Why World Peace Our Way Is Preposterous

Tomorrow a number of people including David Lynch, Movie Director Extraterrestriale, will be gathering in Washington, D.C., where the usual suspects of the international media will sit through another press conference explaining how Yogic Flying and Groups of Vedic Peace Professionals can create world peace.

Which is all well and good, but in some ways, let's face it, its no fun.

It doesn't matter that they are right, that countless scientific studies back what they say, nor that the opposite ideas, more munitions, restrictions, and let's blow up the terrorists if/when we find them (meanwhile our soldiers will be the potshot targets of every disaffected Iraqi for a long time to come) have never and will never work.

None of that matters, because..................

What we are saying is preposterous.

And why? Because it is so opposite of the problem.

Explaining this is like getting people to look out of the back of their heads. No eyes there. Nope. Can't look.

And it's no fun constantly explaining the preposterous to people, since it seems, they just don't get it. There's not much joy in having a completely viable answer to the major ills of society and that pesky little world peace problem if, apparently, the bulk of society will never, ever get it.

The problem is that people want to DO something about the problem(s).

But it is an excess of DOING that has created problems.

How in the world (say all these doers), could sitting quietly with your eyes closed have ANY effect on our pressing problems?

These people are so stuck in the field of doing, that they can't see anything but doing.

But peace has never been an action.

You don't do things and then have peace at the end.

You do peace and then do nicer things from that level.

The "practical" people say this won't work. They have some (I suppose) political solution, some military solution, or some "increased communications among peoples" solution. And as nice as the latter is, it's just as empty as the other stuff.

These "practical, down to earth" people have obviously forgotten their history. When did force ever create peace? When did some new political idea create peace? The 20th Century featured millions upon millions of deaths over differing political ideologies. And then there were those other 19 centuries, too.

In the Bible there was the story of the brass serpent raised up in the wilderness, where all the sick members of Moses' entourage had to do was look at the serpent and they would be cured. But some wouldn't even do that, and died.

That brass serpent thing, of course, was preposterous, too.

It seems that the answer to our deep need for peace requires that we assume a completely abject state of intellectual surrender, and accept that something completely (apparently) preposterous can work, has worked, will work.

Tomorrow the journalists will attend, listen politely, and then, in most cases, go back to reporting the "hard" news.

You can yell in multidecibels, and some people will never hear. Imagine how hard it is for us to cut through the clutter of do-gooder solutions with the idea of stopping action, leaving the field of turmoil, closing the eyes, starting the Transcendental Meditation program, and allowing the mind to settle down, the body to relax, until a sort of all-permeating wholeness of consciousness is experienced, where a wholistic field of pure consciousness is really the dominant experience, more dominant even than the physical experince of the body, which sits in the middle of this conscious field as a sort of wisp floating in an actual, palpable field of what can only be called bliss, at which time the individual is no longer simply a person on earth, but rather a sort of tuning fork of the divine, radiating total unity and purity out into the environment.

Buckminster Fuller said "I seem to be a verb." The TM meditator says, "I seem to be reverb," as she experiences within and reverberates in the environment an infinite field of vibrant consciousness.

This is far more powerful than any created thing. Faster (and more beautiful) than a speeding bullet, More powerful than any motive.

This, this invisible thing, that you can't see, that you can't figure out, which is not an action but pure being individually and collectively radiated into the warring environment, is the answer, the cure, and the only way to soften all the limited, stressed out, mentally constructed doing that got us into this war/terrorism/then-the-US-forgets-itself mess in the first place.

If only it wasn't so preposterous. This however, is your punishment, if you don't get it. You have to be intellectually humbled and accept that something so unlikely as sitting with your eyes closed for 20 minutes twice a day could be the building block of world peace.

It's the same drumbeat we've been sounding out for so many years, because there is no terrorist but you. There is no war but you. You are the microcosm that makes the macrocosm. If/when you create peace within, and I mean deep peace, deep, cosmic, enlightened peace, then you've done your part to make sure that at least one person is not part of the war generating machine of collective stress.

It's so preposterous. So unthinkable.

And it's exactly that which makes it so likely to work.

Morning Haiku

Tuesday 5 a.m.
and your tiny curled fingers
sleep, holding my thumb