How do people in wars not rapidly evolve?

[Miss Hepburn]

Post 18

Originally Posted by Altair

''War'' is basically all around us.

Your points were eye opening...yes, it seems everything is at a type of war ---
you left out the battle underground in beautiful jungles and forests ---the roots
are all battling!!

Wars tend to happen because governments or leaders manipulate us to demonize others. Without this interference most could welcome having a beer with others…..

[Starman]

Altair, your post #18, I embrace that perspective as well. But I also feel that most human beings feel we should be above all other creatures when it comes to violence. Most human beings view war as akin to “animal behavior.”

So spiritually are we more evolved then insects and animals? There are people who do not accept evolution of the human species from apes, or sea creatures as is said in the very beginning. Do we still have animal instincts, territorial instincts, and we know we have survival instincts.

Most wars on this planet are started out of fear, or to control others. It is not always governments; in Sudan it is a series of warlords, it is the same in the Philippines, both of these places have been at war, war lords fighting warlords, for decades. It seems to me that war is part of duality.

Duality is inherent in our mind and emotions. I view war as natural in a polarized dualistic existence. Experiencing non-duality banishes war. I agree, war is everywhere and in every species. Although, in my opinion human beings are not as “civilized” or above it all as we would like to think we are, at least not yet. But I do have hope for humanity to further evolve.

[BigJohn]

How do people in wars not rapidly evolve?

One day, I rode a bus down a newly built road. On the way back there was a big hole in the road. The local people thought all of the mines were removed..........

Years before that, I had a driver who took us to a place that had a big sign. The sign was in numerous languages but not English. So, the person I was with and myself, journeyed down a trail into the jungle. The place was like a paradise to me except for the huge termite mounds.

On the way back, we saw the International Border markers that claimed we were in Cambodia.

Years later, a Japanese Tourist went down the same trail and lost a leg. At that time, it was considered the heaviest mined area in the World..... land mines.

I suspect, some people in war zones, develop spiritually fast ...... as a way to survive.

[Native spirit]

There could be a lot of truth in what you said john.

My husband had a friend he was a work mate,he used to be in the Army

In the bomb disposable unit.

He used to tell us of the things he saw and as you can imagine seeing limbs blown off and people dying he had a funny way of looking at Death.

the more he found out what I was he would speak to me for ages.

One day he came here and i saw someone with him. so i described him and told him how he passed he burst into tears.

It was a close friend from the unit he was in he lost a leg in one bomb blast
and as they were defusing another it went off and killed him

he told him what he was doing in the spirit world and that he was whole again
it changed him he became a Spiritual scholar he wanted to read everything it changed him.


Namaste

[Starman]

I am a firm believer that no one dies until it is time for them to die, the only question is how and when they die. Looking back I was carried through the war which took place in Vietnam. I did not know it at the time but now I do; spirit was with me even when surrounded by war and death on a large scale.

My ptsd when I got back to the U.S. was mainly survivors guilt; this is the most common issue that people in war have to recover from, and I would ask myself over and over; why did I live when 58,000 other soldiers were killed, and about 2-million Vietnamese were also killed. I was very angry and confused about how to think about that war and my participation in it.

I put myself in lots of therapy, even before there was any such recognition of ptsd. That war woke me up and turned me towards spirituality. I lost my eyesight in Vietnam and was totally blind for about 5-years. More than a dozen surgeries later I regained my eyesight. Losing my eyesight was just something else I had to recover from.

Recovery is long and painful and there were very few people who understood what war veterans had gone thru. Before the ptsd label was established psychologists and psychiatrists did not believe war effected people emotionally and mentally. They often thought that person’s problems stemmed from their childhood. Their relationship with their mother and father.

Yes, it was once called shell shock, then battle fatigue, and now it is called combat-related ptsd, and ptsd is now generalized to include people who had not been in a military war. Remember General George S. Patton slapped a soldier who was suffering from battle fatigue, and he called that soldier “a coward.” There was no treatment back then for war related emotional issues; we were just told to “act like a man,” stuff your pain, and my friends used to tell me “you just need to get stoned,” or high on drugs.

Today we recognize how being exposed to trauma can impact a person but it was not always that way. Tens of thousands of war veterans have taken their own life because they were unable to recover from the effects of war.

[CosmicWonder]

@Starman,

I have ptsd because of a lot of bad experiences. I have done EMDR on myself like a diehard. People always thought I was just weak. Reprocessing 20+ traumatic diverse experiences in a day, during hours long focus, is a lot but not weak. Lunatic hell yes and totally irrisponsible to make myself do that. But it worked, and I am now giving myself intense self therapy in lucid dreams and during long focuses while doing my chores or whatever. People never understood my immense healing capacity. But I was stopped by something bigger. Like a big guy standing next to me saying: sit out the trauma, be in this spot. Really awful.

Kind regards,

CW

PS: i advice against practicing EMDR without certified profesionals and a good support network. Please stay safe and take good care of yourself and your needs when doing EMDR. Above situation was in itself an extremity and was not the best. It was to me an necessary evil, but there is help for you when struggling with PTSD or extreme issues/fears. Reach out to your loved ones and professionals when you are ready and talk to a therapist.

[CosmicWonder]

Point is, people dont understand ptsd until they have it. Even now in modern age, there is a lot of stuborn misunderstanding

[Starman]

Cosmic Wonder, thank you for sharing your journey and the information on your treatment. I was there when ptsd was first established as a legitimate disorder; it was first called “delayed stress syndrome,” as a syndrome is a group of symptoms. Then they came up with the name “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.” If it were not for Vietnam veterans fighting the VA and the psychological community to get mental disorders associated with war recognized there would probably be no such thing as a disorder called PTSD today.

Most veterans in Vietnam were 19-year olds, and that was one reason why the trauma hit them so hard. The military only takes young people, and young people are very impressionable and susceptible. I was a combat medic so I knew something about the human body, but not the human brain. After the military I worked in the medical field, and then the mental health field, and also in social work, and later became a college psychology professor. I was obsessed with learning about the human mind and emotions, and spent a lot of years doing that so I could have tools to work on myself.

This gave me a lot of knowledge on how to treat my combat-related ptsd. I went into the healthcare field to gather tools to help myself and along the way I was also able to help others. I ventured into all sorts of treatments; not only mainstream treatments but also Oriental and Asian treatments, treatments which were used in India, etc. Because there are soldiers in other countries that also have combat-related ptsd and their countries may use altogether different treatments.

In the U.S. The National PTSD Center is in Pal Alto, California, and they have inpatient care for combat-related ptsd. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is now teaching veterans with ptsd how to quiet their mind and meditate, and lots of veterans are saying that this is working for them. I learned how to meditate back in the 1970’s and it has done wonders for me. I do not have flash backs and I have made peace with my past. I am sure there are many treatments which may help. Just going camping on a regular basis in the great outdoors also helped me, being in touch with nature, etc. The main ingredient in ptsd is stress. Stress from a past trauma and that stress can manifest in many different ways.

I was a therapist at the San Francisco VA Medical Center, among other places, and I worked with combat veterans helping them to develop stress management programs for themselves. Overwhelming stress is at the center of many disorders. Some people think they have ptsd, or are diagnosed with ptsd, when they do not have ptsd. I really do not care what the DSM-5 says; just getting a diagnosis from a book is not professional. A diagnosis should be comprehensive and involve many sessions before receiving a diagnosis. This is true for combat veterans as well. Some combat veterans do not get ptsd.

But I do understand that people want to know “what do you call it if it is not ptsd,” People want to give it a name, and then the treatment follows whatever we call the thing which we feel we have. Diagnostic labels are from the biomedical model of treatment. The social learning theory model, strict behavioral model, environmental model, Humanistic psychology, and a number of other approaches to disorders, do not use diagnostic labels. They do not use the DSM; most of them uses operational definitions, what does it look like, etc.

Diagnostic labels can stay with a person their whole life and people become known by their mental health diagnosis, which can stigmatize them. When ptsd was first established as a mental disorder lots of veterans were treated like they had leprosy, regardless whether they had ptsd or not. Veterans were considered mental cases. I did not talk about my Vietnam experiences with non-veterans for at least 20-years after leaving Vietnam, and I did not let most people know that I was a combat veteran. I worked in the healthcare field 42-years; I am now retired, but I had a great career, it was a very personal blessing on me, to this very day. I appreciate sharing my journey here in this forum and maybe it can be of benefit to others.

Peace

[Altair]

Originally Posted by Starman

Altair, your post #18, I embrace that perspective as well. But I also feel that most human beings feel we should be above all other creatures when it comes to violence. Most human beings view war as akin to “animal behavior.”

Hi Starman,

I think we can minimize what we generally call ''war'', armies out there locked in deadly conflicts, settlements blown up, etc. But war is a fight over resources (food, water, habitat, even ideologies are resources in a way, giving meaning to communities and fighting over flock). Without what we generally call war, there is a fight through other means such as the economy.

We can't have a natural world with species wanting to survive and compete over finite resources without war. But how the war looks is another thing..