The Last Dimension of Warfare
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Collective Journaling w/ Peter Limberg and Co-Hosts. Daily @ 8:00 AM ET. Patreon event. 90 mins.
The Art of Critical Thinking w/ Jonathan Haber. September 7th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Discomfortable: What Is Shame and How Can We Break Its Hold? w/ A.J. Bond. September 7th @ 6:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Embodied Sexuality w/ Ilan Stephani. September 8th @ 12:00 PM ET. Patreon event.
Two Effective Altruists Walk Into a Monastery w/ Yuli Jadov and Vīrabhadra. September 9th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Collective Presencing w/ Ria Baeck and Co-Hosts. Every Second Friday @ 8:00 AM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Stoic Breath w/ Steve Beattie. Every Sunday @ 10:00 AM ET. RSVP here. 60 mins.
Newly posted events:
Laughter Yoga w/ Madan Kataria. September 13th @ 10:00 AM ET. Patreon event.
Deep Philosophy w/ Ran Lahav. October 6th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Doing Philosophy w/ Gerald Rochelle. October 13th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
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September 5th, 2021
The U.S. Military recognizes five dimensions of warfare: land, sea, air, space, and information. I prefer to think of “mind” as the fifth dimension rather than information or, better said: minds, collective mind, noosphere, etc.
Of course people will eventually start musing about what the sixth dimension of warfare could be, and I read recently somebody suggesting that it was germs, or what is known as germ warfare. Depending on your perspective this could be a war against germs or a war using germs, or perhaps both. This has an obvious materialist bias though, and there is another dimension for us to consider: spirit.
I sense spirit is the last dimension of warfare, and the most important one. Spiritual warfare is something my fellow Orthodox Christians are concerned with. Lorenzo Scupoli, a sixteenth-century Catholic author who wrote The Spiritual Combat, highly influenced Theophan the Recluse, a monk who was canonized as a saint in 1988 by the Russian Orthodox Church. Theophan revised Scupoli’s book, published as Unseen Warfare. Here is some advice from the book …
You must never be afraid, if you are troubled by a flood of thoughts, that the enemy is too strong against you, that his attacks are never ending, that the war will last for your lifetime, and that you cannot avoid incessant downfalls of all kinds.
Ah, fear, the mind-killer. It is the Devil’s weapon of choice. Fear can bend you, contort you, and make you crooked. Fear can flood your body, fog your mind, and completely overwhelm your entire being. Narcissists, psychopaths, and all those Cluster B types instinctively know this, and there is a good reason that their whole personality structure is designed to keep their targets disoriented. They want you to be in a state of fear so that they can provide a ready-made solution to ameliorate your fear: one that perversely benefits them.
If you study their techniques—emotional blackmail, victim blaming, victim playing, love bombing, flying monkeys, double binds, silent treatment, gaslighting, drama triangulation, fearmongering—you start to see them being used beyond the domain of interpersonal relationships. These techniques can be scaled up, and scaling back from our consumption of social media and legacy media will be a wise thing for us to do. Media has the tendency to invoke a culture of fear, and a culture of fear sets up a culture of control.
The good news: on the other side of fear is courage. Courage needs fear. The more capacity you have to feel fear the more courage awaits you. Avoiding feeling fear removes the opportunity for courage, and will make you easy prey for our intraspecies predators, and for the father of lies.
The daemon, source, inherent intelligence, spirit of truth, or whatever words you want to use for the thing that makes you come alive, is the thing at stake in this dimension of warfare. This thing channels through the body, assuming one is in a right enough relationship with their body, aka they are embodied. This is also the thing that leads to beauty, and will be the thing that will guide us towards a beautiful world.
If fear is used to control the mind, it can control the body, and those who weaponize fear can clamp down on what makes us come alive. This is the basis of spiritual warfare today, a war that you might be drafted into soon. It is a war that you may have been drafted into already.
The reason why this is the last dimension of warfare is that the “weapon” that can be used to combat fear is, of course, love, making this dimension not feel like war at all to those of us who have already been drafted.
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