We are forever. Our story never ended, and our story will never end. We are still climbing the wall.

(Mei Rodriguez Mori, The Mei Book, Ms. Gunning’s Class 2024-2025)

It seems that in life, as in a play, the performance of the role of what each one believes to be can only be carried out by isolating oneself from the rest of the performers and the context of the play. But sometimes unexpectedly, the intensity of the overall play increases to such an extent that one can no longer ignore it, and it ends up interfering with the performance of the role. And wow, how dramatically the scene changes!

Those were the times of the Cold War between the former Soviet Union and the United States. An era of fear of communism and the geopolitical domino theory. I was 18 years old, living in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and in love with a beautiful young woman. Full of plans and visions, excited about my biology and chemistry studies, my girlfriend, and life in general. I was taking Russian and French courses as electives that would help me with my future life as a scientific researcher. To practice Russian, I had subscribed to Sputnik, the Soviet counterpart of the US Reader's Digest. Sputnik arrived in the mail, wrapped in brown paper with no indication of what it contained, but it had a line below the shipping address in the Cyrillic alphabet. The postman suspected something and asked the neighbors, "Who lives here?" Maybe he thought there was a Soviet spy....

At the end of 1962, the Cold War heated up with the blockade of Cuba. I was listening to the news on the radio as I walked to college that day. The hysterical radio announcers described Russian and American fighter jets, flying menacingly close to each other, as Russian ships approached to break the blockade of Cuba. I thought, “Oh my God, the world is coming to an end”. There was going to be a nuclear war! Children were being told on the radio to take shelter under their desks at school. And I was having a romantic date with my girlfriend that night. I decided to skip my class and ran to the faculty where she was, waved to her to come out of the classroom, and told her: We have to get out of here, the world is going to end, and we need to make love to each other! She just smiled, didn't pay attention to me, and went back to her class.

But the war became cold again, and some 27 years later, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, it just froze. Those were the years of Gorbachev and the fall of the so-called Iron Curtain. Another chapter of the epic film of life ended, and a new one began.

I was then 45 years old, playing another role. Married with children, living in Mexico, working for the UN. Instead of doing biochemistry research, I was promoting environmental programs. I had used French and Russian to a limited extent in my life, the former very little to move around in Geneva, where I lived for about three years, and the latter to read a little Russian. But I never got to make them fluent channels of language in my mind.

And the cold war surrounding my younger years was followed and continues still by other hotter wars, always far away, thank God. Brought into daily life by headlines and journalistic and television reports, often with an intense bent for hype in sharing the tragedies by the media. Reminding me of Orwell's minutes of hatred in his novel 1984. All these battles between people seem remote, bombings, dead, wounded, destroyed cities, wounded children, and threatening politician bullies, barricaded in their palaces and presidential houses, stirring it all up. Always the same, in the story of my own passing through life. And also, when reviewing history books, it seems that it was the same, before my appearance on stage, although not shared continuously and immediately, in all parts of the planet, as it is today.

Global military spending increased by 37% between 2015 and 2024. The global military burden, i.e., the share of global gross domestic product (GDP) devoted to military spending, increased to 2.5% in 2024. Global military spending per person was the highest since 1990, at $334.

In short, this thing of killing each other, of fighting between communism and consumerism, of wanting to have more and more, even if others are harmed, seems to be part of the human theater. And everyone offers an explanation as to why, and some even kill themselves to defend their explanation.

There are the Trumps and the Hitlers. And also, those who are not so famous, but who, from their positions of political leadership, or from their homes, neighborhoods, and lives, subscribe to programs of hatred and are alright with the suppression of the "others". Yes, those others that interfere with our points of view, our consumerism or communism, our ideologies, or belong to different tribes. Those called woke, or neocons, or liberals, or right-wingers, those having different beliefs. Those who interfere with our selfishness.

But as in any play or film, there are always moments of greatness, of love, of spirituality, even in the midst of constant wars, public or personal (cold or hot). There are always moments of love. And who knows, maybe that's the whole purpose and theme of this life's show.

By the way, in the end, learning a bit of Russian did serve me for something. In 1997, when I was still working for the United Nations, I was asked to go and meet Mikael Gorbachev at the airport in Brazil. He was coming to participate in an event called “Rio plus 5”, commemorating five years after the Earth Summit.

I was very excited about this request, I had always thought that this gentleman had been instrumental in freezing down the Cold War that had affected my romantic date when I was 18 years old. And I practiced a little of my forgotten Russian, which was never fully learned. When Gorbachev entered the protocol room of the airport that day, I received him and said bravely with a very bad Russian pronunciation, “Mr. Gorbachev, it is a privilege for me to meet you”.

He looked at me with a smiling face, and while looking at his wife Raissa, who was accompanying him, he replied in Russian (which had to be clarified by his interpreter because I did not understand), “Won’t that be good if my compatriots would think like you”. And the three of us laughed...

Yes, it seems that life is a play, an evolutionary flow of an ocean of consciousness, where each of us has changing roles to enact, until we end up becoming that Ocean of consciousness, that unified field that we are. As in any great literary or theater work, the contrasts between characters, the moments of cold and hot wars, and those of greatness, love, and peace, in fragments of time, shape and acting roles, are instrumental in the full development of its theme and the final revelation of the Oneness of it all.

Let your love flow unceasingly, like a stream coming down the mountain into the ocean. There will be obstructions of pleasures and pains. Let them go by as passing phases. There will be flowers and thorns in the flow of the water and on the banks. Don't get attached, don't get affected. Keep going, keep going until the stream becomes a river. Doubts will assail you, self-indulgence will attract you, but with love in your heart, keep flowing into the ocean of love. Don't worry, don't fear.

(Meher Baba)