Where peace comes from and how it starts
Among modern research perspectives there is a physical origin of peace that has been witnessed by many of us.
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 described situation.
Imagine.
You were born only a few seconds ago. As a newborn child, your first visible ‘universe’ is just the arm’s length zone of your visual awareness - limited by your neonatal sight. The first images you see are a flurry of blue shapes – hands doing things around you. Very soon those hand shapes disappear. Instead that same small ‘universe’ is filled with 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 hours pass 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]