And they shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning-hooks; nations shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.
Isaiah 2:4
It turns out that Isaiah, who was an eloquent prophet, was engaging in a bit of wishful thinking regarding peace in the human community. America, for example, finds its wars getting longer and longer. This could be caused by increasing levels of fear. Rollo May seemed to see this coming over a half century ago when “everyone would agree that in times of social upheaval, like our own [referring to the Depression, the Cold War, McCarthyism and the threat of the A-bomb], people suffer from feelings of ‘rootlessness’ and tend to cling to authority and established institutions as a source of security in the storm. As Dr. and Mrs. Lynd point out in their study of the American town during the depression, in Middletown in Transition, ‘Most people are incapable of tolerating change and uncertainty in all sectors of life at once.’ So the citizens of Middletown were turning toward more conservative authoritarian beliefs in economics and politics, more rigid moral attitudes, and were joining in increased numbers the conservative, fundamentalistic rather than the liberal churches.”[i]
In the worldview of Simple Reality peace will not be possible in the Global Village without a paradigm shift. “At every stage of development, the next higher stage always appears to be a completely ‘other world,’ and ‘invisible world’–it has literally no existence for the individual, even though the individual is in fact saturated with a reality that contains the ‘other’ world. The individual’s ‘this-worldly’ existence simply cannot comprehend the ‘other-worldly’ characteristics lying all around it.”[ii]
As Jesus said in A Course in Miracles: “God’s Will is all there is. We can go from nothingness to everything; from hell to Heaven. Is this a journey? No, not in truth … but illusions shift from place to place; from time to time. The final step is also but a shift. As a perception it is part unreal. And yet this part will vanish. What remains is peace eternal and the Will of God.”[iii] Let’s continue to work on that paradigm shift.
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Supplemental Reading: Peace, The ABC’s of Simple Reality, Vol 2
#71 Peace Eternal
[i] May. Rollo. Man’s Search for Himself. New York: Norton 1953, p. 153.
[ii] Wilber, Ken. Sex, Ecology and Spirituality. Boston: Shambhala Publications Inc., 1995, p. 267.
[iii] All quotes from A Course in Miracles © are from Volume Three: Manual For Teachers (Farmingdale, New York: Coleman Graphics), published in 1975, by the Foundation for Inner Peace, P.O. Box 598, Mill Valley, CA 94942-0598, www.acim.org and [email protected], p. 79.
