Goodness in Adversity

The Challenge for Goodness to Prevail in midst of Unprecedented Adversity

A White Paper by Klaus with Gundi Heinemann
4/14/2022; last updated on 5/5/2023.

The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything, save our modes of thinking, and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.

This quote by Albert Einstein was the cornerstone of a Palo Alto, CA, based movement in which Gundi and I participated some 40 years ago. “War is obsolete as means to resolve conflict” was our motto. Mankind has no choice but to embark on a paradigmatic shift into an evolutionary era of “Beyond War.” This means nothing less than growth in consciousness is required that honors all human beings — and even beyond that, ALL THAT IS — as divine.  

All great world religions include the “Golden Rule” of treating our fellow human being with the same respect and dignity with which we ourselves wish to be treated as a basic tenet.

We stood for the principle that the time had come when war had become obsolete as means to resolve conflicts. Several hundred, perhaps a thousand, of us were so deeply motivated about the significance of this motto that it became a powerful driving force in the world. We would present it to whoever would listen: friends, neighbors, school and college classes. We presented the message in our own living rooms and, by sponsoring renowned speakers, to large audiences, at conferences, on international platforms, even in “space bridges” (live interacting events on different continents,with at the time pioneering technology).

One of the most impressive audio-visuals we used for our presentations was the “dropping of BBs.” We came with a coffee can full of little (3/16“-size) lead balls, such as are used as “ammunition” in BB guns. Each BB represented one of the nuclear warheads that had been accumulated in the arsenals of the superpowers. In our presentations, we would pour these, slowly and steadily, into a big, thin-metal cooking pot, or even a metal garbage can. The experience of hearing the sound of these BBs for about a couple of minutes was profound. Imagining that each one of them represented the explosion of one of the thermonuclear warheads that could be unleashed in an all-out nuclear war — each one of them with an explosive power multiple times greater than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki — was unnerving. The time it took to drop thousands of BBs seemed endless. No words can describe the experience. It went under the skin. The silence that followed was incredibly powerful. Any listener with a heart would get the message.

We even instituted a prestigious prize, the “Beyond War Award,” which was given annually to the individual or organization that we found had most effectively contributed to establishing a world in which war was considered obsolete. This series of Beyond War awards culminated with the Award given 1988 jointly to Presidents Ronald Regan and Mikhail Gorbachev. At the time, this award was met with significant criticism. Even among members of our own organization it was argued that the Soviet Union, of which Gorbachev had just become the head of state, was the arch-evil country on our planet and not worthy of such recognition.

But there were also those among the critics of the award given to Reagan and Gorbachev who saw the problem on the other side, arguing that President Reagan’s fervent pursuit of the arms race was everything but worthy of this peace-oriented award.

As if it were just yesterday, I remember when Gundi and I dared to present the Beyond War ideals to our friends in Germany. We came with an elaborate slide presentation. It showed the beautiful side of the world and portrayed that this is how the world could become at large, for the sake of our children and their children, if we would truly move “beyond war.” To achieve this, we would have to direct the huge amounts of money and resources now spent for military purposes to humanitarian efforts. But, instead of even listening, save understanding our message, quite of few of our audience confronted us with remarks like, “How can you, the Americans, who bring us the Pershing weapons which we Germans want no part of, give such an honor to the belligerent President of the United States?”

In spite of this sort of criticism, many Beyond War chapters were founded all over the world, including in Germany, and within about a year the world experienced the fall of the Iron Curtain and the dissolution of the “evil empire.” Of course, there were many factors that contributed to this outcome, but the “Beyond War” movement was, unquestionably, one of them. The world had heard Einstein’s warning:

The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything, save our modes of thinking, and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.

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Fast-forward about three decades. We are at the eve of 2020 and look back over 30 years of — essentially — world peace. Of course, there had been war-type atrocities — lots of them, far too many. But, by and large, the world had learned to trade with goods, for money that was understood as beneficial for both sides concerned, instead of detonating thermo-nuclear weapons onto each other. The deployment of nuclear warheads was not even mentioned as an option when disagreements between nations arose. We were about to finish a decade in which it had become clear to just about every educated world citizen that we are on a path of world-wide environmental disaster. The imperative, “we must reduce our carbon footprint,” had become a household phrase.

And then we heard about a virus that was coming from China. It would soon become, effectively, nothing less than World War III. The enemy of that war was not a foreign nation, nor a rogue ruler, but a virus, a microbe so small that it takes an electron microscope to see it. The weapon with which that war was fought was not much bigger — it was a few milligrams of a vaccine injected into people’s arms. The war propaganda was not a demonstration of the futility of physically killing the enemy with powerful explosives, but it was making people understand that, without this vaccine, the enemy would have the potential to inflict lethal harm to hundreds of millions.

Forward another two years. By the end of 2021, when this “WW III” seemed to have been essentially conquered, the most unexpected scenario of, once again, a real world-wide conflict emerged. It started with amassing of troops and armament around a peaceful European country by their neighbor. The scene started as being so bizarre that, at first, only few would assign any importance to what was happening along the Ukrainian-Russian border. After all, there were all kinds of treaties between these two countries, and no “belligerent” scenario appeared to make any sense. That assumption was shattered on February 24th, 2022, when the Russian government opened the flood gates for these troops and heavy armament to invade Ukraine, and started senseless killing and destruction, with atrocities that exceeded everything the world had experienced since WW II. The rest is history.

Of that “history,” the most important aspect of Putin’s war against humanity is not the territorial aspect of it. It is not the senseless destruction of hundreds of billions of dollars worth of home bases and infrastructure, not the irreplaceable historical treasures that are gone. It is not even the tragic loss of one, or ten, or a hundred, or a thousand, or ten thousand children and their parents and grandparents who got murdered; not the women who were raped by savage Russian soldiers in front of the eyes of their children. It is not the millions of refugees flooding into neighboring countries, not the hospitals that were deliberately targeted by the Russian aggressors, not the intended targeting for mass killings of thousands of civilians …. it is the fact that resorting to nuclear warfare has been threatened in this conflict. One side, Putin’s side, has held the entire human civilization hostage over the use nuclear warfare. Putin blackmailed those who would side with his enemy, Ukraine, with resorting to nuclear weapons if they would step over an imaginary red line in their support for Ukraine’s military response.

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What is happening? Three world-wide threats have been presented to us in rapid succession: the climate threat, the coronavirus, and the “Sword of Damocles” of thermo-nuclear war hanging above us. None of these were foreseeable when, just 30 years ago, we were confronted with the criticism over presenting the Beyond War Award to President Reagan.

Looking at these developments holistically, in the big picture, we can rank them in importance. Without spending many pages on building the case, I am simply stating my understanding that among the three, the climate threat is the biggest. And not only that, I see a causal relationship between the three. The calamity of impending climate change gave rise to the other two — the pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war — to occur. We, the citizens of this fragile world, did not heed the danger brewing around climate change. As a consequence, consciousness in the invisible world, eager to get us “back on course,” has hoped that by staging the other two, the pandemic and now the threat of nuclear war, to induce us to come to our senses and come back to cooperate, as human race, in averting the impending climate disaster.

These are big words. We point to our book “Phenomena: Code of the Grand Original Design” for an explanation why we believe that there is a plan underlying the entire [human and] planetary experience. This plan has the purpose — and possibility — to evolve ever-increasing consciousness. The Grand Original Design that devised this plan has the power to communicate to us via subtle energies in form of phenomena, which we humans can perceive when we are open and willing. By cosmic design, rejection of the meaning behind phenomena is without apparent immediate repercussions, i.e., it is within the privilege of free will which is extended to us, and which is a vital part of “creating” consciousness. We have not listened to their subtle hints, and in sheer desperation to make us “listen,” “They” are resorting to “sledge hammer” tactics to make us aware of what we must do.

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So, what do we need to do now? Is all the consciousness that mankind “created” thirty-some years ago around the concept that all conflicts can and must be resolved with peaceful means down the drain? What must our response to the unjust, atrocious, genocidal attack by Russia’s military forces on the Ukraine be? Do we just let it happen and — standing by and, at worst, doing nothing or, at best, doing some lip-service of help — risk that the brutal regime of Putin follows into Adolf Hitler’s or Joseph Stalin’s footsteps? Even worse, do we let one single dictator continue to blackmail the rest of the world with nuclear war? Or do we need to give up our idealistic attitude to categorically oppose all war, when picking up arms — i.e., supplying the “justified” side of the warring parties with potent weapons — appears to clearly be the better of two deplorable alternatives?

We will not know the ultimately rightful answer to this life-threatening dilemma. But we must do what our inner wisdom tells us. And to get closer to understanding what that is, we go back another ten to fifteen years prior to the years when we dropped the BBs in our educational “Beyond War” effort. The idea behind dropping the BBs had not come out of nowhere. Instead, it was the spiritually logical conclusion from a decades long study of the teachings of none other than Jesus of Nazareth. This teaching includes that we not only have the right, but actually the responsibility, to live as response-able citizens in this world. Jesus taught to love with all our soul, mind, heart, and strength. This unquestionably includes to call a spade a spade when the circumstances determine that it is a spade.

That is the teaching of truth. We must not shy away from responding to the truth, even when it is uncomfortable. Jesus himself acted with anger — rightful anger — when he saw the truth about what was done in the Temple, in the symbolic House of God, in the face of Goodness. He understood that uneducated misbehavior can only be responded to with vigorous physical corrective action. Letting the unruly traders continue their undignified activities in the Temple was not an option.

Similarly, letting Vladimir Putin continue to wreck our world unchecked with his brutal war, thus potentially destroying this “house of God” — our world — cannot be an option for us today. It would not be a responsible position for us to take. Most certainly it would not be an option when pro domo thinking is lingering in the back of our minds. This would be the case when we hold back from giving the best of our weapons because we argue we might “need them ourselves.” Or, when it comes to “weapons of economic sanctions,” we hold back, thinking it might end up being disadvantageous to ourselves, such that our own comfort and economy would be disrupted by shortages of oil and gas and concomitant rising prices.

Sometimes we have to sacrifice for the greater good to emerge. Sometimes, our concept of “beauty” must be revised, for the beauty of the greater good to be preserved. The teaching of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, which our spiritual teachers Harry and Emilia Rathbun communicated (see Being the Change) in the years prior to the emergence of the Beyond War movement, cannot be separated from the desire to resolve conflict without violence. Goodness — i.e., the Grand Original Design — has given us the intellect, with which we can and must make the decisions which will preserve the basis for future generations to evolve the very consciousness which created us in the first place.

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We are jeopardizing the continuance of that Grand Original Design, as it pertains to this Earth. Only when we understand this profound connection, we will move from the symbol of the sunset, which we chose for the photo at the beginning of this White Paper, to the rainbow, the divine symbol of hope. We have no other choice. In midst of all adversity we find ourselves in, we must choose Goodness, even if it appears everything but “good” in the moment.

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We point to our books “Expanding Perception” and “Phenomena: Code of the Grand Original Design” for much more on this subject.

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