Here are some questions
I’ve been thinking about recently:
- How can
humans feel at peace?
- Can love by
itself be an appropriate aim?
I asked myself the
second question mostly because of the way I answered my first question, so
let’s start there.
How can humans feel at
peace? I was sitting in church this morning and the pastor said something like,
“We feel most at peace when we trust.” He’s talking about the Judeo-Christian
concept of a surreal tranquility of sorts, flowing from God to humans who
resign themselves to the complex and worrisome difficulties of life,
attributing all events as being the will of God; something that will result in
an eventual good, even if the present seems wholly bad.
You will keep in perfect
peace
those whose minds are
steadfast,
because they trust in you. -
Isaiah 26:3
It’s definitely a
powerful idea, and it would seem that the appeal of it transcends time as all
of human history has been marked by pain and suffering. But it made me start
thinking about what’s really the source of that peace. I’ve personally had
experiences where I went through the mental exercise (as best as it can be
described) of taking the object of worry and “handing it over” to God, and it
definitely did result in a sort of peace. I think most people who grew up or are
currently religious can relate (I think one of the primary aims of most world
religions is to explain the human condition of pain and suffering and offer
some sort of solution), but I want to unpack that exercise a little more and
explore other methods to achieve that same result.
Let’s draw a line around
the word peace. I’m more interested in the concept in a spiritual sense. I
think everyone has a practice or a series of habits that they design themselves
or have mimicked from birth that are designed to relieve stress or pain,
distract themselves from it, or make them forget about their circumstances
completely. For example:
- Smoking a cigarette
- Working out
- Eating
- Video Games
- Netflix
- Sex / Masturbation
- Music
But for my purposes, I
want to focus on another category of exercise, the kind where instead of just
relieving or dulling their sensitivities, one can transcend negative
energy and achieve a higher state of relaxation, calm temperament and an
elevated positive mindset. Some practices other than the Christian one I
explain above that are of this spiritual nature that come to mind are:
- Prayer
- Meditation
- Attempting
to achieve nirvana (the Buddhist concept of cessation of suffering)
- Recognizing
one’s place in the universe and the harmony of all things - Hindu
- Reaching a
mental state where we no longer react passionately or emotionally to
events we cannot control - Stoicism
- etc.
- Music
- Poetry
- Visual stimulus
- Certain kinds of psychedelic
substances
- Etc.
I’d imagine the aim of
the individual who participates in these actions would be quite complex and it
wouldn’t be accurate to boil their motives down to the singular goal of
acquiring peace, but evaluating the end result from an unbiased position, I think
it’s fair to conclude that some measure of this transcendent spiritual peace
can be attained through each of these methods.
Anyway, I think the
first thing a person needs to get this kind of peace is an understanding of the
world which includes firstly an acceptance of one’s own existence, and
secondly, the existence of good and evil. Accepting these two concepts, peace
can be described as the absence of bad, which can be the state within which one
is existing. It’s my opinion that the natural state of the world is quite the
opposite of peace, which is why we (sometimes unconsciously) strive for it.
My argument is mostly
made on mere personal experience, but here goes anyway. I feel that I’m the
most at peace when I am working towards a goal, and I give my all for it. The
goal must be good, in that it produces good. By working towards some sort of
lofty aim in this manner, we are taking our place as spiritual beings with the
duty and responsibility to use our great power to make the world around us
better or worse through our every action. In the words of Jordan Peterson,
"When you speak
truth, you speak paradise into being, when you speak falsely you speak hell
into being. With every decision that you make, you decide for yourself whether
you’re going to tilt the world towards hell, or towards heaven. That’s the
burden you bear for your existence."
Maybe I’ll answer the 2nd
question in another post if anyone is interested.
