Your editorial, as always, deserves congratulations. I am referring specially to "Guns, guns and more guns" of today (28/1) in which you in great detail explain how the hands of politicians are, at one time or another, bloodstained. As quoted by you, Richard Buckminister Fuller has famously said, "The end move in politics is always to pick up a gun."

First the people's representatives in our law-making bodies are all given guns though only one may proudly wave it in front of TV crews to show that the law of the land has given him the power to blow up anybody and everybody who is against him.

When the parent of a student in an international school asked me if I could write a few sentences on "Politics and Politicians" I asked him to read the latest Shorter Oxford English Dictionary where politics is defined as follows: -

"One versed in the theory of government and the art of governing.

One who engages in party politics, especially as a profession.

One who lives by politics as a trade. A crafty intriguer."

The catastrophic disaster we are now facing in this country has not come into being through some action of chance. It has been created by our politicians who were elected to power by us, and me, by our everyday activities of hatred towards one another for power and domination, "Sinhala Only in 24 hours," a slogan created by monks, iskola mahattayas, veda mahattayas and govi mahattayas and our rathu sahodarayas!

In 1956 we got carried away and voted S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike into power.In 1958, just two years, later we had the "Emergency '58" when thousands of people, houses and shops were burnt by our great nationalists and 'bhasha premis' who carried cans of petrol the way they carry water to perform 'bodhi poojas'.

War, in Sri Lanka or Iraq or Vietnam or possibly in the near future Iran and elsewhere, is a spectacular and bloody expression of our conditioning, as labelled human beings who have lost what is human, and left only with our labels, Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, Sinhala or Tamil, instilled into us by our men in robes of whatever hue.

Ill will, social, religious, linguistic, political or national division, all this fragmentation of man into bits and pieces, all this is responsible for this utter chaos we face today.

This is not a Sri Lankan problem alone. It is a global problem caused by the various divisions, beliefs and political ideologies, religion and national ideologies, the Arab the Jew, the Sinhalese and the Tamil and so on.

Technology, since God created Adam, has developed tremendously. We have passed the fig leaf era. There is sufficient technological knowledge to produce the essential needs of man, but greed, ambition, nationalistic spirit, racialism, craving for power and prestige, they prevent the production of the essentials for all human beings. The produces of fossil fuels, Saudi Arabia to start with, do not care for the people who have to depend on it but they will restrict the extraction of oil forming a heartless cartel called the OPEC. The rich enjoy 80 per cent of the global wealth while 80 per cent of the people in less developed countries live on less than a dollar or two a day. Muslims in Sudan, Ethiopia and so on starve while the Saudi Royal Muslims are swimming in petrodollars!

The extreme left or the extreme right is not concerned with human happiness. They are concerned only with their own particular system, American democracy or extreme leftism for instance, spending large sums in armaments to blast each other, manufacturing more and more powerful bombs, always preparing for a war in addition to all the regional wars they are engaged in. We say man has developed, yes he has in every way except psychologically.

Psychol-ogically animals are far superior to human beings though animals don't have, or may be because they don't have, Buddhas or Christs or Mohameds?

Until and unless man is freed from psychological conditioning, man will create a state or government which will inevitably be possessive, ruthless, lacking compassion, lacking love, understanding and friendship but still call ourselves images of God or future Buddhas or whatever!

There is plenty of spiritual leadership in this country and elsewhere but not spirituality. Neither the pope nor a monk nor a spokesman in layman's garb can lead you to truth. If the pope or anyone else leads, he does not know truth because to truth there is no path, the path of the Buddha, Christ or Mohamed. The very fact that there are so many paths to truth is enough proof that truth is pathless. What is happening today is one is going north and the other is going south. Yet they claim that all roads lead to Rome! In this journey, those who follow different paths are destroying each other in the name of their particular religions leader, and path.

The Island editorial of 28/1 clearly states how each party had to resort to guns or bombs to save itself from the other parties. It is the same with religion too. One religion has asked for stake recognition and protection. Does religion or truth need protection or is it the hierarchy that needs protection? The pope cannot travel without a bullet-proof 'pope-mobile'. CBK, our earlier president, in a television interview owned up to having carried a bomb on her lap in her car in self-defence!

All over the world politicians are living in fear of being bumped off by other politicians.

We only talk of corruption in state organisations. The COPE report is an example. It is only the corruption in political circles we are concerned about but what about corruption of the religious world? Every religion is riddled with superstition, just a lot of words and texts which are read and reread by our religions pundits on every possible TV or radio channel. All ideologies are corruption whether they are Hindu, Buddhist, Islam or Marxist because they have caused untold misery in this world. What passes off as religion today is nothing but a repetition of rituals.