I believe in Peace. Because it works.

I went to Kennywood yesterday and it was cold as balls but still surprisingly fun despite none of the real coasters being able to run in that temperature.
Been thinking about how great my life is and why–that’s really the important thing to analyze for me is why did my life turn out so great?, I know it’s due to my decision making, and I know in general what I’ve done right, but sometimes it’s hard to pin down the specifics of your own behavior patterns.
But I’ve been thinking, really it’s all about this fundamental idea of peace and that we are all God’s children and He loves us all equally which means He want’s all of us to treat everyone else like they were family, even if they are totally different from us. Even if they are in a country at war with us. Even if they have committed great crimes. Like, we are all family, for better or worse, a collective mind, as Bill Hicks put it, “We are all of one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There’s no such thing as death. Life is only a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves.”
Golly how thankful I am that Tool put that on their album so I listened to it over and over and over every day in high school. But it’s true. At least, believing in it is the most effective way that I’ve found to really find success in my life.
I suppose just believing we are all of one consciousness won’t necessarily bring someone toward peace. But it really is all about peace, knowing and having true faith in Jesus or whatever embodiment of peace you choose to take comfort in, and just knowing that peace is the answer and peace is always the answer, even when every fiber of your being is telling you that you need to be violent out of vengeance or that you need to learn violence or build or acquire weapons to protect yourself. That’s the devil talking, to use a metaphor I don’t take actually literally, but still think it’s a good metaphor. But that’s what true faith in God is really all about, is the willingness to choose peace, even when peace is fucking terrifying and seemingly impossible.
But it’s like, I don’t choose peace just because God want’s me to. That’s crazy. I’m still an atheist… at least I think… I dunno anymore. It doesn’t even really matter.
But I choose peace because it works for me. It really really works for me, and I think it can work for others.
I guess it’s more about teamwork also, like we are all of one consciousness, which means right now life is going through a metamorphosis that humans are taking charge of. It’s like a billion years ago or whenever that the first single celled organisms started teaming up to create multi-celled organisms. It’s like, something clicked in their biology that allowed them to see each other as teammates instead of rivals and they combined to create practically every beautiful living thing on this planet.
If something could click in the heads of humans so that we start seeing everyone as a teammate, then everything would change and we could revolutionize life and spread it out into the galaxy.
But it seems we are going in the opposite direction.
When I was a kid, liberals used to wear those cheesy shirts with the cartoon flowers that said “war is not healthy for children and other living things” or something like that. Like what ever happened to that kind of thing? When I was a kid, I remember people–hell lots of people would say that war is bad, lets stop funding war and the military industrial complex. We had people like Bill Hicks trying to say that all humans from every corner of this globe are all beautiful and all deserving of God’s love and human dignity and compassion.
But we are heading in the opposite direction of that from what it seems. I don’t hear that kind of stuff at all anymore, from either side of this ever widening political divide.
I heard about some CEO of a pharmaceutical company–no, medical insurance company, I dunno- who was murdered a week or so ago and my ex posted to facebook gloating and expressing her joy at this person’s death and his family’s suffering and I highly doubt she even knew what this guy had done to deserve it, she just hears CEO of medical company and wants him dead and it’s like, what exactly is the point of being a liberal if you’re just going to hate and call for people’s death?
When I grew up, at least I thought, the point of being liberal was to move toward peace, communication, understanding, compassion and science. Granted, there are still a bunch of us peace-lovers out there, but we are becoming more and more drowned out by the war drums from both sides who don’t seem to recognize the actual consequences of the things they are doing and the way they aren’t even trying to understand the other side, and the way they all so callously talk about their fellow Americans as some sort of enemy that deserves to die.
But if you reject all that, I have found, that life actually gets so much better. I mean, you have to be careful obviously.
But I try to hold this emotional perspective where if someone physically or metaphorically breaks into my home, I’m going to attempt communication and I would absolutely let them steal thousands of dollars worth of shit before I would ever use violence. I know Jesus would not be okay with me killing someone just to protect my stuff.
Now, to protect the lives of me and my friends and family, of course that is a different story, but at the same time, you only use force/violence when absolutely necessary to prevent more violence and if it is necessary, the violence ends the very second the situation is under control and even then you see the person as a team member who made a mistake and you now turn to trying to get them help. If I become a victim of a mugging or break-in or something like that, I’d like to think that I’d view it as God connecting me with this person and that it would be my mission to connect and make peace with them and to help them become a better contributor to the larger consciousness of the human race and life in general.
There was an episode of Doogie Howser from my childhood where he did just this and it’s like, you never see those kinds of things anymore. Our sitcoms went from that kind of shit on Doogie Howser to the things on Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which to be fair makes me laugh a whole lot harder, but doesn’t genuinely add anything to my life and even kind of brings me down a bit.
Another good example is that Malala girl who was shot through the eyeball by the Taliban because she wanted girls to go to school, and woke up a couple days later in the hospital and the first thing she did was pray to Allah for the shooter’s forgiveness.
That’s the kind of person I want to be.
And I find the more I embrace this idea of peace, compassion and unity between all people left, right, queer, vanilla etc etc, the more it rewards me in the form of peace of mind, friendships, lower stress and healthier interactions, more opportunities and more respect.
I’m not like this to honor God, certainly not to be rewarded in the afterlife. That’s the kind of person I want to be because I have clearly seen the rewards for that type of behavior and attitude. Massive rewards.
Spiritual well being is just the beginning of the benefits of these attitudes.
The weird thing is that even the people who passionately disagree with me on these subjects, still seem to want to warm up to me. It’s like sometimes it feels like everywhere I go, I just feel loved from everywhere, even people I only just met. Even people who passionately disagree with me.
It used to be so difficult for me to make friends and allies before I embraced this, back when I went along with society and believed that there actually are “good guys” and “bad guys”. I thought I had to “fight back” against the people I’d seen who have done horrible things. Everyone believes that horrible people must be destroyed.
But I don’t believe that anymore. No we are all cells in a massive, amazingly beautiful organism that is in process of being born. People disagree with me about that, but at the same time as they disagree, it’s like their respect and trust toward me actually increases. Deep down inside they desperately want it to be true.
And it can be true. We just have to make it so.