We have chosen the above title, not so much because we live in unstable times and it's "Mayan calendar year", but because peace and war represent opposite polarities that you all have to deal with at a personal as well as a collective level. Peace and war follow each other as much in personal relationships as in relationships between nations.
Qabalah teaches opposite polarities on seven of the 22 paths. These polarities are life-death, peace-war, wisdom-folly, riches-poverty, grace-indignation, fertility-barrenness, and power-servitude ("Qabalistic Tarot" by Roberts Wang). PS: we might need to take a look at grace-indignation, with some possible rewordings, or maybe not. In Tarot it is the path of the Tower.
Synchronistically I have just been lent a book that explores debt and the shadow side of wealth. It is not about the practical sides of financial management, more about debt as it relates to cultural and religious values, and how it has been dealt with in literature, at least that is what the blurb says. I haven't really got into this book yet. It is interesting to me to note in the cycle of things that Germany, after the great "indignities" of its past, is now being asked to "bail out" some of its less financially functional European partners.
As we said in the class last week, I Ching or The Book of Changes deals with and teaches the ebb and flow of cycles. The more you can work toward centering your life in flux and change, the less you hang on to one position or side being right, the more you accept chaos as the counterpart to order and not a dysfunction or, worse still, an evil, the happier you will be. In Hexagram 43, "Breakthrough", I Ching says "we should not combat our own faults directly. As long as we wrestle with them, they continue victorious." Jesus says in the Bible "I say unto you that ye resist not evil."