Ian's June 2026 Newsletter

In my April newsletter, I wrote about the financial struggle that many people are currently experiencing. The other common theme impacting many people in all parts of the world is racial hatred and prejudice, along with the fear and uncertainty that is created as a result. 

Long before the most recent escalation of the old Israeli/Palestinian conflict in October 2023, a Palestinian doctor, Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish, wrote a book ‘I Shall Not Hate’. This was his response to three of his children and a niece being killed by an Israeli tank shell which blew up his apartment in Gaza. It would have been so easy for someone experiencing this to be filled with hate and revenge, yet through all his grief he realised hatred would only prolong the conflict and lead to similar suffering by many others. He chose to not hate, but to forgive and has since devoted his life to peace and reconciliation, especially promoting health and education as strategies for resolving violent conflicts.

When I teach about the Mountain Devil in my Level 2 workshop, I draw on real-life examples such as Dr Abuelaish, Sir Weary Dunlop, Jewish inmates who endured the horrors of German concentration camps and Sir Weary Dunlop, a Japanese prisoner on the infamous Burma Railway during the Second World War who all chose to forgive and had great compassion.  

Weary Dunlop was a surgeon – in fact one of Australia’s best known. After graduation, prior to the war, he enrolled in the Royal Australian Medical Corps as a Captain. He served as a medical officer in Palestine, Crete, Greece and the Middle East, before being sent to Java, Indonesia in 1942. In March of that year, the Japanese captured Weary’s hospital. He could have escaped but he would not leave his patients and allowed himself to become a POW. From Java, he was shipped to Singapore and from there travelled with thousands of other POWs on crowded rice trucks to Thailand. The Japanese intention was to use these POWs to build the Railway of Death, as it became known - a four-hundred-kilometre-long railway to connect Burma (Myanmar) to Siam (Thailand). The construction of this railway cost the lives of one hundred thousand POW and native labourers. 

The conditions that Dunlop’s Force – the thousand POWs under his command – endured were abominable. They worked from pre-dawn until well into the night. The prisoners were regularly and brutally beaten by their Japanese guards.

He frequently displayed extraordinary courage, risking his own life in trying to protect the injured and attempting to improve the harsh living and working conditions. Many a time Weary’s standing up to Japanese guards led to him being severely beaten.

At the very end of the war, Dunlop saw a Japanese guard attacked by his fellow prisoners. This man died in Weary’s arms as he attempted to comfort him. The Australian soldiers said to him, ‘How can you be so caring towards him after all that he's done to us?’ Dunlop responded ‘He’s a human being - how can I not care for him?'

These people, even though they experienced horrendous suffering and cruelty from their captors, never lost their compassion for others, including their guards. One Dutch inmate witnessed his three young daughters shot in front of him by the SS before he was interned. For months, he was consumed by hate and fixated on seeking revenge against the Germans. Eventually, he experienced an epiphany and realised that this anger was only harming himself. From that point, he began the process of letting go and working toward forgiveness. When he achieved this, he entered a state of grace and was of great comfort to the other prisoners, often giving away what little food he had. His fellow prisoners and later even the German guards would come to him for advice and help. When he was liberated at the end of the war, he hadn’t lost any weight even though he rarely ate. Mountain Devil helps transform hate, rage and jealousy into love and compassion. This Essence is so widely needed now, as are people like those I have mentioned above, who can be an inspiration to us on how to behave and express more love.