It has often been suggested to me, in no uncertain terms that enlightenment is impossible: "How is it possible to be eternally at peace? It's a great idea but can't be done!"
So with cynicism, sarcasm and normalized resignation we scoff at the possibility of everlasting peace, whether internal or external, in our hearts or in the world.
But isn't it peculiar that we are perfectly capable at living at war for years. Isn't it odd that we can persist in internal psychological tension and conflict for our entire lives. How is it that we can live in families constantly at odds with one another, "odds" so intense that it all too often leads to murder?
We can put all this energy, time and worry into stress, struggle, familial violence and war, to name only a few of the ways we find to suffer, but we can't find peace. Actually we can't even really find relaxation. And surely joy and love are also far down the agenda of normal possibilities.
The usual excuse as to why suffering is "easy" and normal, if not absolutely unavoidable, is that "that's just the way things are." That's the nature of things. As if we have not all to often chosen what brings suffering. As if we have nothing to do with the lives we live, with how we think and act in our world.
So we continue to suffer even more by resisting the proposition that it's not what happens to us that brings us fulfillment but how we respond to what happens. What would it be like to choose peace, joy and love? To act on peace, joy and love?
What actually might become of our lives and the world if we invested 20 minutes a day in peace? Peace might actually grow, might spread, might become normal. It may become the very condition of joy and love.
Desire and scarcity come to mind as the challenges to finding or maintaining a calm equilibrium, which may be another way of describing peace. Desire is an artifact of the mind, and scarcity is an apparent condition of the physical world. When desire meets scarcity there is a potential for conflict if one person or group has what another wants, and a fair exchange cannot be made. Much human activity has been directed toward reducing scarcity, but not much toward the reduction of desire.
ReplyDeleteAssuming scarcity is far from necessary and desire's immanent goal is peace, possibly rather than reducing desire we need to open it full throttle such that it can reach its only fulfilling or self-fulfilling resoluteness and resolution, namely, the attainment of peace.
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