Peacing things together
Maybe peace is not a static concept
I used to cringe when I was younger and hear people give a beauty pageant answer to questions about changing the world. I wish for world peace. Come on. It felt cliché and so obvious. I mean, of course everyone wants world peace.
Don’t they?
If I’m honest, I still cringe a bit inside when I hear people say that, but not because I’m against world peace. It bothers me because I feel like it’s an unfinished statement.
What does world peace even mean?
Throughout my life, my dad used to read a ton of self-help and development books. Many a Saturday morning were spent sitting cross legged on our taupe 80’s living room carpet under a cloud of Rothman’s cigarette smoke while my dad, in yesterday’s dress shirt and a thin cotton chador wrapped around his waist and draping down to his ankles, would give us the newest sermon. The topics varied. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. The Power of Your Subconscious Mind. The Religions of Man. I still remember one particular session when, whilst reading a book about hypnosis, he felt my siblings and I were the fitting recipients for him to practice on. Thinking I had absorbed this wisdom, I proceeded to brag to my 5th grade classmates that I could hypnotize them (sadly, all I made people do was shed tears from their drying eyes because I wouldn’t let them blink while they stared at a spot I made them focus on).
Despite being his occasional oblivious guinea pigs, we would listen mesmerized as he explained these concepts to our young minds between puffs of his cigarette. It instilled a lifelong thirst and curiosity for self-development amongst my siblings. Business strategy. Mind and body connections. Psychological growth. It was all welcome, and we devoured it all.
But it wasn’t until I started learning about energy that I really began to feel something percolate inside of me. THIS was the interesting stuff.
I couldn’t get enough of it. I felt like an innate knowledge that was always inside of me was suddenly being given a voice. Everything in the universe is energy. Yes, of course! I was fascinated by the fact that everything is just vibrations, frequencies. The laptop I’m writing on. The chair I’m sitting on. My old cat sleeping at my feet. The birds chirping outside. The clouds floating above. The wind, the trees, the stars … my thoughts and emotions. All of it. And when different vibrating things come into proximity of one another, they will slowly start to match their frequencies. Whoa.
“Everything is energy and that's all there is to it. Match the frequency of the reality you want and you cannot help but get that reality. This is not philosophy. This is physics.” ~ Albert Einstein
Have you ever seen videos about the scale of the universe? The first time I remember seeing something like this was in the opening scene of the movie Contact. These scale sequences usually start somewhere local, like a child playing or a house or a person doing some activity, and then slowly the video pans outs. Sounds are everywhere: voices, animals, radios, vehicles, all overlapping in an unharmonized soundtrack. Then, the perspective rises up into the sky, so you start to see houses, yards, neighbourhoods, and cities. Continue zooming out, and streets and city lights start to fade away and landscape becomes one mass, floating amidst oceans. Zoom out more. Our beautiful planet in its effervescent brilliance is a singular orb, soon joined by our luminous moon, and then they begin to slowly shrink in size as the perspective continues to zoom out. Planets drift out of sight, sound dissipates, and for an endless time what seems expansive and eternal in the peripheral begins to fade away into nothingness, into a soft pink smoke that is just another galaxy in an endless sea of space as the eternal continues to pass by.
When we zoom out, everything becomes no-thing. It becomes one thing.
Peace. Tranquility. Stillness.
Peace can feel easy when we zoom out. When we look at the whole from the outside and say: It’s all the same thing. It’s all equal. It’s all divine. It all matters.
But then, when you zoom in, that’s when stuff gets a bit trickier.
When you zoom in, you start to see the details. Details are defined and separate. Too many details can feel messy and complicated. Details sometimes feel unfair and unjust. It is in the details where we start to experience differences and conflict and other-ness, and peace becomes something of a seemingly impossible illusory state.
And the problem is, when do you stop zooming? When we are panning out in the universe, at what point in our journey through space and time do we say we’ve gone far enough? Or do we continue for eternity … isn’t that the point?
And when we zoom in, where is the finish line? Do we stop from a perspective of viewing another person or group? Should we stop at the point just outside of ourselves, observing who we are from an outsider’s view? Or, could we continue, adjusting the focus of our lens to the smallest details within ourselves, until we have reached our souls and come full circle into a new vastness of space, where there is nothing but infinity.
My sense is we often stop too soon.
I used to oscillate between prioritizing perspective. Zoom out, and see the world as one. Zoom in, and focus on inner peace. Zoom out just a little bit, and create harmonious community. Zoom back in a tiny bit more, focus on self-reflection and growth.
Frequency.
Maybe peace is not a static concept. Maybe, peace is a dynamic process, oscillating high and low, back and forth, inwards and outwards.
Perhaps peace in our world starts with peace in our hearts. Building our relationship with our own soul, remembering our divinity and value, sitting in silence and showering ourselves with acceptance and compassion and love may be our starting point.
And then riding the wave of expansion, embodying cooperation and justice and respect and compassion and love and radiating it out across borders of culture, race, age, creed, sex and context.
And then, holding it within again.