preferable to the latter, since it addresses the fundamentals more properly and brings more fullsome healing. However, the latter is valuable when it is too late to apply the former - sometimes, if a cancer has gone critical, surgery, radiation and chemicals are the only known solution.

The same goes for social peacebuilding versus military intervention. With military intervention, as with surgery, the diagnosis needs to be good, and the work done excellent and appropriate, and sometimes, in an emergency, you have to just act on the knowledge and skills you have, without knowing if it's the best option in retrospect – because disaster is, at the time, the only other perceptible option. The lesson to be drawn from this is that full complementary therapy needs applying from the first moment the symptoms arise, not when they've gone super-acute and deadly – and the big fault of the international community is that it has avoided the issues up to now and thus allowed military intervention to become almost inevitable. However, since we're in the situation we're now in, my reservation is that meditative action, especially action which perhaps rigidly is visualising peace at any cost, might not be the sole or best option. I would remind people that, aside from bombing, armies are good in humanitarian work because they're trained to achieve results and overcome obstacles – and even if no shots are fired in Kosovo, and even if the Serbs pull back and drop their case, there's a lot of emergency work to do there, and imminent deaths are likely without bombing happening.

So please watch your judgements, people! Don't project your peace-preferences on a situation in a way which might itself be one-sided or even narrow! Peace-work is important and right, but we needed to think about this at an earlier stage, when such healing was perhaps more valid than it now is, at the last minute. To me, it's not a question of military intervention or no military intervention: it's a question of the skill and motivation with which it's done. Perhaps it's better to put spiritual support into the right use of intervention, instead of belatedly complicating things. Perhaps it's also worth getting a prejudice out of the way: who's to say that military action is always bad? And who has a really acceptable, demonstratedly-effective substitute? I see few hands shooting up with good answers to this.

We have to remember another matter. There's one thing, which is the confusions society gets itself into – fear, distrust, polarisation and so on. There's another too, which is that a small number of serious assholes still have a big effect in the world. Because we humans are all trained to default to negative (fear) than to positive, it just takes one Milosevic to stand up and activate terrible negativity amongst people who, in themselves, are basically okay people. Yes, most Serbs are fine folks. This doesn't happen on the positive side: if one person stands up and spouts wisdom, everyone says "Very well and good, but....".

I do a lot of remote-viewing meditation work, and I've visited many world leaders in this way. From this, one thing I can say about Saddam Hussein is that he has his faults, but as a soul he seems to be an interesting guy with a valid point to make, and a good-hearted side to him as well as a lot of paranoia, pain and dangerous motives (mostly unconscious). However, Slobodan Milosevic, in my experience, is an empty soul. He has nothing inside him except a heart of glass – in my judgement and experience, from the inner researches I've made. This man is a skilled manipulator who is likely to seek to twist the world round his finger by any means. He's the sort of man who can guarantee his own safety only by staying in power. This makes him very dangerous, a suitable channel for serious badness. In my experience, he has no feelings at all – not even hate. He seems to have but cold calculation going on within. If anyone has a different perception, I'd be intrested to hear it! I'd like to feel compassion and understanding even toward Milosevic.

In this context, though love and light might be of some therapeutic value, I have serious doubts in the value of resorting to blanket pacifist statements and ideals, or in believing that a wacky link-up of good-intentioned souls would really solve the problem. In my judgement, spiritually or militarily, this guy probably needs 'taking out' with incisive precision, because of the disastrous effect he has on other humans. He has the power to bring out the very worst in both Serbs and their victims. In this context, form your own conclusions, though I suggest that, if the love'n'light brigade really want peace, some focused, intense, directed, carefully-conceived innerwork is needed to neutralise this guy, and divine love-soup, good intentions and peace-ideology aren't it.

I would add this. If you want to take a simple love-and-light approach, do start becoming aware of issues at an earlier stage, and do something about it at the appropriate time, not when it's already too late! This is not just a matter of stopping gunfire and murder – it's a matter of fundamental peacebuilding and historical problem-solving, from bottom-up. So, may I suggest that we use this opportunity to scan the world for problems-in-the-making (of which there are many), and that we get more into the habit of working on them before they become 'sexy' news-items and painful disasters for ordinary people?! This involves getting into deliberate, ongoing world-healing work, and bypassing the Wow-factor of big dramatic last-minute big-numbers meditations, promoted by highly-regarded new age stars. Short-termism is part of the problem, not part of the solution! This involves getting into the boring stuff – the healing work we need to do even when we're uninterested, even when no one is clapping, even when everyone else is in avoidance and denial. It involves working on fundamentals for decades. Until the Big Job – planet Earth itself, and its global and historical and cosmic fundamentals – is fixed. Which I would estimate to be a long-haul task with many intricacies to it.

So, go for it with the meditations, and do your best. However, Bosnia/Kosovo, a decade-long issue, has arisen because everyone turned the other way and hoped it would all disappear. There's a lesson to be drawn from this. And while politicians and miliary men are getting it all demonstrably wrong in Kosovo, this doesn't mean they should down tools, go home and leave it to prayer. The whole of the Muslim world has been praying for Bosnia and Kosovo for a long time, and while it's good that post-Christian new agers are now at last getting on the case, something more is needed!

Some of the British military people come from my area (SW England). A few of them are my astrological clients and local acquaintances. One of them has given me lovely, inspiring rides in a hot-air balloon, for free! They love their families and care about humanity. They've been in Bosnia, Ulster and Kurdistan. They're basically good, sincere guys, who believe they're doing the right thing – though they too get frustrated with the management of the army and with politicians. Don't automatically oppose these guys! Pray for everyone, on all sides, to see truth and wisdom, even if it's hard, and to realise and learn from the consequences of their/our actions. If military intervention happens, watch out that you don't exacerbate problems by introducing complexity of agendas: pitch your prayers and light-energy well, non-judgmentally. Who's to say we are right? I don't think 'God' uses such judgements – if 'he' did, planet Earth would have been wiped clean of humans ages ago! May the Kosovo experience become a deep lesson for the world, and may those on all sides who have sacrificed their lives in order to teach us be blessed with the joy of seeing that sacrifice leading to genuinely, fundamentally wholesome outcomes.

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