Diary Essay - The War Within and Without — Phases of Karmic Cleansing

 Sometimes I think that every war begins inside a human being, long before it erupts on the map of the world.
There, where the unconscious collides with morality, where the shadow has not been integrated but rejected — there lies the first impulse of violence. The outer conflict is only an expression of the inner rupture, translated into collective language. Psychoanalysis would call it projection — the unconscious tendency to externalize what one cannot bear within. The spiritual view would call it karma.

When the inner reality is divided, the world divides with it.
And when the world explodes — it is a sign that countless inner wars have reached critical mass, that the personal and ancestral unconscious have merged into a shared frequency and are demanding liberation. There is no external war that is not a mirror of our inner incapacity for consciousness.

In spiritual terms, karma is not punishment, but a dynamic of consciousness, a law for restoring balance. Every action — thought, emotion, choice — leaves a trace that longs to be reconciled. Thus are born the cycles of experience — personal, ancestral, collective. But these cycles are not simultaneous; they have an order, like concentric circles expanding outward.
First the personal, then the ancestral, then the collective, and only then — the continental, the global field of destiny.

If this order is disturbed, disarray follows.
If collective cleansing begins before the personal is complete, the energy becomes chaotic. Then societies begin to manifest external conflicts that in truth belong to the unfinished inner work of individuals. The unconscious of many merges into a single archetype — and that archetype materializes as history.

Perhaps this is what we are living through now — an epoch of overlapping karmic processes, in which the personal has not yet been purified, the ancestral is only beginning to unravel, and the collective is already in turmoil. The world is cleansing on several levels at once, and that is why at times everything feels impossible — too much pain for one moment in time.

Psychoanalytically, it resembles a crisis of integration — a moment when the ego is trying to assimilate too much content at once. The unconscious erupts because the defenses can no longer hold.
Spiritually, this is the moment before dawn, when darkness thickens not because the light is absent, but because it is near. The closer the transition to a new consciousness, the stronger the resistance of the old.

Boundaries — whether internal or geopolitical — preserve the structure from collapse, but also prevent its growth.
They are like a membrane of consciousness that must break at the right moment. Too early — and the being dies; too late — and it petrifies. That is why wars, even in their most destructive aspect, are often symptoms of a passage — painful, chaotic, but directed toward the release of energy that can no longer be contained.

Yet transition has its laws.
We cannot heal nations before we have healed ourselves.
We cannot speak of peace between states while inside us the unconscious and the conscious, love and fear, power and surrender are still at war. The wars between nations are only outer versions of the inner dialogue we refuse to hold.

The human unconscious is deeply ancestral. Within every psyche live the shadows of forebears — their traumas, desires, unspoken prayers.
If these shadows are not illuminated, they seek release through repetition.
Thus are born cycles of suffering that psychoanalysis calls the compulsion to repeat, and spirituality — the karmic spiral.
The same story reenacts itself in different bodies, in different centuries, until someone recognizes it — not as fate, but as a task.

That recognition is the act of breaking the karmic cycle.
In it, the individual ceases to identify with the conflict — to be one of its sides — and begins to observe it from the standpoint of consciousness, which embraces both. Then comes not reconciliation, but transcendence — rising above duality.
Psychoanalytically, this is the integration of the shadow; spiritually — the surrender of the ego.

Perhaps this is what we mean by “leaving the karmic cycle.” Not through action, not through moral compensation, but through inner realization: the understanding that no conflict can be resolved at the level where it was created. That war ends not when one side wins, but when the field that gave rise to it dissolves into a higher awareness.

In this sense, true peace is an event of consciousness, not of politics.
And though political processes may mirror it, they do not generate it.
Peace begins in the body — in the breath, in the pause between thoughts, in that brief instant when we stop defending our own rightness and simply allow Being to be.

Sometimes I imagine the world as a multilayered being, cleansing itself layer by layer.
First — the personal pain, then — the ancestral, then — the pain of nations, and finally — the pain of the Earth itself, which carries within it the imprint of all human dreams and fears.
If one layer is skipped, the next cannot hold.
And so the universe returns us to what we have left unfinished.

Wars between nations are, perhaps, the global therapy of humanity’s unconscious.
Cruel, yes. Painful, yes. But in their deeper sense — attempts at integration. For the collective shadow does not disappear if we suppress it. It turns into history, until it turns into understanding.

And so, when we feel that “there is no hope,” that the world is fragmented and pain unbearable — perhaps it is precisely then that we stand at the threshold of the next phase of cleansing.
It is coldest before sunrise. It is hardest before liberation.
Old structures contract around themselves because they sense their end — and this contraction we experience as fear, as resistance, as the gravity of the past.

But if we endure — not through violence, but through awareness, through presence, through silence — then everything begins to rearrange itself.
Wars fade not because everyone has forgiven, but because the vibration of the world has changed.
Then a new epoch arrives — not of forgetting, but of conscious remembrance, in which pain is no longer transmitted, but transformed into light.

Perhaps this is the ultimate purpose of all karmic processes — not atonement, but the transmutation of suffering into knowledge, of division into consciousness.
And when that happens — in one person, in one lineage, in one nation — then the true healing of the world begins.