War is what most people would like to see eliminated first thing on this earth. War disrupts people’s lives, tares our living environment apart, cripples and kills innocent people. Very few of us actively choose war so mostly it is imposed on us, civilians.
War is a command given in a harsh and brutal tone of voice to those of us in the military and for us war is a whole lot more than just a three character word: we actually have to do the job itself. And often times even  we do not really choose it as in those countries that have mandatory service for young people!
Atrocities are committed by individuals at their wits end or when something has taken a hold on them that makes them go out of their minds.
What if people could stay responsible for themselves and in their right minds? Would there still be war?
Here is how you can learn to really value your life and the (temporary) opportunity to live.
Bear with me in this small example.
A father slaps his toddler/kid-son and yells at him all the time as he sends him away so he, the father, can mind his own business. But then the boy grows up to be a man. He has learned that it isn’t honorable to hit your father back and that he’d better swallow his anger. But what if his father has been preventing him from being who he really is (gay, an artist, a craftsman raised in an intellectual environment, a car mechanic in a doctors family or just simply himself)?
What if the son didn’t feel acknowledged by his father as an independent, potentially autonomous human being? What if deep down inside he feels he hasn’t been given the right to be just because the way he is doesn’t seem to serve his father’s purposes, whatever they are.
What if this father really is unable to make room for another human being in his life, even if this other human being is his very own son, because he is so preoccupied with living up to his own expectations?
What if the son, because of that parental flaw, keeps trying to cover up all his perceived shortcomings because of this desperate need of being acknowledged by his father. He feels he has to earn this being visible as a valuable person to his father eyes. He tries to be someone else, someone his father would appreciate all the while suppressing the rage that is generated in him due to not being allowed to be who he truly is. In a way you could say he had to suppress himself or should we say his self was murdered within him while bodily he stayed alive. He has not being given the acknowledgment of being a separate and unique human being with the right to live for the mere fact that he already lives.
Now let us get back to a situation of war. Are the appearances right? Are the atrocities really committed in the name of the government as people claim they are? Or are they excesses that happen because people who are already living on top of a volcano lose control?
Why do many people end up in the army in the first place? Is it due to the lack of validation of themselves and lack of direction in their lives (“I don’t know what else to do and the army provides opportunities”)?
Is it because of the lack of a sense of belonging, lack of recognition of their unique skills, talents or because there is no body for them to recognize their potential to develop those. Add to that the suppressed rage and lack of connection to the self (Lack of Sense of Self), the terrifying drill the solders must undergo to prepare for war (watch the movie: Full Metal Jacket with Vincent d’Onoffrio) and we have the necessary robots that can be used in the military.
A Lack of Sense of Self  makes you unaware of how big a part of your existence is actually to be attributed to having a body. Without a Healthy Sense of Self you are so busy surviving in this ‘to your Self – hostile environment’ that you totally become one with the ways you have found out how to do that (Vehicles). Your father wants you to be a great baseball player than you are continuously working on improving that skill. You forget to notice that you actually are made of a different kind of material. You forget to notice that you much rather be a musician or work in healthcare. You forget you are YOU all together.
Here is how to avoid such a situation. By actively taking care of installing a Sense of Self in your son by acknowledging him (or your daughter) as a potential independent person with a free will, you teach them to look at life with their own eyes and draw the conclusions that work best for them. Let it be clear to your kids that they are not an extension of yourself but that they are their very own person. The opportunity to be your own person makes you feel at home in your own skin.
With this kind of self-honoring as a value, you would not want to put your body, your life at risk for anything in the world because you know it is your only way into the world. What comes after you doesn’t concern you, really. You would have a huge respect for the gift of life and the opportunity of living so that you would not dream about throwing that away because a government deems it useful to go and fight in a faraway country. If there would be enough people with a healthy sense of self there would be a much smaller army and possibly a lot less reasons for war.
If you think there is something to this reasoning you might want to open up the book about the Sense of Self Method and Method that is about to be published. But you need not wait until that moment. Just dive deeper in this website and you will find a ton of valuable information on how to implement a healthy sense of self in yourself and in your children.
Because that is the first step to tackle: make sure you have a Healthy Sense of Self yourself, as a parent. Only then you can instill it in your children and once these two generations have been healed from a Lack of Sense of Self the world could be a better place where people actually value and respect the gift of life more than anything else.
There are so many ways you can develop this awareness of and for yourself. One is for example, to just take a moment a few times a day, for a week or so, to work on becoming aware of the fact that without a body your life IS NOT anymore. That without a body all that is important to you vanishes into thin air. Note and process deep down in your heart that your body and your life is all you have in this world.
Yes, we do need to work on getting insight in our own habits and behavior, especially the ones we do not like about ourselves so we get clarity on our issues. We have to free our inner adult and learn to think with our own minds and feel with our own hearts. Be thoroughly aware that our body, our life, our self is all we really have and that that is valid for everybody.
If you feel that through and through for yourself you know it to be true for everyone else as well, independent of their race, culture or religion and it would take a whole lot of good reasons to put that at risk in war or to offer yourself to take that away from others.