Essai on the Current War

War on this scale does not introduce anything new into the world. It only amplifies what has always been here, like a loudspeaker pressed against the hidden chambers of the human heart. The missiles and sirens, the speeches and the statistics, are the visible choreography of an older, more intimate battle: the one between fear and love inside consciousness itself.

We like to imagine that wars begin with leaders, borders, treaties, and broken agreements. But beneath those narratives, something more rudimentary is at work: the ancient impulse to divide the living world into “us” and “them,” to build an identity that can only know itself by having an enemy. The outer front line in Iran, or anywhere else, is only the point where this inner architecture of separation becomes visible. What explodes over cities has first been allowed to gestate quietly in minds: resentment rehearsed, humiliation cherished, superiority justified, pain left unexamined until it demands expression in fire and metal.

Mystical traditions, across languages and religions, have said this for centuries in different ways. There is the lesser war—the one waged with weapons—and there is the greater war, the one waged against the patterns of fear, hatred, and self‑importance that live within us. The tragedy of history is that we devote colossal energy to the first while almost ignoring the the second. We mobilize armies, but rarely mobilize attention. We draft young men, but seldom draft our own thoughts into accountability. We ask nations to disarm while we ourselves remain heavily armed—with judgments, with inherited stories, with unhealed ache.

It is at this point that the religious fanatic enters like a dark priest of the same old drama. He stands close to the language of God and yet far from its heart. Fanaticism is not faith that has gone too far; it is faith that has stopped moving, stopped listening, stopped allowing itself to be corrected by love. It is the moment when a wounded identity mistakes its own fear for revelation and then canonizes that fear in the name of the Divine. “We are pure, they are impure. We are chosen, they are expendable.” Once this verdict is enthroned as holy, almost any cruelty can be enacted without a flicker of doubt. Scripture becomes a mirror in which the ego sees only its own reflection, then kneels before it and calls it God.

In that sense, the fanatic is simply the inner war decided in the wrong direction. Where the mystic lets the fire of God consume her certainties, the fanatic offers up other people instead. Where the mystic discovers that the closer she draws to the Holy, the more porous her heart becomes to all beings, the fanatic becomes narrower, more rigid, more obsessed with borders and belonging. If the mystic stands in a tradition like someone standing by an open window, letting the wind of the unsayable move through, the fanatic boards up the window and guards the frame. He does not protect God; he protects an idea of God that secretly protects him—from ambiguity, from grief, from the humiliation of being wrong.

In the present war, this energy whispers through mosques and parliaments, through newsrooms and living rooms. Each side feels the temptation to ennoble its fear with sacred vocabulary, to turn a regional conflict into a holy confrontation. Apocalyptic phrases begin to circulate; ancient prophecies are dusted off and used as commentary on the evening news. It is an old maneuver: laundering human rage through heaven, so that the call for blood can be felt as obedience rather than as despair. Armageddon becomes not a cautionary symbol but a fantasy of final vindication.

The mystic, standing in the same landscape, hears all this and quietly shifts her weight. Not out of superiority, but out of recognition. She knows this intoxication; she has met it in herself, in smaller forms—the relief of feeling unquestionably right, the secret pleasure of casting someone else as the problem. She knows that “fanatics” are not a separate species. They are the extreme expression of a potential that runs through every wounded heart: the urge to make one’s own pain absolute and then demand that the world bow to it. What we condemn in them, we may find—if we are honest—in subtler shades in ourselves: the way we cling to our narratives, the way we bless our resentments, the way we quietly enjoy having an enemy.

So the presence of religious fanatics in this story is not just another reason to despair. It is also a brutal form of spiritual feedback. They show us what religion becomes when it loses its mystic core and keeps only its slogans, its flags, its weapons. They show us what happens when the language of transcendence is used to avoid transformation instead of undergoing it. And they invite a harder, more uncomfortable question: not “Why are they like this?” but “Where, in me, does this same rigidity live? Where, in me, do I feel secretly comforted by the thought that the Divine is on my side against someone else?”

From here, the essay returns to its deeper current: the sense that what we are living through is a collective dark night of the soul. In the dark night, our familiar consolations are removed. Strategies that once seemed effective—dominate, punish, control—begin to feel tired, their cost too visible, their results too bitter to ignore. The mind keeps reaching for a clean narrative: the guilty, the innocent, the righteous victory. But the soul is being asked to endure something more exacting: a kind of nakedness in which no side can fully claim innocence and no side can be safely dehumanized.

This is not softness. It is a fierce refusal to cooperate with the inner machinery that manufactures enemies. It is to sit in the presence of horror without allowing hatred to claim the final word. To watch the images from Tehran or Tel Aviv or Washington and notice, with ruthless honesty, what awakens in your own body: rage, grief, numbness, a craving for revenge, a wish not to care. These responses are not obstacles to spirituality; they are the very battleground on which the greater war is being fought. Each unexamined reaction is a conscript waiting for orders. Will it march into the familiar trenches of blame, or will it be invited into a different service: to be seen, held, and transmuted?

The deeper spiritual meaning of war is never finally decided by treaties or by the rise and fall of regimes. It is decided, quietly and continuously, by the way hearts respond when confronted with what feels unbearable. Some will harden, mistaking contraction for strength. Some will turn away, mistaking numbness for safety. And some—perhaps only a few, perhaps more than we know—will allow themselves to be broken open in a way that does not close back up. They will discover that compassion is not a mood but a discipline: the discipline of not turning the other into an abstraction, of not using suffering as a reason to hate more.

Spiritually, the question is not “Will this war lead to peace?” History suggests that such hopes are fragile at best. The more intimate question is: “What is this war doing to me?” Is it driving me deeper into separation, or deeper into intimacy with what is real? If I let it, the suffering of others tears the thin veil between “their world” and mine. Their fear is not foreign to me; their losses vibrate the same strings in the human instrument that my own losses touch. This recognition changes nothing and changes everything. It does not stop a single bomb, yet it repositions the soul from spectator to participant in the invisible dimension where the true war is waged.

And what can one person do, standing far from the noise and yet not truly separate from it? Perhaps nothing that will ever be measured on a map. Yet everything, if we measure in another currency. You can become attentive to the smallest movements of aggression in your speech, your thoughts, your silences, and decline to weaponize them. You can refuse to tell stories that make entire peoples faceless, even when such stories are fashionable. You can let grief do its slow, alchemical work in you instead of rushing to anesthetize it with certainty or outrage. You can choose, again and again, to relate to God—or to whatever word you use for the Real—not as an ally against others, but as the inexhaustible presence in which no “other” is outside the circle.

Will that end wars? Perhaps not. This world may remain what it has always been: a place of birth and death, building and collapse, tenderness and terror. But within such a world, a human being can discover an interior that is not at war, that does not need an enemy to know itself. From that interior, every act—every word, every refusal to dehumanize, every quiet prayer that does not take sides—flows into a different river than the one that has carried history this far. If there is any lasting meaning to what we are witnessing now, perhaps it is this: that, once again, we are being asked whether we will live as though we are fundamentally separate, or as though, mysteriously and terribly and beautifully, we belong to one another more than we can bear to admit.