On Militarization & Mysticism

The question of safety is one of the most critical questions of our time. How do we feel safe and what are the conditions necessary for safety? In our current governmental models, we have invested in militarization as a form of safety. Under this view, to feel safe we must defend ourselves through protection and the only way to do that is through weaponization. 

Yet just as more policing actually makes us less safe, more militarization compromises our safety. The view that depends on militarization as a form of safety comes from a limited understanding of reality that only prioritizes the physical realm while ignoring and erasing the mental, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of existence. This leads to a complete destabilization in the psychological paradigm underpinning our reality. Thus leading to wide scale confusion and chaos, both on a personal and collective level. 

It is vital that we confront the incredible amounts of violence that militarization has reigned on our world. To do this, we must investigate the mind that created the military industrial complex. In this essay, I am proposing that militarization is a form of addiction. Through a psychological and spiritual inquiry into our internal experience of safety, I would like to offer mysticism as a channel to transform militarization. Spirituality is the tool that can interrupt systems of violence and can show another way. 

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Decolonization requires that we study the mind and the internal state that gives rise to external conditions. We often want to discuss political circumstances outside of notions of the self. Yet this is impossible, as the internal patterns and belief systems create the physical conditions of life. We cannot shift political paradigms without addressing the psychological conditions that uphold them. 

Let’s start by breaking down how addiction works through a psycho-spiritual perspective:

Addiction starts with an experience of a certain lacking. There is a need for something, and a desire to satisfy this need. Yet the mind tries to fulfill this need in a way that cannot meet this need. As a result, this unmet need grows stronger. This creates a loop; as the unmet need grows, the mind keeps going back to the same place that cannot meet it, and the need amplifies. 

This looping mechanism is an addiction. The experience of need cannot be released, so the mind starts to grasp. Over time, this grasping becomes quite intense. The mind believes that the place it is going to will solve its need, but this belief is faulty. As long as the thought pattern of the mind is the same, this situation will continue. 

The mind is functioning under faulty assumptions and the addiction loop rests on this perception of the mind. The mind thinks it can fulfill the need in a place where it cannot. This thought is what fuels the loop. 

As long as the condition of the mind is the same, these dynamics of addiction cannot be changed. The mind won’t register that it needs to think differently. 

In a healthy situation, the mind has a need and knows where to go to have this need met. Through the meeting of this need, the grasping for it dissolves and the experience of need is released. The mind returns to equanimity and to safety. This is internal liberation. 

Now let’s apply this understanding of the loop of addiction to the militaristic mind.

As human beings, we have a need for safety. This is a natural necessary need. The militaristic mind thinks that to meet its need for safety, it needs to defend itself. Defense is the place the militaristic mind goes to in search of fulfilling its need for safety.

Thus a loop is created:

“I need safety” - “let me defend myself”

Yet this is a faulty perception. The need for safety cannot be met by the military and only strengthens how unresolved the need for safety remains. We see this in how the ones who are adamantly holding on to militaristic regime are actually stuck in experiences of terror. Additionally because it is an addictive loop, there is no end to investing in defense systems, even as they prove to be ineffective in resolving our needs.

Furthermore, because the militaristic mind is under an illusion of safety, it thinks that it is defending itself, but actually this defense is always an attack. By exerting itself in a defensive way, it is attacking. Here, a defense-attack complex is formed. This mind cannot understand this dynamic because it is still stuck in a victim mentality, meaning it is oriented towards its own experience of lack. It cannot see the impact it has on the other, because it has grown to be obsessed with meeting its own needs.  

The need for safety grows and grows, and the mind keeps going back to defense to fill that need. That is why we keep putting more and more resources into the military: We need more defense, we need more wars, we need more troops, because we need more and more safety. War creates more war. There is an amplification which indicates that this is an addictive process. 

In reality, safety through defense is faulty grounds and unstable energy. Reality is consistently showing no matter how much investment there is in militaristic power, it doesn’t change people's fundamental experience of safety in the body. 

On a psychological level, the people holding weapons don’t experience themselves as strong and powerful, rather they feel like victims, weak, and powerless. The mind does not see that war, military, defense, attack is not achieving any semblance of true safety. The body is still terrified, but the mind and body system is so caught in the mentality that the military will save them. The mind cannot see through this because the way it is conditioned is still the same.

Let us apply this understanding to Israel/Palestine as a case study. The militaristic mind is a terrified mind. Israel and the Israeli army is caught in a cycle of terror even even though they have access to an extremely powerful military. Psychologically, they cannot see their own power because their internal experience of terror has not been processed. They have been conditioned to attach to the  military as a false source of safety, which acutally creates more and more terror because safety is not truly achieved.

Palestinians and the world are calling Israel out for its abuses of power. And Israel cannot see this, as in their minds they are the victims, the terrified ones, the ones scared for our lives. This is truly what they believe. Their attachment to the military just gets stronger and stronger in this addiction loop and the invisibilization of the abuse of power also gets stronger because realization of that would call into question this whole dynamic. This whole dynamic rests on this faulty belief system that my need for safety can be met through the military.

This mind trap shows how coded narrative is in our minds. There is tremendous power in the beliefs we hold. To intervene in this loop we must ask are there other ways we can find safety? 

An intervention of this loop is predicated on the conditions of the mind. The mind will not shift away from this pattern and false belief that the military will get it’s need for safety met unless it believes that there is another place it can go to get its need for safety met. When the need for safety is met, the addictive need for militarism will shift.

To penetrate through the delusions of safety that the military industrial complex holds onto, we turn to mysticism. In this pursuit, we need to expand our understanding of what safety is. Mysticism works with the internal experiences of reality and offers a completely different notion of safety. 

Mysticism teaches us to have a wider perspective on dimensions of being. In the spiritual reality, there are multiple dimensions of existence, not just the physical realm. The physical realm is simply an expression of other more advanced realms such as the emotional, mental, energetic, spiritual, and beyond. To shift the physical realm, we tend to these other realms. 

With this understanding, we come to know that when we seek safety, we are not just seeking physical safety. But rather our experience of safety is defined by our emotional well being, our mental health, our energetic configuration and our soul expression. We desire safety in all realms. Whether we are conscious or unconscious of this multidimensional perspective, this is how we operate in the world. 

Mysticism can meet this multidimensional need for safety and break this cycle of addiction. When we have a need, and we actually go to a place where it can be met, there is a release, there is a liberation.

Mysticism is the channel of truth. It is the hidden wisdom that sets reality into motion. Here, we find that safety is not rooted in permanence, but actually in impermanence. The militaristic view desires reality to be static and fixed because the movement of life is a threat to it. But mysticism dances with these movements, following their lead. 

Change is a fundamental reality. When we grow comfortable with change and vulnerability, we develop strength and stability. This maturation brings us closer to the true source of all strength and stability: the Creator. 

The Creator is the place we can go to meet our need for safety, and truly meet it. We can release all fear of physical dynamics, release all attachment to the grasping for safety in a permanent way, and liberate the addiction to defense. 

True safety lies in relationship to the Divine, offering us the inner equanimity to flow with the unfolding changes of the world. When we create this intimacy, we can gracefully engage with life’s struggles. We also understand that our safety comes in solidarity with the safety of all beings. In the spiritual world, there is no paradigm in which I as an individual can feel safe at the expense of another being. Because the spiritual truth of all is that we all belong to the Divine. 

This is a decolonial lens to justice. Psychological patterns are holding these ineffective systems in place, and spirituality can undo these psychological processes and liberate them. We see that liberation does not stem from an external force, but rather is an internal process that holds the external reality in place. 

To undo massive systems of oppression such as militarization, we begin with the internal dynamics of the self. We return to our power as Beings of the Divine. We learn to slowly shift from the inside our attachment to defensive patterns and reconnect them back into the harmonious nature of life. This sacred view of safety rests on internal intimacy with the Self and with our Creator. It is this act of revolutionizing the mind that transforms physical systems into ecosystems of liberation. May we learn to divest from militarism and invest in mysticism.