By Matthew Rosenberg, The New York Times – July 20, 2013

http://tinyurl.com/ksyr6r3

KABUL, Afghanistan — President Hamid Karzai on Saturday approved the second of two elections laws, setting the stage for a presidential vote to be held next year.

But the deaths of at least 14 people in bombings offered a bloody reminder of the obstacles Afghanistan faces as the country prepares for what will be its first peaceful transition of power as the United States pulls back.

The United States and its allies, who pay the vast majority of Afghanistan’s bills, have made it clear that they expect the presidential election to be held next year, and would prefer that it take place on time.

The vote is scheduled for April 5, and diplomats have said Afghanistan must hold an “acceptable” election — that is, a vote considered legitimate enough to avoid a political crisis — if it expects to see billions of dollars in aid pledges materialize in the coming years.

Until last week, when Parliament passed the two laws needed to govern the election and the commissions that are to run the vote, there were growing concerns about whether the election would be held on schedule, if at all.

But Mr. Karzai last week signed the law governing the election commissions, the more contentious of the two laws, and on Saturday he signed the one outlining how the vote would be held, according to a statement from the presidential palace.

If the election goes ahead and a new president replaces Mr. Karzai, who has served his constitutional limit of two terms, it would be the first time that Afghanistan has had a peaceful transfer of power.

Its previous governments were overthrown in coups, like the one that toppled the monarchy in 1973.

Yet, even as Afghanistan’s political elite prepared for the election, the Taliban remained a potent force, especially in the insurgents’ traditional strongholds in the southern and eastern parts of the country.

The power of the Taliban to disrupt, and to kill, was on display over the weekend in the southern province of Helmand, where American Marines and British soldiers had spent much of the past few years trying to root out the insurgents.

The foreign troops are ceding the fight to the Afghan Army and police. Both Afghan forces remain very much works in progress, and the Taliban appear to be reasserting themselves in areas that the American-led coalition never cleared fully.

Chief among those areas is the district of Sangin, where five Afghan intelligence agents and a police officer were killed after their vehicle struck a hidden bomb late Friday, Afghan officials said.

There were three other bombings on Friday afternoon and evening in Helmand, and six civilians and two police officers were killed in the attacks, said Omar Zwak, a spokesman for the provincial government.

One of the bombings killed at least three civilians in Marja, the site of a large and widely publicized offensive by American, Afghan and British forces in 2010. In the years since, the former Taliban stronghold has grown markedly more secure.

But American commanders said they believed that the Taliban wanted to re-establish themselves in Marja, seeing it as a chance to score a military and propaganda victory by showing that they could take on the Afghan security forces.

Times of India, Science – July 21, 2013

http://tinyurl.com/lunzxpr

A new study of tribal societies finds warfare is not an innate concept but a recent phenomenon invented by ‘civilised’ societies…

Is it natural for humans to make war? Is organised violence between rival political groups an inevitable outcome of the human condition ? Some scholars believe the answer is yes, but new research suggests not.

A study of tribal societies that live by hunting and foraging has found that war is an alien concept and not, as some academics have suggested, an innate feature of so-called “primitive people”.

The findings have re-opened a bitter academic dispute over whether war is a relatively recent phenomenon invented by “civilised” societies over the past few thousand years, or a much older part of human nature.

In other words, is war an ancient and chronic condition that helped to shape humanity over many hundreds of thousands of years?

The idea is that war is the result of an evolutionary ancient predisposition that humans may have inherited in their genetic makeup as long ago as about 7 million years, when we last shared a common ancestor with chimpanzees – who also wage a kind of war between themselves.

However, two anthropologists believe this is a myth and have now produced evidence to show it. Douglas Fry and Patrik Soderberg of Abo Akademi University in Vasa, Finland, studied 148 violently lethal incidents documented by anthropologists working among 21 mobile bands of huntergatherer societies, which some scholars have suggested as a template for studying how humans lived for more than 99.9 per cent of human history, before the invention of agriculture about 10,000 years ago.

They found that only a tiny minority of violent deaths come close to being defined as acts of war. Most of the violence was perpetrated by one individual against another and usually involved personal grudges involving women or stealing.

About 85 per cent of the deaths involved killers and victims who belonged to the same social group, and about two thirds of all the violent deaths could be attributed to family feuds, disputes over wives, accidents or “legal” executions, the researchers found.

“When we looked at all the violent events about 55 per cent of them involved one person killing another. That’s not war.

“When we looked at group conflicts, the typical pattern was feuds between families and revenge killings, which is not war either,” said Dr Fry. “It has been tempting to use these mobile foraging societies as rough analogies of the past and to ask how old warfare is and whether it is part of human nature. Our study shows that war is obviously not very common,” he said.

Only a tiny minority of cases involved more organised killing between rival bands of people, which could fall into the definition of war-like behaviour. Most of these involved only one of the 21 groups included in the study – the Tiwi people of Australia who seemed to be particularly prone to violent incidents, Dr Fry said.

Rather than finding war ubiquitous , the two researchers found little evidence that hunter-gatherer societies were in a constant state of violent conflict with rival groups. In short they found that some of the most “primitive” peoples on Earth were actually quite peaceful compared to modern, developed nations.

“These findings imply that warfare was probably not very common before the advent of agriculture , when most if not all humans lived as nomadic foragers,” Kirk Endicott, an anthropologist at Dartmouth College told the journal Science, where the study is published.

The findings also question the conclusions of well-respected academics such as Harvard’s Stephen Pinker and University of California’s Jared Diamond, both of whom have recently published best-selling books on the subject of war-like aggression and tribal societies.

King David's palace found, says Israeli team

This undated aerial photo released by the Israel Antiquities Authority shows the archeological site in Khirbet Qeiyafa, west of Jerusalem. A team of Israeli archaeologists say they have discovered a palace used by King David at the site, a historic discovery that was quickly disputed by other members of the country’s archaeological community. (AP Photo/SkyView, HOEP)

MAX J. ROSENTHAL 9 hours ago

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Hilarion – July 21-28, 2013

Beloved Ones,

As you go about your daily activities and perform your earthly duties, know that you are also, on a higher level, serving in a capacity as the divine changemakers. By your high and positive intentions which you set each day, you set the template for the world to follow. As you each read or hear these words, you absorb the energies that are embedded in each word and integrate these into your five body system. These times call for individuals to be adaptable and flexible, to go with the flow of events, both in their personal lives and in the greater world around them and to remain firmly grounded into the earth with peaceful serenity and calm.

Many there are who are now searching for answers to their many questions, some do so quietly, following their innate inner wisdom and others seek outwardly by expressing their viewpoints in a more strident manner. All are reflecting the awakening that is occurring within. All need to be supported and nurtured in these changing times by being encouraged to go beyond their former perceptions to reach beyond previous limitations. They need to achieve their higher potential and reach to the stars. As they question and seek the answers to their many questions, they find even more questions to be answered. Such is the way of expansion and growth within each person.

You have set the standard for excellence by maintaining a higher vision of the world of your future and it now behooves you all to remain steadfast upon your paths. Maintain your focus as you continue to release the remaining remnants of the old paradigm thinking and perception from your cells and five body system. Set a strong image of yourselves as divine beings of Light, love and power. See yourselves in your Light bodies, feel yourselves as your Light bodies each day, if only for a few moments. As you do this, you begin to remember that you are, indeed, Light and this will empower and encourage you in a myriad of ways that bless you, your loved ones, and the greater world around you.

Hold the thought that your body is a temple of the living Light and that you are now returning it to the pristine purity of its divine origin. You are the ambassadors upon this planet to show the way by example. We realize that this can seem to be a dichotomy as the purging from within you continues as you set your intentions for the higher visions and versions of yourselves but we ask you to persist in your efforts. Forgive yourselves of all the emotional eruptions that seem to come out of nowhere and seem to make your intentions, beliefs and efforts a silly fantasy. Realize that it is merely the workings of awakening that are occurring and that it is temporary and cyclical in nature.

As your dormant DNA/RNA/LNA strands continue to be activated, you will continue to experience temporary side effects in ways that affect each of you differently. Be patient and loving with yourselves and in your relations with others. Exercise self restraint as you go through your changes and transformations when possible, and we fully realize and understand, that sometimes, it is just not possible, for metamorphosis is a powerful process and must be outwardly expressed at times. Try to return to your center as soon as you can after such an episode and forgive yourselves your seeming lapses in behavior, growth and improvement. It is only the releasing of the patterns of the old world paradigm that are at work. It is all ultimately benevolent for you and your world.

Until next week…

I AM Hilarion

©2013 Marlene Swetlishoff/Tsu-tana (Soo-tam-ah) Keeper of the Symphonies of Grace

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Our Spiritual Destination

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A magnificent coming-together of the human family has commenced

07/21/2013 by John Smallman

The long-expected and hoped-for moment of once more becoming fully conscious beings, at one with each other and God – and fully aware of this – draws ever closer, as more of you choose to join the collective intent to awaken. It can happen instantly when the Love field enveloping and uniting you all is fully acknowledged. Despite all the attention being paid to the illusion and its problems, there is growing awareness that a sea change in perception is essential if you are to leave behind the old ways of judgment, retribution, and conflict so that you can live in harmony with one another, regardless of race, color, or religious or political persuasion, and that awareness is what is driving you forwards so effectively on your path to awakening.

The Oneness of God is wondrously stimulating and utterly amazing. It can only be experienced. Attempting to describe It in words or images, in fact, in any manner at all, as so many of your mystics and enlightened ones have told you, is beyond impossible. However, those who have experienced It have managed to convey to those who are willing to listen that It is an experience that surpasses all joy, exhilaration, and understanding, It just IS! And all are enveloped within It, even if they choose to remain unaware – to be unaware is a choice that humanity made. Now you are in the process of changing your minds and allowing yourselves to open up to the infinite wonder of God’s eternal Love for you. Nothing you can think, say, or do could remotely compensate for what you lost when you chose to become unaware, which is why you can never find true satisfaction within your illusory environment. You have to wake up. And you will!

Consciousness, God, is a massive, a vast, an infinite field of loving and accepting Awareness, in which all that is, every part of consciousness from the infinitesimal smallest to the infinitely largest, exists eternally in perfect bliss-filled harmony. Within that field are a few small pockets, bubbles, or enclosures, in which an aspect of consciousness has chosen, very temporarily, to play a game of being unaware of its oneness and to pretend to be separate, individual. Humans on Earth are presently experiencing life in one such illusory enclave, but the unawareness that they chose to experience is wearing off as they move towards their moment of awakening. To be unaware – as humanity most definitely has been – is a most unnatural state of being which can only last for a moment, rather like the soap bubbles that children blow and which burst almost as soon as they have formed, releasing the air trapped within them back into the surrounding atmosphere.

The “bubble” of unawareness in which you presently seem to be enclosed and cut off from Reality has no option but to burst when the moist film enclosing it dries and shrinks in the surrounding air. Then the unawareness enclosed within it will just dissipate as it is subsumed fully and lovingly into the field of divine Awareness from which it had tried to hide. Unawareness does not exist, cannot exist. It would be like a state of intense darkness, a dark hole, where there is no shade or shadow to cause it, in a place fully lit by the midday sun.

Unawareness is an imaginary state of unknowing which humanity built so that it could justify the many unconscionable and unloving activities in which it has been engaged over the eons. If you had allowed yourselves to remain fully aware you could never have become embroiled in judgment of one another, leading to intense disagreement, fear, hatred, conflict, and endless war. As your unawareness fades and then disintegrates you begin to recognize the insanity of so many of your activities and planned future activities, and so you take steps to put an end to them. Now many of you are making the determined intention to cease using violence against another, whatever the circumstances, and the results of those individual loving intents is a growing field of energy that is effectively swamping, drowning, and then transforming any energies that are not in alignment with it.

Distrust is an energy of fear to which many of you have clung in desperation as you observed or took part in the conflicts that seemed to be almost constantly ongoing all around you. Now the divine field of Love that envelops the Earth is dissolving all fear and hatred, as the energy that supported them becomes transformed by humanity’s collective choice to awaken from the nightmare inferno of distrust and conflict which has so disastrously confined each of you in the fires of your own bitterness and confusion for far too long.

Trust occurs when people stop mistrusting and cease erecting the defenses that mistrust demands. That is now happening all across the world in an unprecedented expansion of awareness that that is the only way out of the wars and conflicts that have plagued you since before the dawn of recorded history. You have realized that there has to be a better way, and that there isa better way, and you are now engaging with it in increasing numbers. And that way is by respecting and honoring one another no matter how diverse may be the cultures, ethnicities, religions, and political persuasions which have been used for so long as a means to divide you and set you against each other. Those days are over.

A magnificent coming-together of the human family has commenced. It is like a massive family reunion, a get-together to celebrate a wedding or a birth. And just as in such a celebration, the newly-weds honor each other in their vows, or the parents honor and welcome their new child, all present now make a new and loving start, saluting all the family members, and agreeing to release and forgive old scores that had festered instead of being settled. After the celebration a great lightening of the collective energy field can most definitely be felt by all present.

Open yourselves now to feel that energetic shift, that transformation that is encouraging you to embrace others instead of distrusting and avoiding them. All are one – you know that. You can no longer deny it by pretending to be separated by race, religion, class distinction, gender, or supposed value to society. Open up by honoring self and others, and by graciously accepting the recognition offered to you, and feel the divine energy field embracing you as you do so.

With so very much love, Saul.