Two Thoughts for Inner and World Peace

Two thoughts for both inner-peace and to co-create world peace:

• Nothing and no-one is better nor worse than anything or anyone else; and
• There is no encumbent duty of existance - there is nothing that one has to do to survive.

• Humanity has only one soul and you have full access to it. This requires that one not deny - and pin upon evil others - aspects of one's own humanity.
• We are one. One is not better than another - we are all expressions af of different aspects of the same humanity.

Re: Two Thoughts for Inner and World Peace

Darkchanter, hello!

I fully agree, except I must be confused on the survival issue.

I can see that we have a strong drive to give of ourselves, and that we will often reflexively place the needs of others before our own personal safety. But we do have to eat, right?  And unfortunately, I have to eat to survive. In our world, where we see so much scarcity, there is a lot of competition for commodities and for ideologies to govern the distribution of resources.

But I am sure this is tangential to your point.

And you are so right: Judgment appears to be a very strong dynamic working against peace. Any attempt to quantify the worth of a human being is to miss entirely the most important point: that we are one.

Well said!

Fortunately, this is an inside job. As more people are able to observe and neutralize their own judgments, the scaffolding supporting the vertical positioning in terms of some narrow-minded and arbitrary assignment of worth will disappear into thin air. Which is really where it exists anyway…

Re: Two Thoughts for Inner and World Peace

Thankyou, Mary :)

Scarcity is a dellusion. We have the food and the other resources (such as logistical capability) to feed everyone. This is an observation. there are a number of empirical facts to support it: every day, America throws away enough food to feed half the population; 20% of humanity owns 80% of our resources; there is plenty of money and technical skill spent on space programs and weapons manufacturing, etc.

It would seem that, generally, we're too scared of running out to simply share. So the problem is fear, not scarcity, by my reasoning.

Re: Two Thoughts for Inner and World Peace

Absolutely!  And distribution systems are really based on the values and ideology of the system producing them.

But fear is a global problem. Not in the sense of all around the world, but as in affecting everything within the bubble of our own perception. Fear causes us to lose intelligence, to recoil from ambiguity. Fear causes us to focus on the most superficial aspects of events and situations. And it causes us to narrow our focus from the needs of the community to the needs of our families or ourselves.

Not everyone will reflexively protect others at their own expense. Whether they do or not is largely a function of fear.

Vast implications….

Also, it strikes me that the illusion of scarcity is reinforced as a function of the distribution system: if it is unjust, there will appear pockets of severe deprivation and pockets of concentrated wealth. Hmmm….. What have we here?

Re: Two Thoughts for Inner and World Peace

I agree with you in general. Please allow me to make (some more) subtle differentiations…

Distribution systems, I'd say, are affected by the ideology of those using them, which is fear based. The materialistic and wealthy have the opinion that because they've “made it” that anyone who hasn't is at personal fault. (“Lazy welfare moochers”, and so on.)

The obsevable fact is that we are not presented with equal opportunities. And it is the (ab)use of the distribution system (economic market) by those who would curtail and horde the flow of resources that causes this imbalance of material opportunity.

Re: Two Thoughts for Inner and World Peace

Good point!

Maybe just semantics, but I understand the distribution system almosts like a description of people's behavior.  So that the distribution system is not so much like say, an irrigation conduit, distributing water to farmers, but is actually the aggregate of all the people who work within it, who actually form it moment by moment by their behavior, much as we form the systems in our homes and in our own lives.

A family system, for instance, does not sit in the living room for people to use as needed. It is an evolving manifestation of the dynamics between people as they interact with each other and negotiate their needs. I see a distribution system like this, only bigger.

I absolutely agree that the curtailing and hoarding of resources causes imbalance of opportunity. But the curtailers and hoarders, being fear-based, actually become agents of fear, injecting fear into the many who are adversely effected by their unloving ministrations.

Then they fear the victims and build gated communities to protect themselves from what they wreak with their own hands.

And the gated communities become isolated as the throng outside gets larger and angrier…

And the system loses its balance and chaos erupts…

We have seen it so many times before. Just not here, and now, yet.

Re: Two Thoughts for Inner and World Peace

It is the behaviour of a composite social organism, yes. By way of elaboration: one's personal physician being trustworthy does not imply that one should trust the medical profession.

Re: Two Thoughts for Inner and World Peace

Absolutely. As if we become increasingly delusional as we aggregate in fear. But yes, no need to generalize the specifics to the whole. The whole is like, maybe, the least common denominator, or something… Like the famous committee that can formulate nothing more coherent than its least coherent member. It doen't mean that all members are incoherent, only the mean…