Summary. (to follow) ...............
Where peace comes from is an open question.
Answering it is complicated by the lack of an agreed definition.
It's further complicated by the wide range of common usages of the word; for example as an event (the resolution of a conflict? or end of a war?), as a place (that individuals feel to be peaceful or quiet?), as an ideal or a spiritual condition (that will vary with personal values?), as a social condition (described from collation, analysis and synthesis from observation, reflection and discussion?), or simply as an 'idea'.
Setting out to make peace stronger entails another complication - how do we measure peace? There are no agreed units for amounts or strength of peace. Instead we can refer to softer evidence that might derive from any of the above usages: the number of years since that war ended; the observable characteristics by which a place comes to be accepted as peaceful; the day-to-day feelings that characterise peace in a community.
In those ways we have numbers, visible clues and sensations that relate to peace and that useful in its place as approximations; 'proxies' such as calm and unexcited feelings or expressions of contentment.
A physical origin of peace
Among modern research perspectives there is a physical origin of peace that has been witnessed by many of us as the emergence of human contentment.
Try this 'mind-experiment'.
As you read the next few lines pause and close your eyes for a little thought between each sentence. Try to put yourself into the situation described as follows.
Imagine you were born only a few seconds ago. As a newborn child, your first ‘universe’ is just the arm’s length zone of your limited awareness. The first images you see may be a flurry of shapes – perhaps hands doing things around you. After a while those shapes disappear. Instead that same small ‘universe’ is filled with the shape of a human face as you have your first social encounter. The face is smiling. It is the face of your adoring mother. You stare into their gaze. For some reason your lips twitch. As time passes that face follows you calmly as new comforting things happen. Your own face and body come to show a relaxed contentment that merits the status of ‘peace’. That contentment is a new peace - your very own new 'inner peace'.
The first hours and days of a new life may not all go quite that smoothly.
But those changes are widely reported.
It’s known too that a newborn’s peacefulness has limits that may be broken by sudden unexpected experiences.
That scenario for the origin of peace points helpfully to two conditions that enable a newborn’s peace to thrive:
- one condition is the newborn’s naturally restricted ‘zone of awareness’
- a second condition is the ‘calm, sensitive care’ provided by the mother.
The mother’s care performs several functions:
- the feeding and direct physical care of the newborn
- mediation of newborn’s direct physical experiences
- protection from unexpected experiences
- mediation to soften and welcome the unexpected
Together those same conditions will promote further growth of newborn’s peace as their physical growth pushes them into successively larger zones of awareness.
In this model, the origin of the newborn’s new peace is visible as the emergence of their contentment with all they perceive in their tiny zone of awareness.
A description of the subsequent ‘Growth of Peace’ will be the subject of a later Post [Here]