UNNATURAL PEACE
PEACE! Scream it loudly. Grab people by the shoulders and scream it into their face. Force people to experience it. Demand it. Make it legally binding
Well, why not. Nothing else has worked to get either individuals or nations to take seriously the pursuit of peace.
Perhaps there is nothing natural or automatic about peace. Our genetic evolutionary background prepares us for mass sporting events and mindless entertainment and serving in the army, but not for peace. The pursuit of peace, inner or international, was never a prerequisite to survival.
Cultivate crops, kill food, compile money, these reflect our genetic inheritance. Conquer, combat, control, these have sustained our survival.
Pursue peace?! From where did such an impracticality arise? Exactly. That is the question. For it does arise, a longing, an instinct, an evolutionary anomaly never quite fully quieted by even a few million years of fang and claw survival.
Pursue peace. Whence arises this nagging admonition? Why do we wish it were viable, even if we don't believe it is? All that has made us human, uncompromising biological and societal evolutionary dictates, lead not to meditation or mediation.
Peace. Within and between. Still unrealistic after all these millennia. But what about the next millennia? Do we not hope that our descendants might individually and collectively experience a little more peace than we? Might it be that it is not our carnal evolutionary development that has made us human, but "human", in the greatest potential of that word, is what we are called to in spite of that family background of survival of the most ruthless.
Pursuit of peace, an indefensible longing detracting from personal productivity and risking tribal vulnerability.
Longing for Peace, a whispering hint of the
nature and potential of our souls, of what "human" can mean when
liberated from the carnal evolution with which Creation and Creator cast us
toward our destiny.
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