This is the transcript of an event I attended earlier this year where Anne Baring issued a proclamation to demand the cessation of war.
Anne Baring, Ph.D, is a Jungian Analyst, author & co-author of seven books including The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image and The Dream of the Cosmos. Her work is grounded in the spiritual traditions of different cultures & the psychological causes of human suffering.
The following words are Anne’s words:
Women are one-half of humanity, yet our voice is not heard in relation to war. We see, every day, how war is destroying human life and the precious life of the planet. This must stop.
Most of us don’t experience the full horror of war. But those who are ordered to fight and kill, if they survive, are condemned to suffering for the rest of their lives from the atrocities they have witnessed, and injuries sustained.
The families of those who have been sacrificed live in grief forever. Mothers and grandmothers never recover from the loss of their beloved sons and grandsons, the rape of their daughters and granddaughters. Bitterness, hatred, fear, and trauma pass from generation to generation. Trauma does not vanish with time but is held in the collective psyche of humanity. That is why ALL war must stop.
This is a key moment in our evolution. The choices we make now will determine our future – and whether there is a future.
There is only one power in the world that can eliminate war. That power is Women in service to Love. So, we proclaim:
We, the Mothers and Grandmothers of the world, demand that War Stop NOW!
We delve into the greatest challenge that humanity is facing right now, and that is: how do we stop war? It’s something that has been considered since time immemorial, mostly unsuccessfully. But today, we’re going to turn to the subject once again and hear from those who are calling for mothers and grandmothers around the world to come together and demand an immediate cessation of war.
Such a call could not be more important, and I want to draw our collective attention as we set the context for the discussion today to an announcement made at the Kiev Forum … Victoria Newlin, the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs and in charge of US policies around the war in Ukraine, spoke via video from Washington to the assembled guests in Kiev. She announced that the United States had been working with the Kiev government, the Ukrainian government, for over 6 months now on a plan for a counteroffensive. This counteroffensive is set to start in late June or early July to coincide with the NATO Summit in Lithuania on July 11th.
I think we ought to pause and take this in. It’s the first time that an official of the United States has spoken officially and explicitly that the United States is now actively engaged with Ukraine in the war. So, it’s no longer the case of the Ukrainians receiving just logistical support from the United States. The United States is now on the ground with Ukrainians, preparing for a counteroffensive that will surely have an impact along the 1500 km border between Ukraine and Russia.
We need to come to a realization that there’s no doubt how this is going to turn out. The United States has the most massive military ever assembled in the history of the world. It’s the most lethal, most potent military apparatus known to humankind. It’s also worth noting that in the 240 years since the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the United States has been in perpetual war, with the exception of about 15 years in the early 19th century. The United States’ history is marked not only by war but also by destabilizations and interruptions of elections all around the world. Since Vietnam in the 1960s, the United States is estimated to be responsible for between 30-30 million people killed and displaced. When comparing the damage done by the Nazis and the Bolsheviks in the 20th century, Hitler was responsible for about 17 million deaths, whereas the United States has wreaked havoc through its military and political subterfuge at a level achieved in a very infamous way by both the Nazis and the Bolsheviks.
I want to probe more deeply, so we can grasp the gravity of what’s going to take place as a result of this counteroffensive. It is believed that they will use nuclear weapons to defend what they’ve taken in Ukraine. Vladimir Putin, the Russian Duma, and the Russian generals have all stated that nuclear war is an inevitable outcome. They consider the …… of Ukraine by the United States and NATO to be an existential threat, which they have been warning about since 2008. We’re heading into an acute and dangerous moment because it is inevitable that this coordinated counteroffensive in Ukraine is going to have elements of shock and awe. If we remember what happened in Iraq, the Russian forces will be involved, and nuclear war will become an escalating option.
When we talk about war, this is not hypothetical. It’s not something that’s happening in a far-off Middle East or in Africa where the consequences are limited. It is globally consequential. We are now caught up in an escalating war between the superpowers—the United States and Russia. At the same time, the United States is escalating war preparations against China, with predictions by US generals that there will be war with China by 2025.
I will begin with a quote from Matthew Fox in his book Original Blessing: ‘The Divine and the Demonic are very close together, only a thin line separates them. We who are capable of divinity are also capable of the demonic, and the deepest of all demonic activity is the use of our divine imagination.’ Who has been glorified for millennia on the walls of Egyptian temples and Assyrian palaces? Pharaohs and kings with their maces raised to strike, stand over rows of doomed men. War is an ancient sacrificial ritual waged by warrior leaders intent on conquest and victory. War is a rape of the soul. War is a collective psychosis where fear and hatred replace civilized behavior. Then, I’m not naturally cruel but regress into barbarism when the destruction of the enemy is the overriding aim.
War devastates the lives, homes, and livelihoods of millions. It traumatizes children and veterans for the rest of their lives. It destroys the infrastructure of a community built up over centuries. Hypersonic and ballistic missiles reduce cities to blackened skeletons. The fields on which people depend for food and the works of art that are the treasure of a nation’s creative life are destroyed. We have recently witnessed this pattern of destruction in Syria, and now we see it in Ukraine, where 8 million people, mainly women and children, have taken refuge in other countries.
In every society from time immemorial, mothers have cared for the young and the old, prepared food to nourish them. War is anathema to them because war destroys the precious life that they have brought into being. The life of sons and daughters whom they have loved and helped to grow from infancy to adulthood. It may leave some widowed and destitute, with their sons murdered and their daughters enslaved, like the tragic Yazidi women, or confined to their homes like the mute women of Afghanistan.
In his great play, The Trojan Women, Euripides describes the face of women in war. We feel and dread the agony as her young son is torn from her and flung to his death from the walls of Troy. She herself, with other Trojan women, was destined for slavery. Women have been the helpless victims of a pattern endlessly repeated over four millennia, where rape has been used as a weapon of war. Rape is as old as war, but we need to recognize the horrific reality of what women have lived through and are living through. In Sudan, for example, today. Although rape was defined as an international war crime in 1919, no individual or country has been convicted by the International Criminal Court.
We may wonder why, according to the latest US assessment, more than 220,000 Russian troops and mercenaries have been killed or injured in Ukraine, and an unknown number of Ukrainian men, women, and children have been raped and murdered, children abducted and held captive in Russia. When will the mothers of both countries come together to end this slaughter and the hatred, fear, and trauma generated by war? When will other mothers all over the planet join them?
We are living in a time of great danger. Danger from the deliberate or accidental release of nuclear weapons that can wipe out the lives of millions and the planet. How much longer will it take us to realize that if we are to survive as a species, we will have to put an end to war? Separations for war and engagement in them devour trillions of dollars that could be better spent feeding the hungry or on education and healthcare.
You can find the statistics for military expenditure on the database of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. America … is by far the biggest spender on weapons, taking up 39% of the world’s expenditure in 2022. We have been conditioned to accept the idea that weapons of mass destruction will protect us. We do not see how evil infiltrates the creation of these weapons because they are designed to extinguish life on a massive scale. Evil can be defined as the willingness to inflict terror, pain, humiliation, torture, or death on other human beings.
We do not see, as Albert Schweitzer did when he received the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1954, that we have lost our humanity. We can see this nightmare scenario active in the United States, North Korea, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Israel, all of whom are competing for power and dominance regardless of the cost in human suffering.
The mythic inflation of leaders is the same today as it was in older civilizations. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have used war to impose their beliefs, killing millions by the sword in the name of their God. One of the main reasons for the continued existence of war is that the image of God in these religions has been male, and men have drawn support and power from this fact. The missing divine feminine aspect of the godhead was deliberately excluded in these religions. The silencing of woman’s voice and the destruction of the temples of the goddess in which she served as priestess was part of this process.
The loss of the divine feminine, held in the image of the goddess once worshiped as divine wisdom and the Holy Spirit, led ultimately to nature being split off or dissociated from spirit and to the multiple polarizations and conflicts of our world. The great web of life, of which nature was the living expression, was no longer experienced as sacred. Only the indigenous people have remembered that all life is sacred. It is sacred because spirit is present in every atom of material reality. To kill men and women who are our brothers and sisters is to break the law of life and to injure the body of God. To rape and murder women is to desecrate the embodiment of the divine feminine.
The destruction of the life of other human beings and, in a wider sense, the life of the planet and the species that sustains it becomes easier to enact when we no longer realize that we’re living within a sacred order. And when the power-driven values that Jesus named “Caesar” or the ruler of the world prevail over the higher values he was trying to establish, values which, if practiced, could put an immediate end to war because we’re all connected at the deepest level.
War inflicts a terrible wound on the collective soul of humanity, a wound that can never heal because of the deep imprints left behind in our species memory. Not only are we living with the living, but also with those who carry these traumas with them when they die and even when they reincarnate. These traumas remain embedded for centuries in the collective soul of humanity. Bitterness, hatred, fear, and trauma are transmitted from generation to generation. Russia and Ukraine, for different reasons, are two of the most traumatized nations on the planet.
Unacknowledged trauma causes us to repeat the pattern of war because they have given us a false image of reality. I need to mention here the doctrines of scientific materialism or scientists that we are the only conscious beings in a dead, insentient universe that came into being by chance. Meaning, this belief system has separated us from nature and dispensed with God, the soul, and our survival beyond death. It claims that consciousness arises from the neurons of the brain and has instilled in us the belief that the planet is ours to dominate and exploit for exclusive benefit.
This ideology has infiltrated science, politics, academia, medicine, and psychology. Ignorant of the fact that the universe is conscious, intelligent, and full of beings who are aware of what is happening on this planet, we have blindly accepted these inadequate beliefs and the unconscious behavior that they give rise to because our situation is so fraught with danger.
I have decided to publish some of the messages that came from Jesus and were sent to Francis during her life. There was no way that she could speak publicly about them, but I will share some of them with you now. They have directed my own life and my work, and they will shortly be published under my name with the title “Messages from a Transcendent Dimension.” This is how they began:
One winter afternoon in New York, in February 1943, at the height of the Second World War, my American mother, sister, sister-in-law, and a close friend met to talk about the life and death struggle that was tearing Europe apart. Suddenly, although the windows of the apartment were closed because of the cold, they heard a roar like thunder, and the glass door onto the terrace was blown inwards by a powerful blast of air. Lightning flashed all around them, although there was no storm. They cried out in terror and went to shut the door, but suddenly felt a tremendous presence in the room. Overcome with awe, they heard a voice which told them to write down what they heard.
The voice said, “Be sure of my spirit as I am of being the wine and the bread of the one who is above the fire and the light.” And foremost, it warned of a future catastrophe for the Earth and humanity if things did not change. It said that this warning should be shared with anyone willing to listen. If enough people could become aware of the danger and respond to the guidance from another dimension of reality, the full force of the catastrophe could be mitigated or even averted.
My mother asked what they could do to help the world, and the answer came in writing: “Follow your heart.” And the answer emphasized that the despair of the Son of Man should not be confined to the walls of a church. “Your church is your immortal soul.” My mother and her friend continued to meet for some 25 years to receive further messages, and here are some extracts from them:
“Man is on the threshold of his greatest trials since the day of my coming. This is the time when my teaching has to be fully understood. Humanity has lived for 2,000 years in the state of adolescence. Now it must become adult or sink into general criminality that will bring chaos, confusion, and finally destruction. If humanity chooses adulthood and responsibility to life, it will have the millennium of peace and happiness, and Earth will join the circle of planets which have already completed their evolution.
“All the great prophets have been heralding this moment, which is truly the moment of judgment of which I spoke to my disciples at the beginning of this cycle. Verily, I say unto you, receive my blessings, receive my dove, because now unity has to become the law of the Earth. And those who respect and make it their own will enter with me the kingdom of heaven. The others will be thrown to the bottom of the evolutionary ladder and will have to start again from the animal kingdom. There is no place for half-men or sleeping men anymore. Either you are an awakened man or you are no man at all.
“There will be crisis after crisis that will completely upset the human mind and split the frame of civilization. The wanton thirst to kill will be aroused more and more for no logical reason. Blood is being shed, and more will follow. Pray that you be given the strength to resist the madness that will be the fourth horseman of these times. You need to become as wise as serpents and as gentle as doves, not to shed your brother’s blood in cruel wars.
“In the house of God, be built on its true foundations. Until this moment comes … Caesar, I’m just the user. The power that is God’s, because those who ought to have chosen God chose Caesar, and you see the results today. There will be greater and more terrible discoveries than the splitting of the atom. More devastating weapons are being worked upon in secret. Weapons so powerful that they can reverse the laws of nature. Already, you see the results around you. A man’s presumption endeavor to use the elements of matter not for beneficial purposes, but to destroy life. Destructive energy emanates from places where scientists are working to develop new weapons. This energy affects human bodies and human minds, creating effects which are the equivalent on the human plane of what the splitting of atoms is on the cosmic plane.
“There’s a danger of collective insanity if you mix the waters of knowledge with the thought of destruction. Destruction will come. The control of nature, now nearly acquired, can be used for love and blessing or for maladiction and hate. The age of Aquarius is the age of hydrogen, where hydrogen may mean the destruction of this planet or its transformation into the true Elysium. It would be better for those of this generation never to have been born than, having been born, not to become fully awakened to the moral responsibility of this dangerous yet promise-fulfilling age.
“Do not offend nature. Do not offend God by tampering with the doors of nature, trying to bend them to your destructive purposes. Every act of a human being must be judged according to the rule: does it defend nature? Does it offend God? Does it injure life? Man has progressed in his intelligence and his mastery of scientific discoveries, but his wisdom and love have not progressed to the same extent. He is like the laborer who knew how to sow but who has forgotten to put in the living seed. So that when harvest comes, his field’s a barren, and he suffers the pains of hunger. Today, man is truly hungry for what he lost since the words of my apostles died in the rituals of indifference and the greed of those who used my church to serve Caesar instead of God. The result is the destruction and suffering you are witnessing today.
“The Divine Mother is the Holy Spirit who presides over the new age. Inspired by her, women, through their love and understanding, have been given the task of awakening in men the compassion and devotion to life taught by me at the beginning of the Piscean Age. Man, through woman, will realize in himself the sense of his mission on Earth and see clearly, as in a mirror, the law of the universe. When that time comes, the secrets of nature will be understood.
“My death and resurrection were meant to help man realize his lasting power to survive death and achieve his salvation through devotion to his fellow men. It is necessary for man to know that there is no death of the soul. That your intelligence has given you power over nature, scientific knowledge must be raised to the level of this realization. Blessed are those who see behind and beyond the veils of sacredness to the divine unity of life.
“And finally, do not despair over your lack of achievement. It only needs a few years, days, or hours of complete realization and service in one incarnation to make worthwhile the eternal sparrow and your arduous way back to the heavenly spheres.
“Then I remember that some years ago, at a conference in Vancouver, His Holiness the Dalai Lama spoke for decades about the imperative need for peace. He said that the world would be saved by Western women, as they are one half of humanity and hold the balance at this crucial time of choice. The power of millions of women coming together with enlightenment to protect the sacred planet could not only eliminate war but allow us to write a new story—a story of how we changed our pattern of behavior from one of rivalry and the struggle for power to one of relationship, love, and care for each other and for the precious life of our planetary home.”
