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Screwtape, surprisingly, doesn’t think war is the most effective way to capture human souls.
 
Of course a war is entertaining. The immediate fear and suffering of the humans is a legitimate and pleasing refreshment for our myriads of toiling workers. But what permanent good does it do us unless we make use of it for bringing souls to Our Father Below?
 
He cynically and accurately observes that it takes a global crisis for human beings to orient to something beyond egocentricity. 
 
But, if we are not careful, we shall see thousands turning in this tribulation to the Enemy, while tens of thousands who do not go so far as that will nevertheless have their attention diverted from themselves to values and causes which they believe to be higher than the self.
 
The true war for human attention, Screwtape contends, is fought and won on the domestic front. He therefore encourages Wormwood to sow the seeds of separation closer to home. Whether it is persuading his patient to judge his immediate circle of friends, neighbors, colleagues…
 
Provided that any of those neighbours sing out of tune, or have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous.
 
…or being offended by his mother’s tone of voice…
 
Your patient must demand that all his own utterances are to be taken at their face value and judged simply on the actual words, while at the same time judging all his mother's utterances with the fullest and most oversensitive interpretation of the tone and the context and the suspected intention.
 
…a human soul is more safely secured through fueling domestic hatred.
 
A majority of us will perhaps never live in a war zone but we are no strangers to personal conflict or the battle for attention.
 
It’s not peaceful to live in the dualistic world of opposites, being bombarded by conflicting messages…
 
how it is versus how it should be, 
what I have versus what I want,
who I am versus who I should be.
 
It’s miserable to commit to making a change for good and to be defeated by an unwillingness to follow through. 
 
It’s terrible to watch helplessly as the violence of hatred surges through the body and expresses itself as an unkind word or as unskillful action and then suffer the lashings of self-recriminations that follow. 
 
If turmoil is a human being’s internal signature, why are we surprised that war is woven into the fabric of human history? 
 
So, when we turn to spirituality in times of tribulation seeking guidance to resolve the world’s problems, we are invariably directed to work on inner peace. An excerpt between a pacifist and the great mystic, Ramana Maharshi:
 
Q: Wars are going on in the world. If we do not think, do the wars cease?
RM: Can you stop the wars? The one who made the world will take care of it.
Q: God made the world but it is not God who is responsible for the present condition. It is we who are responsible for the state of the world.
RM: Can you stop the wars or reform the world?
Q: No.
RM: Then why do you worry yourself about what is not possible for you? Take care of yourself and the world will take care of itself.
 
What does it mean to “take care of yourself”?
 
The Buddha taught “there is no self.” As awareness practitioners, “we take care of our self” by paying attention to the process that creates and maintains the illusion of a separate self. The “self” we discover is a karmically conditioned mental pattern of reactivity that triggers the landscape of inner conflict between self and self (self-hatred), self and world, self and other.
 
Observing without judgment or condemnation these karmically conditioned patterns of reactivity leads to the understanding that the pattern, not the external trigger (neighbor, parent, partner, colleague, boss, world leader, add your own), is responsible for generating the suffering experience of hatred, anger, worry, dread, powerlessness, disappointment, grief, anguish, bewilderment, judgment, add your own. With practice, we learn to stay in awareness of the pattern, rather than identifying with it as “me.”  As the ability to stay disidentified grows, restraint replaces reactivity, dispassion displaces defensiveness, compassion supplants criticism, curiosity overrides certainty. The locus of identity shifts from being adrift in mental turbulence to being anchored in a quiet, tranquil, equanimity. 
 
As awareness expands beyond the illusion of separation, it may dawn on the practitioner that
 
The being
Of separate beings
Is non-separate being
---Wei Wu Wei
 
It certainly has for those who have gone before! 
 
Practice delivers the understanding that a separate self cannot experience itself as one with the world and is bound to struggle with the assertion (however enlightened the teacher) that the “world will take care of itself.” But it is also undeniable that despite the human propensity to destroy it, the world has taken care of itself. It therefore behooves those of us who care about the world to make peace with ourselves and through that process encounter the “indestructible within” (Karlfried Graf Dürckheim) that takes cares of All.

Gasshō
ashwini