When I take part in demonstrations for Peace, I have to win my scepticism, which would like to stop me and others with a few but blunt words: But, what for?
Immediately, the images that we daily see on TV news come to my mind; images that we have been getting used to, despite showing horrors of destruction and death ruling the world.
I have to breathe deeply, multiple times…like when you gasp for air, desperately looking for oxygen while risking suffocating…before being able to open the window of the room, where my gloomy thoughts want to lock me up to make me believe that there is nothing to do, so to let me collapse into my powerlessness and into its sadness.
Yes, admittedly, it is not very useful anymore to gather in squares and parade through the streets flanked by the police forces, shouting slogans for peace in-between chats, a selfie, and a video recording friends there. In fact, it can actually seem ridiculous, if not even pathetic!
And yet, we have not thought about more incisive alternatives to scratch away the mask of icy indifference, which covers our hearts the same way the tar covers the dirt of the streets where we walk.
Sure, it is a form of defence…at times necessary to survive…the panic attacks due to the anxiety caused by all those news and images of inhumane violence, between blood and ruins, which are continuously foisted on to us, blended with useless and out-of-place sense of guilt: after all, what are we guilty for?
Who orchestrates all this? Is that, perhaps, me or other common citizens that protect and wage wars? Are we the ones gaining anything from it, either in economic terms or in territorial terms, or in terms of international and domestic political prestige? Evidently not! And yet, we also can generate potential war material, though unconsciously, which is highly inflammable, corrosive, destructive…before the actual developing of all sorts of weapons is done, financed by the Ministry of Defence, to which we also have to pay our obol, though not voluntarily!
For example, in my small existential sphere, how much gunpowder do I produce through my defensive reactions, when I feel somebody attacks me…in all sorts of ways, true or presumed…which I believe aim at destroying something about me: image, will, freedom, serenity, ownership-power, esteem, among sui-generis others? And when I attack somebody myself, always to defend some of these areas in danger, how many arrows and hand grenades can I shoot, even just through offensive words and ways? Oh, if one could only see them in the air, materialised as toxic clouds, like the ones left by the explosions between rubbles…in our daily-life battle grounds!
Thus, there is something that I can do for sure and for starters: disarm myself.
If this process does not begin, one remains in a military zone, with its barbed wires and barracks, where one studies how to annihilate enemies through the many strategies coming from the undefeatable conviction to have the right perspective, to be right, and either to expect others to show respect or not to be subject to others. But how can I exit this minefield, in which I am the first to get maimed?
It seems impossible, but it is not.
A simple STOP is enough.
A sign that stops you and reverses the course.
Therefore, precisely like ages ago, locomotives were charged with coal, all the energy employed to charge our alerted system needs to be redirected towards diminishing (also in terms of dis-arming: dismantling our internal arsenal) the caloric pressure, cooling off our fatal wrath with refrigerating deep breaths while going down in apnoea into our abysses. Here, like reconnoitring deep sea divers, we contact emotions, oftentimes unknown, that keep us prisoners of desperate reactive mechanisms, resulting in violence, in all its silent and resounding forms.
In the depth of the sea, there are many fish that continuously look for shelter to hide from predators. Likewise, we also have to seek a safe place inside us, where we can be ourselves fearless and therefore, defenceless: vulnerable but safe, calm.
Only in this safe place, we can develop trust in life, exiting from the circuit where everyone is someone’s necessary prey, climbing back and walking towards the horizon of freedom. Only in this place, we can be reached by different words, which are able to generate alternative thoughts, looks, and life choices, different from the ones stemming from our defensive mode. Just an autogenic training is in fact not enough to leave our consolidated war system; as it is not enough to spell out the Peace mantra…demonstrations, protests, and maybe not even shutting down the arm industry, to leave the war system that has always dominated human beings and their culture…it is necessary to exit ourselves: to exit our own conditioned and conditioning circuit of death!
And this is not in our simply human abilities. As it is not to give oneself life. We can give ourselves death and we can give it to others, but we can’t give ourselves nor to others the origins of life. We don’t own it, even though we try to reproduce it in labs, or at least we try to keep our origin of life through technological artifices. We, human beings of all times, need to find our origin, the source of our being, to be able to be truly human and alive; without this, we are an agglomerate of cells, which can suddenly go crazy, as our body well shows us, unfortunately increasingly more clearly.
If the behavioural choice to avoid a destructive conflict depends on me, so does knowing and accepting my right posture regarding the forces, which are within me and which move the Universe. The difference I can be both in the orbit system and in the one closer to me is not indifferent; if I somehow break the harmonic order, its echo will spread across all spheres and this will have its consequences, even though I don’t know neither how nor when!
Thus, why being surprised of all the terrible things that happen?
Now, all my words here, which are useful to clarify myself because I feel as insufficient the available means to oppose warlords and their choices…to try and not to give in to indifference and passivity…as well as to better realise that partly, I feed their infernal system, take me to a closed door. Here, I can only knock and wait, silently, for it to open.
Here, I can listen to the words I need to get out of the death field towards pastures of infinite life and join its unfolding between blades of grass and shining galaxies, with a simple and light breath interwoven into an endless love relationship. The only one to stay forever.
Vallefoglia, end of Advent 2024