Peace Through Strength?

I was recently reading some comments that followed an Internet article concerning how many nuclear weapons we need, and from some of the comments, I have solidified my belief we are insane.  Here is a comment paraphrased: "Through strength comes peace". This is of course the philosophy held that as long as we have thousands of nuclear war heads we will have peace because nobody in their right mind would attack us knowing we would blast them from the face of the earth. There are only two things wrong with this position. One is "that anybody in their right mind" rules out those that could care less about their lives and are not in their right mind. Second, is that we have had thousands of nuclear weapons since the early 1950's and we have not been at peace. There was Korea, Viet Nam, Iraq, and now Afghanistan, not to mention a few others. What do we make of this? For one thing, all of these wars, or conflicts if you prefer, were of our own volition, so I guess we could say that having thousands of nuclear weapons have prevented us from being attacked, except for the attacks of 9/11. And since 9/11 wasn't obviously perpetrated by a country we couldn't nuke them out of existence. And even if we had been able to identify one culpable country we still would not have nuked them out of existence. We would have used conventional weaponry to defend our honor. So do we want peace?

It is obvious that our nuclear arsenal is being held only to prevent those countries that also have a nuclear arsenal from attacking us. But since we have been in at least four major conflicts since the end of WWII then it is also obvious that we do not want peace. And it is also obvious that strength does not bring peace. Strength through the posession of nuclear armament is a false sense of security and certainly not an avenue to peace.

And this brings me to the question, "What is peace?" Certainly there have been nations in the history of civilization that have possessed superior strength to all the nations of the earth, and yet we have been warring with each other for thousands of years. Is it that our definition of peace is somehow convoluted and it is not really peace that we seek or want? Taking a closer look at peace through strength it appears that by having superior strength is nothing more than scaring our adversaries to the point they fall in line with our way of thinking. And if they don't we will attack them as is evident from Korea, Viet Name, Iraq, etc. This does not work because to fall in line with our way of thinking is asking them to give up their way of thinking, and their culture, and their traditions, etc. That will never work! If you have become over weight, look at how hard it is to lose it. If you have become addicted look at how hard it is to get off your addiction. Now the peace we seek is asking an entire nation or country to give up its ways. Under this situation peace is unobtainable and it appears our desire for peace has always been a defective goal as it is not really peace, but rather subjugation.

True peace has not come to this earth because true peace is a disolving of boundries, a melding of ways, which appears to us as a sense of loss. Even if we had the magic wand and dissolved all boundries, made everybody the same race and spoke the same language, we would still not have world peace. We would have conflicts over imaginary territories and the the fact that speaking accents have developed and "those" people sound funny. There would be conflicts over natural resource, methods of education, and for sure, religion and politics, and the list can go on and on. The point here is that no matter our situation here on earth we will have conflict because we want conflict. And the reason we want conflict is to assure a state of separation continues to exist between us, for becoming one is what scares us to death. Even to the point we bring death to each other.

Later...

Upside down

"... a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma." Winston Churchill.

Churchill was speaking on a 1939 radio broadcast referring to Russian intent; little did he know that he easily could have been describing the game we all play that keeps us in the dark about who we really are and hides any truth that may exist.

Said a bit differently, it could go something like this: Being insane, thinking we are sane. However could we find a truth or an answer to anything if we are living in an illusion? Insanity is living in a world of illusion and believing it is real, and if we are insane then any saneness would appear to be insanity. As an example, we all have moments of insanity where we hold a thought we believe to be true accusing the truth holder of lying. The thought we hold in our mind is held by virtue of its value to us and no matter the evidence towards its falsity, we hold it as true. Is this not a moment of insanity? How long are our moments? And how long have we held a belief that we value even to the point where we have come to know it is a lie?

Those that we observe to be insane amongst us come to believe in the reality of their thoughts, and as such, their thoughts become their reality. This is the power of our mind. The question then becomes, "What degrees of insanity are there?" To think our spouse is having an affair and then to concoct scenarios in our mind that proves our thoughts are real is called jealousy. Is this not a degree of insanity? And where does this movie come into existence? In our minds of course.

Quite a bit of this insanity is occurring within our current internet political articles, and the comments section following the articles. I was just reading a story this morning and one of the readers was  ranting on about the government forcing something upon him on one hand, yet espousing the government to force something upon us that he holds dear. So the reader really didn't have anything against government intervention in our lives, rather what the contents of the intervention. But his comments would clearly leave one to believe he was against government intervention. Is he lying to himself? Is this a degree of insanity where he has come to believe in something under the guise of something else? How much of our lives are of this level of delusion?

Our delusions are born from our values, for what we hold as values dictates our beliefs and our actions. Little do we know how deep into our behavioral instincts beliefs and values rule. Our tribal instincts are clear examples of this. Whatever our tribe we have great difficulty accepting another tribes values. Why is this? It is because we seek security and our tribal instincts bind us together seeking security. This we value to the point we ignore any values an outside tribe possesses, ignore our faulty values, even to the point of our demise, which is what we were trying to prevent in the first place. Is this not a picture of our warring nature? And is this not a classic definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result. We delude ourselves into thinking our beliefs and our values are superior to those of our enemies (they're enemies mainly because they hold different values) and have been fighting for centuries under the illusions that we are seeking peace. Peace is our illusion, conflict is our value.

More on this later....

Dreaming the Future

It was the latter part of 1969 and I was on a paid vacation in the Republic of Viet Nam enjoying an after dinner drink with a couple of buddies at a beautiful resort (the NCO club)  in Tay Ninh province. The drink of choice, New York Taylor champagne, was also the default as there was nothing else to drink. None of us cared for champagne, but it was all they had and it was cheap. There were four of us and we drank two or three bottles apiece and we all wandered back to our hooches stumbling drunk. I woke up the next morning with the second most horrible hang over of my life (the worst came about eleven years later). I was one sick puppy and thought maybe if I ate something I would feel better. I strolled over to the mess hall, er gourmet restaurant, and ate breakfast. It didn't help, and for the first time in my short Army career I went back to sleep during duty hours. I had a dream that I was standing on a precipice about 400 feet high and a Chinook helicopter came flying by from right to left. Just as it was directly in front of me and just below eye level, it flipped upside down, snapped in two pieces and fell to earth. As the the rear engine portion fell to earth it burst into flames.

I awoke from my sleep feeling much better and sauntered over to the company  area and started helping the guys put together the weekly rations, water, mail, and ammunition that would be helicoptered out to the guys in the field. We had just finished setting all the supplies on the edge of the runway when I noticed a Chinook lifting off the ground at the south end of the runway. The Chinook had a sling load of concertina wire that was being ferried out to a forward fire base and as he lifted off the ground the helicopter appeared to have problems as it tilted forward and backwards and from side to side. It appeared he had lost hydraulics and could not maintain control of the aircraft. As the chopper gained altitude it started coming our way. By the time it reached us it was about forty feet off the ground and was still out of control. Once the chopper passed us and continued down the runway it seemed to straightened out and we all began to cheer thinking the pilot had finally gained control. And then the chopper turned to the right and the pilot managed to jettison its load. The load fell on the tail end of a Huey helicopter and cut the tail off, and then it disappeared behind a stand of rubber trees. We all began running down towards the end of the runway and as we approached the clearing we met people running towards us yelling that the chopper had flipped upside down and crashed to the earth.

For many years I was at a  loss to explain or to even begin to comprehend how I, or anyone, could dream of  an event and then watch the event happen in waking life. Nothing made any sense until I became a student of A Course in Miracles. As I wrote in my introduction I began reading The Book looking for a miracle that would help me regain my ability to swallow, only to find out there was much content advocating that this life and our world is a dream; a dream we had and are continuing to remember over and over. As I read this I found myself rejecting even the notion that this life and our world is a dream, until I remembered the dream of the helicopter crashing. Suddenly I could see how we can dream of a future event because we have dreamed this world and we are remembering this dream over and over in successive dreams.The dream of the helicopter crashing was nothing more than the memory of an event that had already occurred in the dream of life. How else can you explain prescience?

Later

Something or Nothing?

What is it we are looking for? Well, that depends on who you are and what your beliefs are. If you are a physicist you may be looking for that illusive elemental particle, you know, the one that is the basic building block of matter. If you are a spiritual individual you may be looking for God. My question is, is there any difference in what we may find? I ask this because if you keep splitting the atom, at what point can you no longer split it? If you have read my previous blogs you may have already deduced that there is no end to splitting the atom and we could go on indefinitely. I remember a riddle that I heard when I was a small boy and it went something like this: If you are standing on one side of the room and you want to get to the other side but you are only able to go half the distance to the other side at a time, how long will it take you to get to the other side? Even as a child it didn't take me long to figure out that I would never get there. That is because half of something is infinite and we can take half of something for eternity. Does this not also apply to the atom and all the particles the atom is made of? Besides, how can you possibly find the smallest thing there is when there is no end to small? For if I can count from one on up forever, I too can count from minus one and smaller forever. As a matter of fact there is an infinite number of points between two numbers such as one and two. We keep finding ourselves in the vicinity of infinite and eternal, our two absolutes. And if we think about this, we can say they are one and the same. Infinite and eternal, two endless concepts that have no beginning and no end. Besides, since we cannot even describe the two outside of the abstract, how is it we can differentiate between the two? In order to differentiate they must have different aspects, or elements, and there are none.

Our thoughts actually belong in the same league. We can wonder through our imagination forever. We can project ourselves out beyond the cosmos and go on forever. We can conceptualize the subatomic until the end of time, if there was an end of time, which there isn't.

How is it being finite beings we are able to conceptualize the infinite and the eternal? How has it been possible to conceptualize something we cannot observe, but something we inherently know to be true? There is not a person on this earth now, in the past, or in the future that could claim there was at some time nothing and there will again at some time be nothing. Why is this? This is because we cannot conceive nothingness. It is beyond our conceptualizing ability to conceive nothingness! Try it.You cannot conceive nothingness as a sentient being. Nothingness has no description for to describe we must be able to compare at least two things and in nothingness there are no things.

Later...