Peace

A rare moment of clarity: I realise that I’m not going to be here forever, that my own transient, anxious and caffeine-fuelled path through life is, has been and will forever be completely meaningless if I do not in some small way make this world a better place and room for improvement quite clearly exists in what is bordering upon an infinite estate of possibility. I have studied this world and existence in great depth, distilling core facts and problems to their simplest components and sought to bring an intellectual self-awareness into it in ways and places that have only ever stumbled into failure and despondency. It takes a long time to realise that failure often enough occurs not because you are incorrect but precisely because you are correct.

The unity and unification we may not all seek but most certainly all need is a mystery and spectral image of some unknowable state of mind and life or existence that is mischievously indefinable in ways that forever elude us but that which we know and viscerally feel must in some way be there. It is precisely in and as the presence of absence that unity, freedom and peace manifest – the unbounded remains beyond comprehension, along with the infinite and the playful child-like smile of nothingness itself.

A reason why we can not obtain peace is because we treat it as though it were just another thing, an object or artefact to control and know like any other conceptual technology or relational state of being and matter or information but there, right at the start, we have made our fatal mistake. Peace is – in our lives, minds and as rendered through human words – the absence of fear, of hate, of greed and conflict. It is that unity and exceptional state of human self-organisational intuition and insight as indefinitely-extensible creativity and living experience that is never present when we chase it because it is completely unlike any other destination or fact. It is as a manifestation of the (almost) entirely unintelligible self-containment of a Universe that effectively and recursively, mischievously reproduces itself in ways so utterly complex and sophisticated – and yet mystifyingly simple – that it is not only comprehensible just as – and indistinguishable from – nothingness but is in fact identical to and an instance of the actual presence of it.

Peace, freedom, love and unity all existing in and as their own counter-intuitive absence in the world as a class of very special, very precious no-things. Before you dismiss that concept stop for a moment and try to intuitively feel the reality behind it and that you can and never will directly grasp because it is not the kind of thing that adapts to or fits into the shape of linear language, reflexive cognition or any other method of narrative explanation.

The sum total of all entities, artefacts, systems and experiences, of all pasts, presents and futures, the aggregate singularity of all living and passing away, of all time and all space, all dimensional extension and complexity – this is peace and it is not only indistinguishable from nothing, it is nothingness itself. It is only the reflexive games that language and a forever struggling cognition play with our lives and intelligence that leads us astray here. No amount of authority, administration, narrative or fiction will bring us closer to the goal and in all truth, these cultural abstractions only ever (and enigmatically) alienate us from it.

Gracefully acknowledging this mystery is subtle and can be challenging for a mind that eternally and reflexively seeks non-existent closure and completeness in explanations, technologies and identities of insecurity-bound hollow tribal affectation. That we can know that we can not know is itself an indirect vision of the paradox at the heart and abstract soul of life; I can extrapolate countless logical, technical and intellectual dimensions here but how will that actually help any of us? We can know peace by its conspicuous absence and in embracing this void without effort or the fear of other, loss, death, absence and existential emptiness that has haunted us since we first evolved sentience, we will find there and quite to our surprise that we have finally arrived at what was never really a destination at all.