China, Muslims, the Hate and the Love

July 14th, 2009

By Marcus T. Anthony www.mindfutures.com email

mindfutures@yahoo.com

Sorry, this post is rather a long one. The kinds of ideas contained in this article are also
covered in my book Sage of Synchronicity, but in a more lighthearted way.

Recently China’s far-western Xinjiang province exploded in a wave of hate and violence.
The ethnic Uigur Muslims and the Han Chinese majority clashed. The result was over
two hundred deaths, as well as widespread vandalism, burning and looting. China has a
state-controlled media which is notoriously propaganda-heavy and manipulative when
dealing with issues of social instability. So finding out the truth of what actually
happened is not easy.

As with so many ethnic clashes across the world, both sides have blamed the other. The
Uigur have said that they are the victims of ongoing discrimination by the Han, and have
been relegated to the status of second-class citizens. They also point to Beijing’s policy of
encouraging mass migration of Han Chinese into the region, such that the Uigur are now
a minority in their homeland. Many Han Chinese believe that the Uigur are ungrateful for
the economic benefits that the Han have brought, that believe that the Uigur are lazy,
inclined towards criminality, and that they are the ones who started the violence.

In a nutshell the Han and the Uigur don’t like each other much. In fact many simply hate
the other.

One of my prime interests as both a futurist and an intuitive analyst is to get to the bottom
of human conflict and drama, and to open a space for healing. My concern with the
Han/Uigur conflict is no different. My question then is, how can the situation in Xinjiang
be addressed peacefully, and how can the two parties move towards greater harmony and
healing?

The question can be addressed at many levels. You could look at immediate justice. We
capture and punish those who killed or committed crimes. We could look at the political
side. What policies can we implement to help things get better? We could also look at the
idea of culture. Can Han Chinese culture and Uigur Muslim cultures learn to get along?
These analyses might all be helpful, and are probably necessary. But I like to go deeper,
right to the heart of the matter; to the spiritual.

Human minds are not localised within brains, as mainstream neuroscience and
psychology wrongly assumes. They spread out beyond the confines of our skulls, and are
entangled within a dynamic cosmos. We human beings exist in an ocean of
consciousness.

What is more, individual human beings are part of a greater evolution: that of humanity
and cosmos. It is often in times of conflict and drama that the greatest opportunities to
learn and heal come forward. The current crisis in China is no exception. But before we
even begin to talk about learning and growing from what is happening, there is another
requirement.

The essential lesson of the Human Collective Oversoul is learning to love. Many spiritual
and religious traditions realise this. Yet what is required to fulfill the promise of
unconditional or divine love is responsibility – responsibility for the expression of
consciousness. This means a total commitment to truth. It necessitates an awareness that
what we see and experience in the world, including the totality of all our emotions,
judgments, and fears, is created by us – not by the other.

Both Individuals and groups have Soul Issues, and they all boil down to one concept:
responsibility. We have a tendency to disown parts of ourselves, to project blame and
anger at others. We tend to give our power away to external sources and objects. We give
power away by blaming; by assuming that the external source is responsible for our pain,
our anger, our grief. We give our power away by holding on to guilt, shame and dishonor,
thus diminishing ourselves. We give out power away when we expect to be saved by
another, or by some deity. And we disempower ourselves when we allow our beliefs and
attitudes to be controlled by the group mind, consciously or unconsciously.

Like all ethnic groups, the Uigur and the Han have collective Soul Issues. The key to
long-term healing of the conflict in China, as with any conflict in the world, is for
individuals within groups to acknowledge what their collective issues are, and then to
accept responsibility for the emotional energy which they create. Blame and anger stand
in between chaos and healing. But blame and anger are not the real problem. These ego
projections are perfectly normal. They inevitably arise where there is fear. And where
there is intense fear, they arise with great force.

The greatest problem when we experience blame and anger is the failure to accept
responsibility for these states of mind. We allow emotional intensity to carry us away. We
lose control and become possessed by the spectre of the collective mind.

Governments often exploit the human tendency towards projection, in order to create a
kind of lowest-common-denominator social cohesion. In the case of the Xinjiang riots,
the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) immediately came out and pointed the finger at
“hostile anti-China forces” from abroad. This is a standard policy of the CCP. It
encourages the population to hate outsiders, and channels fear and anger at foreign
targets. In fact a CCP spokesperson said quite literally “we should be hating the outside
forces, not each other”.

That there may be individuals and groups outside of China influencing what is happening
within China is not so important when addressing the problem at a spiritual level.
External forces have no power over our minds when we accept complete responsibility
for ourselves. Although Bin Laden may well have masterminded the 911 attack on the
US, the US government used him as a channel for hate, deflecting attention and
responsibility away from a greater dynamic of power and control at a global level. At a
spiritual level the US was not a victim. And neither was Islam when the US retaliated.
Despite imbalances of power, and the hegemony of US market capitalism and the
destructive forces within some Islamic fundament groups, they were, and still are, equals.
Equally responsible.

The policy of finding an external scapegoat may well help restore social order, but it
comes at the cost of healing. There can be no healing where there is no turning inward to
acknowledge what lies within.

Because the minds of individual human beings are embedded within collective minds, the
energy of the collective washes through us. To accept responsibility we need to turn our
attention inwards. But as soon as we accept the judgments of the collective we get drawn
into the consciousness field of the group, and its dramas. We become part of the mob. It
is judgment which drags us into drama and conflict, whether at an individual level, or at a
group level.

Therefore, what is required for the Han and the Uigur to begin the healing process, is for
each individual to make a personal commitment not to ride with the mob. This is
particularly difficult in societies like China which are less individualistic than western
cultures. To develop ideas and opinions which differ too much from the norm can result
in social isolation. Chinese people feel safe in groups. Their identity is centered within
the collective. While this is true of all societies, Asian cultures express this tendency
more than western ones.

What are the Soul Issues of the Han and the Uigur? Soul Issues almost always have to do
with “negative” qualities. And this creates a problem for an outsider making observations,
as I am here. People don’t like outsiders telling them that they are “bad”. However the
idea of being “bad” is purely an ego judgment. Soul Issues are simply those parts of the
psyche which lie in shadow. They have great power over us only because we do not
recognise them. It is, in part, the belief that our “issues” are “bad” that grants them
power, and makes us fearful of them.

In truth it is incredibly freeing to allow ourselves to see our shadow side. To embrace the
shadow is an incredible act of love. It is what lies at the heart of human spiritual
evolution.
I am an intuitive. When I “read” consciousness fields I go within them to sense the
energy of them. It’s a bit like dipping your finger into a pot to test if the soup is hot
enough. My reading of the Soul Issues here is primarily based on an energy reading, not
my “opinion”, or an intellectual analysis.

For the Han Chinese the central issue is the giving away of power to the collective. The
tremendous death and destruction that befell China during the Mao Ze Dong era,
stemmed directly from this issue. About 40 million Chinese people died as a result of a
mismanaged country. This giving away of power includes a refusal to step forward as
individuals.

Another relevant Han Chinese Soul Issue in the current conflict is a belief in cultural and
ethnic superiority, and a lack of empathy and compassion for others. There is a clear
image that I see as I examine the Han collective: looking away. The Han are not great
empathisers because they look away, they refuse to get involved. So indifference is a
major Soul Issue of the Han, and it is one reason why empathy and compassion are in
short supply in China. In turn, that looking away comes from fear, from a sense of
helplessness that the individual is too powerless to influence the vast whole.

Looking at the Uigur, they see the Han as aloof and unapproachable. Then there is a
particularly powerful symbol which I sense lies at the heart of Uigur judgments of the
Han. This is the idea of eating pork. For the Uigur, pork is something low, dirty, vile,
animalistic. Shameful. Thus in a sense the Uigur see themselves as above the Han. In fact
the symbol of the pig is a central motif which underpins the conflict, with each side
referring to others using this unflattering symbol. As we all know, calling someone a pig
is not exactly a compliment, but in an archetypal sense that is the essence of the fight
happening here.

Yet at the bottom of all this, both the Han and the Uigur share a fundamental Soul Issue
which draws all this together. That is, the tendency to see themselves as victims. Han
Chinese people are taught that they are the wronged ones, and their history books focus
upon “the century of humiliation” (about 1840-1945) when China was invaded and
occupied by foreign forces, including the Japanese and some western powers. The
Uigurs, ironically, have adopted a similar stance. They see themselves as being oppressed
by Han materialism, by an economic and ethnic hegemony. Such a stance mirrors a Soul
Issue of the Islamic cultures worldwide, only most see “the west” as the materialistic
oppressor.

Neither the Han nor the Uigur is willing to give sway to the other. At least not yet.

This attitude of “We are the real the victims, not you!”, would be comical if the
consequences were not so disastrous. How can there be a resolution to the problem while
both sides are fighting it out for the right to be “the really oppressed”? The human ego
loves being a victim, and that’s why there’s so much victim talk going around. Victims
don’t need to take responsibility. They can find an external cause to pinpoint why they
don’t have what they want or need. They can point the finger and feel morally superior.
Perhaps as you read this it is beginning to dawn on you that The Han versus Uigur
conflict is just a microcosm of the essential drama of all humanity. It mirrors the Soul
Issues of our species. The Han and the Uigur are not so strange – not from each other, and
not from anyone reading this who is from neither ethnic group.

In the end, there is no love or healing without responsibility. And high levels of
responsibility are rare, not only in the Xinjiang conflict, but worldwide. Love, and
healing, lie at the heart of our spiritual evolution.

PS. There are ways for individuals to begin to deeply acknowledge their Soul Issues, and
the Soul Issues of the collectives they exist within. I am not going to write about them
here. For those wishing to explore these things further, I detail some of them in my book
Sage of Synchronicity. For researchers, you can also check out my Harmonic Circles
method. I have written about Harmonic Circles in two academic papers. One details the
process for individuals (published in Foresight journal, and available on Scribd) and the
other one addresses collective issues and civilisational conflict (soon in Futures journal).

Marcus