עברית These are the pains of convergence, burning intensely because Israel is a tiny place and there's no place you can escape it. Creating this melting pot of all the religions is the coming task of humanity in the present fifth cultural epoch, until the middle of the 4th millennium.
Israel and the Global Melting Pot
From Lecture 9 of Spiritual Science in the 21st Century
These are the pains of convergence. They are burning intensely because there is no way out. Israel is a tiny place. You cannot solve the Israeli dilemma by physical means because there is no place to go. You cannot do it as the Europeans have done in 2 world wars and just recently again in Yugoslavia, when they said— ‘Let’s concentrate all the Orthodox Slavs here, the Muslims here, the Catholic Croatians over there, Divide & Rule (divide et impera)! But that’s impossible in tiniest Israel. It’s completely mixed in Israel…. there is nowhere to go. You cannot really expel the other. The more you chase them away, the more we are integrated.
Creating this melting pot of all the religions is the coming task of humanity in the present fifth cultural epoch, until the middle of the 4th millennium. These religions are destined to disappear physically and spiritually in the course of the next millennium. The positive spiritual impulse of the future will create a center into which will flow all the past traditions, world conceptions, religious systems, and philosophies into one united synthesis of all the disparate parts.
This is the mission of the coming 1000 years. When we experience it, we can say — ‘Beware, it’s working, it’s beginning, and everything is already melting’. If you dip your finger a little bit into the situation, you can feel the fire working; it’s very hot. And you don’t have to dig so deep in Israel to feel the molten core, to feel the fires from underneath, from above and from all sides… the center of which is Jerusalem. Where it is the holiest, there it is burning the most. The whole place is on fire!
Nothing happens in the world in our time which is not a rite of passage of sorts, and what remains for us is only to interpret what it all means. Catastrophe is simply part of initiation; it is an act of grace, a beautiful revelation of destiny. We can say that the greater the catastrophe is, the more blessed is the event that the catastrophe rises out of. So what is the appropriate mood for this? It would be a loving, thankful, joyful, serene, heroic feeling for destiny in the face of these catastrophes. In a sense, we have nothing to lose in this rite of passage, because it opens us to the experience of the divine nature of our deepest self, and a divine being can only lose the illusion of separation and loneliness. There are no other basic illusions to lose, apart from this.
When you are confronted with your destiny, when you can identify yourself in the next blissful blowup, this becomes a self-formation of the highest degree. It is the most painful and joyful experience at the same time. It is a direct experience of the knowledge that ‘I am a being of the world and all separations have ceased to exist in this moment.’ When the blowup or the bliss touches us, we are one with the world, and then we know we are beings of truth, beauty, grace and honor, and we can admit — Yes, that is what we are. The world is us and we are everything that is in the world. So whatever we have invoked, whatever comes our way, is what we are, is what we have prepared for so long, as the initiation rites of our humanity.
These are the pains of convergence. They are burning intensely because there is no way out. Israel is a tiny place. You cannot solve the Israeli dilemma by physical means because there is no place to go. Of course you can try all the physical means — chase as many Arabs as you can beyond the Jordan and further. In the ‘good old days’ of the independence war, you could do this to a certain extent, but, by and large, this is impossible today. Not in Israel. You can do it in Yugoslavia now because this is in accord with some interests of the global elite. There they can say — Let’s concentrate all the Slavs here, the Muslims here, and the Orthodox over there. But no longer in Israel. It’s completely mixed in Israel. And as I said there is nowhere to go. You cannot really expel the other. You can wish for it, but like in Europe, everything that you are doing to drive away the other brings him back and with revenge. The Germans have noticed this! This is one of the jokes for the Israelis about Germany — You didn’t want the Jews, now you have the Turks! You cannot do without the Semitic element. Arab, Jewish, Christian, Orthodox, Slav, you cannot do without these. The more you chase them away, the more they are integrated.
In regard to this, read the brilliant American politician, Pat Buchanan. His book, The Death of the West (2001), is one of the greatest American “masterpieces” ever. Because Buchanan is not a professor at Yale, he doesn’t have to mask so artfully what he thinks. He says what many people think but don’t say. Buchanan just says openly what all those professors of policy and sociology at Yale and Harvard are hiding behind in their books, like The Clash of Civilizations (Huntington), and The Grand Chessboard (Brzezinski).
In Buchanan’s estimation the West has lost. We are a shrinking minority of whites. In America and in Europe, immigration has taken over. There is nothing you can do. Buchanan gives the plain statistics, the birthrate, the demographics and details of immigration. He shows a global melting pot, in which the ‘white’ races of America and Europe are losing the fight. When the one color eventually emerges, it’s not going to be terribly white, hmm? And that is a terrible loss for people like Pat Buchanan. He likes this color white. He seems to like it very much. It’s a matter of taste. It’s not my first choice, but okay... White is definitely endangered and this is a bit of a worry. The American color that is forecast for the middle of this century is not white, with the increased South American immigration, the natural birthrates of the Spanish community here, and the black movement. Whites will become a minority in their own Anglo-Saxon lands and in Europe you have mosques that are sprouting like mushrooms all over now. Islam is spreading itself like fire in Europe.
One can lament the loss of one’s own separate racial- religious identity only if one believes oneself to be exceptionally gifted and beautiful. But when one has a more realistic self-knowledge, one cannot lament the loss of one’s physical-racial identity. Can it be said, based on physical-racial characteristics — I am the only representative of humanity? I am here and this is the end- result of human evolution? I am humanity and I represent its destiny? On the path of initiation, as we have indicated, it is part of the process to lose the sense of self. And the loss of the connection to one specific race is part of that process. To lose the sense of an exclusive race, exclusive national identity, exclusive religion and philosophy, is the greatest release. You cannot find a greater release than that. It is the greatest liberation for the one who can say, ‘I am not only this race, I am also yours. I am a human being and a human being is all races. The reality of me, as a human being, embraces all nationalities and spiritualities. I am not only a believer in Moses (with all due respect to Moses) and Abraham and all the prophets. They were great, but sorry, today I know more than that. I have heard about this Jesus; I also heard about Buddha, some good news and some truly fantastic stories. This is all mine, this is all myself. I’m not really my true self, if I’m not one with all teachers and nations and religions and ideas.’
So the same melting pot is for many the most burning and painful experience because they only lose, they don’t gain. So they moan and they cry, and they suffer and they kill, and they are killed. They feel only deprivation for something that they love gaining. Dear friends, it’s time to expand your being; it’s time to expand your consciousness. You can do it willingly through love and compassion and acceptance of the other, and then it’s a joy and a release. You can consciously choose to say, ‘As a Jewish Israeli, who am I without an Israeli-Arab? Am I an Israeli without him? No. He’s part of the land, he’s part of the climate, and he’s part of nature. He is as myself. In many respects he’s more than myself, because my fellows are immigrants and he’s been here some centuries. And without him, am I a true Israeli?’ You don’t have to live with him in the same village and share with him the way he lives. It’s not a physical thing and it’s not a sentimental, psychological, or mental thing. It’s a spiritual thing, and it will only happen, therefore, if through real spiritual science we wholly transform the ordinary consciousness of the materialistic and intellectual thinking, feeling and doing of present humanity.
Spiritual Science in the 21st Century