We are now well-into the Time of Changes, and the dramas in our world (and lives) are deepening. Conflict is everywhere, and the struggle over who will set the course of our future is intense.

How can your expanding consciousness help you move through these challenges with more peace and ease while creating the future YOU want?

First, let's be clear. I don't speak about feeding the hunger of your desires, nor starving the pain of your fears. How you relate to them is part of your journey of awakening, and you must strike a balance that works for you. Just recognize that balance will change as you do.

Somewhere along the way you may feel a need to understand why you have such fears and desires in the first place. They offer valuable clues to the puzzle of your life.

I suspect that as you look at them you will also find struggles and conflicts within you that are not much different than those taking place in your outer world.

Just as taking sides against yourself leads you deeper into duality (and away from knowing the wholeness that you are), so does taking sides in the polarized outer battles expand the separation between us, feeding the escalating battles that are leading toward "Armageddon."

So what are we to do?

Withdrawal is not an option; that simply reinforces an inability or unwillingness to confront our own inner obstacles. But neither is jumping into the fray and fighting for one side or another.

Rather, detached engagement is probably your best bet -- releasing the hold of the beliefs and emotional charges they tweak within you while making a consistent stand for the PROCESSES and SOLUTION PATHS (not necessarily particular solutions) your expanding consciousness is causing you to want.

Our leaders -- if we can euphemistically call those who engage in such battles leaders -- need to know that we hold OURSELVES accountable for how we conduct our lives, and that they will be held similarly accountable for how they conduct our common affair.

This puts the burden for the future squarely on you -- not them. If you are still tied to the beliefs and practices that keep you at war with yourself and your life, then they will be free to keep doing what they're doing.

But if you recognize that notwithstanding the illusion they hold you in, you seek your own wholeness and that of your outer world, then your light will filter over to our leaders as well. When that happens, they will realize that their continued battles stand in the way of the kind of world we want for ourselves and they will search for another way (or fall by the wayside).

You will find, though, that to do this you must address your own egoic tendency toward self-interest and find your own place within the whole. It is that very attribute that is at work behind many of the ills of our system as well as our international and business affairs. For runaway will and desire are at the heart of it all, simultaneously corrupting our system while fueling a continual fight to counterbalance their influence.

It is a battle that can never be won until we find a way to make peace within ourselves. That peace starts with addressing the inner conditions that create the emotional buttons they push to elicit your support. Then holding yourself to a standard of wholeness, and your leadership as well.

Abraham Lincoln said it best. "A house divided cannot stand." The divisions within us are playing out in the dramas of our world. If we hope to make our stand within those dramas and move toward a better tomorrow, we must heal those rifts within and without.

Then again, if you like things the way they are, never mind.

I love you. God bless you indeed.

john