Monday 26 December 2016

Peace, the perfect gift.

Peace, the perfect gift.


To best understand the concept of real peace, ultimately world peace and how we could share and give it, I guess we ought to try to imagine what it might actually look like if it were possible to possess it.

So what is peace to you, just the absence of war?

What would world peace look and feel like?

Have you any ideas of how amazing peace would be and of what value it would be to the inhabitants of the earth. Would it be very much different to what we have so far experienced throughout history?




John Lennon and Yoko Ono amongst a whole range of people throughout history have tried to describe their ideal and what it would epitomise if it came to be. The song IMAGINE by the Lennon Ono’s is one of the most well-known advocates of this idea as is the long since created give peace a chance. To begin with they suggest that what we do is to imagine a world that is different to the one that we currently have. A world that is perhaps governed by concerns and objectives far from the way our world has been shaped up until this point. I shall share the lyric below, to serve as another timely reminder just what a vision of fairness and equality it offered us.

"Imagine"

Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today... Aha-ah...

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace... You...

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world... You...

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one






It is my feeling that what was being said or implied here in the song was simply to reconsider all of the fundamentals that have been causing huge problems on our planet. Not criticising particularly but asking, do these ideologies and philosophies give human beings a chance to enjoy the peace that may come if we didn’t let them interfere? It may be fair to say that simply following traditional perspectives is not in itself helpful to bring about world peace. Or we would already have it wouldn’t we? Maybe more openness and a little more compassion and empathy is what we need to help us evolve past this point.





I personally believe that we have never actually given peace a real chance, not with any serious intention. I mean that we talk about peace and security in quite nefarious terminology, in ways that haven’t allowed abstinence from violence to take the lead. Other than peace activists and campaigners who beg for peace to get a chance, the authoritarian elements of our world keep a strangle hold over the methods we can employ to achieve world peace. It really doesn’t serve the benefactors of war to stop using fear and propaganda in the desire to sell and deploy, fire and profit from weapons. In this I’m speaking predominantly of the arms trade and weapons manufacturers. Then there are the companies and corporations that benefit from the reconstruction programs of the war zones, often notably the same corporations. There is absolutely no evidence that anyone who lived in a city, region, country or nation that was bombed by armed forces has ever found a lasting peace and sense of security as a result of that campaign of violence. Currently Syria and Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq the Yemen, come swiftly to mind. Then are the many attempts to justify acts of violence even those using weapons of mass destruction as a ‘necessary means of war’.

It is said by our mainstream media that when the western nations use these methods we are defending our values and civilization against terrorism. When the countries we invade respond or retaliate their actions are not seen as people fighting for their freedoms, but again, as acts of terrorism against us. Repeatedly the use of these words banded about by our propagandist media defy a logical argument if a dictionary would be consulted. Terrorism is best defined as the acts we employ, equally as such of any retaliation by those people responding to unlawful invasion. What seems evident to the careful eye of scrutiny is that a high level of bigotry and hypocrisy exist that will always favour us, the western world and our carefully constructed views. I find this appalling though that fabrication of truth is so heavily engaged in, to steer the general views towards a biased and perverted outcome. Namely the confusing of people from hearing and seeing the reality of the situations in front of them, and the attempts to hide the perpetrators of lies from the shame that these actions deserve.





One of the real obstacles to world peace is marked as a lack of desire on the part of human beings to seriously acknowledge our inter-connectedness. For us to realise that the negative actions that we enact upon others actually has a negative effect upon our own wellbeing is unlikely. Likewise that positive actions result in shared positive outcomes. Cause and effect are natural laws of the world in which we live. The wind blows and things move even if not in our part of the globe, tiny often imperceptible movements go unnoticed but are affecting the overall balance of life. In the matter of peace if we are not willing to consider the arguments of the other side we cannot ever hope to find solutions that incorporate the desires of all people.

Evidently this also brings us to the matter of equality. An understanding of whether human beings are born with equal rights to life, material resources and a fair share of democratic governance. I have seen no evidence that real democracy is in action in any part of the world. Human beings have partitioned off various bits of the planet, staking some claim, god given or otherwise and insist that this gives them ‘rights’ that others are not allowed to have. The use of this presumed superiority has given rise to most of the despicable crimes against other human beings and the other species alive on this planet too. Human beings don’t seem capable of accepting that we are indeed an integral part of the natural world and not in any way superior to it. Yes we have our consciousness, we have an awareness that seems evidently different to the other beings on the face of the planet and beneath the oceans, but no evidence exist to suggest that this in and of itself gives us the superior mandate to make all the decisions about the fate of others. This is an act of gross stupidity I believe, and we ought to quickly rectify this if we ever hope to find real peace.





Historically many ancients knew that to live in harmony with our environments the spaces where we chose to live, was a sustainable and beneficial way to coexist. This has also been littered by much abuse of course, I’m not naïve to this, however for millennium human beings lived with far more care and compassion to others. Those that respected nature, the animals and creatures they shared their particular part of the globe with, had the greatest sense of peace. Native American tribes hold many things sacred for example which stopped them abusing the natural world as we are becoming ever more aware of with actions like the Lakota tribes responses to DAPL and the insanity of pushing oil filled pipes through both sacred lands and beneath the sources for life, lakes and rivers.








Chief Seattle famous for his many observations of the interconnectedness notably said:





What a pity the majority of people on this planet do not respect these ideas as if they were worthy of greater consideration. Yes it can be seen from historical accounts that peace in even those days was rare, but it wasn’t the native Indians that found it incomprehensible to be respectful to others was it? The desire to conquer the lands of others, to take their resources at any cost by any means was not initiated by that creed they lived by. Sadly it seems to have been promulgated by the greed of the kind of mentality that went about enforcing with violence, the idea that one man is inherently better than another. This was pretty well the attitude of the British Empire and all others that came before. We had a King, a Queen, a religious ideology that made our god more important than others and therefore a licence to spread our views throughout the globe, irrelevant of what was there before. By violence and arrogance we shoved our rightfulness down everyone’s throats. And if they didn’t appreciate that, then we just obliterated them and recorded a history that made us seem victorious with god’s backing.

So can we see that violence and fear, not peace and love has shaped the world into what we have today?






The Indian statesman Gandhi once said:












Einstein also famously said:











Quotes from others who have made peace a priority:








































And the lists could go on forever really. So many people know that a different world IS possible, a world where peace love and harmony are the rule not the exception. It’s just that currently they are not the ones governing it, simply doing it. Those governing it, those that occupy another attitude don’t want to give peace a chance. For to do so, would mean a total transformation to the status quo and the ridiculously unjust and unequal order that serves the greedy and not the needy.




This song and video below I hope will go some way to helping to continue the messages of Peace that so many people have wished for, have dreamed of over the past decades, centuries. It is my wish that the message is shared far and wide a hope for mankind, for ordinary people to receive the blessings that could come if we really did, ‘GIVE PEACE A CHANCE’.





Please, become informed, study peace like your life depends upon it. It does!

The buck stops with us, with me and with you and if we can’t see the dreams we share come to fruition we may never get off of this merry go round of hate fear and disaster.

A sobering thought, but doable…!!!





LOVE PEACE AND HARMONY. 

Peaceful Warrior.



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