The root of violence is the illusion of separation — from God, from Being itself, and from being one with everyone and everything.
Richard Rohr
All violence begins with the personal, with the I, and with a point of decision, a crossing of a line, where each of us chooses momentarily to view another living being as an `It´ rather than a `Thou´.
Pamela Cooper-White
World peace is the sum of each and every individual making peace with her/himself.
Thich Nhat Hahn
Many people in Europe are stunned by the fact that we `now have war in Europe´. In fact, those who have been paying attention clearly see that we have had continuous war in Europe, and throughout the world for that matter, since the dawn of human history.
Even if we accept a general definition of war; `with their tanks and their bombs and their bombs and their guns´, we can see that, in my own lifetime there have been insurrections brutally supressed in several Eastern European countries (Hungary, Czechoslovakia, etc.), followed by brutal wars in the Balkans, in Chechnya, and now in the Ukraine, not to mention the bloody civil war in Northern Ireland, in which my family grew up.
Both of my grandfathers were soldiers who were actively involved in wars; my paternal grandfather in India, Mesopotamia and Burma in World War One, and my maternal grandfather in Ireland’s War of Independence against the British occupiers and the subsequent civil war between the parties who were for and against a peace treaty which divided our island into two separate states.
There was never talk or reflection in my family about these war experiences, as if they were locked away, never to see the light of day. Neuroscience now tells a different story; trauma is carried over multiple generations at the cellular level. As Bessel van der Kolk pits it; `The Body Keeps The Score´.
Apart from the obvious military expression of violence in all-out war, we have in our societies, domestic violence, sexual abuse of children, rape, bullying, and today the constant onslaught of the violence of the global media corporations underpinning all-out consumerism. Even so-called entertainment is made up of violence for the most part. We live in a culture steeped in violence.
Moving beyond our species, we treat other sentient beings, not as defenceless brothers and sisters of creation for which we have a special responsibility, but rather as objects. Otherwise, the murder (we call it slaughter) of billions of cattle, poultry, and fish each year cannot be explained.
Despite most world religions having values along the lines of; `Thou shalt not kill´, we have no issue with the brutal means of keeping in captivity, and slaughtering these living brethren. As Einstein once quipped: `As long as there are abattoirs, there will be battlefields´.
Over and above these `Crimes Against Creation´, we have adopted a `rape and plunder´ strategy towards the finite resources of our glorious Blue Planet, such that species extinction is rampant and accelerating. Half of the world’s rain forest has been destroyed in my lifetime. It took thousands of years for these forests, with their incredible richness of flora and fauna diversity, to establish themselves. We are succeeding in destroying such treasures within the blink of an eye, on the timeline of our solar system.
Thich Nhat Hanh hit the nail on the head when he pointed out that: `Peace is an inside job´. It all begins with me. If we pause and observe for a moment how our thoughts bombard us incessantly, how the `inner critic´ judges our selves, others, and our circumstances, we cannot deny that most of us live in a state of all-out war, the battlefield situated between our ears. The good news is that this is where the leverage for world peace is to be found.
This ongoing, destructive behaviour of the mind is referred to in some circles as `stinking thinking´. The rational is the domain of the ego. Since the ego has, by definition, the purpose of keeping itself at the centre of the universe, it is only natural that it should attempt to always keep us in this state of stinking thinking, the world revolving around our very personal problems, real or imagined.
The ego’s super weapon is to convince us that stinking thinking can be remedied by even more thinking; a silver bullet, namely some correct form of philosophy or other. And so, we continue to pour oil on the fire, in the hope that it will thereby be extinguished.
The wise perspective of the Sage tells us that it in not thinking which is required, but action. New things to do and new ways of doing things. Any transformation process is 20% insight and 80% practice. Recent discoveries in neuroplasticity tell us that any new behaviour carried out assiduously in a regular fashion each day for forty days has a much better chance of establishing itself in a sustained manner than a practice sporadically attempted, or the decision to remain on the abstract or theoretical plane.
As Shirzad Chamine, the creator of the Positive Intelligence (PQ) movement points out: `You cannot defeat ten bandits by sending out one warrior per day for a hundred days´. This is what we are up against when it comes to our old destructive habits of thinking and behaviour. Nothing less than a new, radical approach will work. No half measures. No holding on to even some of our old ideas. A total openness to radical change is what is required if we are to achieve peace. Peace of mind in each and every human being adds up to world peace. Not more weapons, not more blame, resentment, and hatred.
The portal to any new practice is silence. There are few pockets of silence remaining by default in our society today. The barrage of the media, the noise of the cities, the ubiquitous sounds of machines, planes, trains, and autobahns; these make it difficult to experience silence. So, we need to create silent spaces ourselves. A silent room in our homes or places of work. Oases of silence in nature, a silent hour at the beginning of each day. These are approaches that work and are becoming commonplace in this new era of `lay monasticism´ or `positive mysticism´. They do not emerge of themselves; they must be established and cultivated in our daily structures. Once they do take hold, peace of mind begins to emerge.
This is the great good news. A New(er) Testament for the twenty-first century, a century in which we can reap the harvests of depth psychology, neuroscience, behavioural psychology, the recovery movement, psychosomatic medicine, and positive mysticism, to form a powerful new whole. I see no other path towards world peace. Everything else has been tried innumerable times and has always been shown to fail. Let’s work at it from the inside out, together.
Peace!
