The Sevenfold Peace (eBook)

1. Peace

How can there be Peace when everyone seeks their own advantage and sells their soul into slavery?

He who has found Peace with the brotherhood of man has made himself a coworker of God.

The Gospel of Love and Peace

The greatest longing of humans is often said to be “Peace.” Humans are social beings, constantly vying for relationships and attention. When these relationships conflict due to unmet expectations, differing views and possessions, or lack of attention, then Peace is not possible. This applies to our relationship with Mother Nature as well as with our brothers and sisters, all our fellow creatures, including animals, plants, and fellow humans.

It's remarkable that this most significant of longings plays no role in psychology and is sociologically defined merely as the absence of war and violence. Politically motivated, the word is often reinterpreted, its meaning distorted almost beyond recognition.

Literature and religion show that Peace is not dependent on external factors, but is more a felt state, expressed in external behaviour and internal feelings.

The etymology of the word “Peace” is also interesting.

The connection to the Latin pax comes later through the influence of French on the English language after the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. The Old French word pais (modern French paix), which evolved from the Latin pax, was adopted into Middle English as pece or pees. This is how the Latin root ultimately influenced the English word “Peace”, but it is not the direct source of the word's etymology in English.

Therefore, while “Peace” in English has a connection to the Latin pax through Old French, its etymological origin is the Old English frēoðu, connected to the idea of protection, safety, and Love from the Proto-Germanic and Proto-Indo-European roots.

Therefore the word for Peace traces back to the In-do-European root fri, which is also the basis of the words freedom and friend. Fri means “to love”.

A friend is someone “who makes me feel Love.” Freedom means “to belong to friends” and “to live in Peace/Love with others”. And Peace is nothing but “being filled and surrounded by Love,” “being in Love”.

The German language distinguishes between Frieden (Peace) and Heil with different lexemes. This is not self-evident. The Arabic salaam and many other languages (e.g., Somali nabad or Toba-Batak horas, and many more) have only one word and semantic concept for this, denoting a “universal Peace” as a state of undisturbed (cosmic) order. “Heil” in German means “whole” and “unharmed”, “healthy”, and “as intended”. Thus, the combined concept of Peace/Healing denotes a state of undisturbed order in Love.

In the German language, the word Peace Frieden (Peace) lost its connection to individual feeling and universal cosmic contexts through centuries of use in political contexts. Its use in liturgy and Old Testament Bible verses seems to describe a more otherworldly state, or at least one that is “bestowed by the grace of God”.

The Lord bless you and keep you;

The Lord make His face shine upon you and be gracious to you;

The Lord lift up His countenance upon you and give you Peace.

4. Moses 6:24-26

In the New Testament, the words of Jesus clearly describe Peace as an inner emotional state with external consequences and universal relationships, such as in “salvation”, which also encompasses the aspects of health and wholeness, as in the English “to heal”, “healing”.

Peace I leave with you; my Peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.

John 14:27

Peace, then, is much more than an external state where no one resorts to violence to impose their special interests, which would amount to a disruption of order. The Essene texts, originally written in Aramaic, define Peace, like the Bible, as a holistic concept of unblemished order founded in Love.

The cosmos (Greek: “order”) is an expression of divine Love, providing for an intact/whole existence through this order. The maintenance of this order stems (conversely) from the Love of humans for God and His creation.

When we say “we feel the Peace,” “we are at Peace with ...,” we feel this connectedness through order. It is the “feeling of oneness” with everything, in the realization that through divine, perfect order, everything is interconnected.

Peace, like Love, is therefore a feeling. But feelings are never found externally; they are always within ourselves. Only when Peace is felt can Peace be possible externally. Perhaps many Peace processes in the world fail precisely because this fact is not taken into account. Agreements for external, social interaction must be based on internal values and feelings. People who have learned to accept enemy images and even profit from them will only adhere to "Peace agreements" to a limited extent and under duress. The same applies to Peace with nature: those who view nature as a resource to be exploited, owned, cultivated, fought for, and managed will hardly behave peacefully towards nature, lacking the necessary sentiments and a holistic relationship with it. All climate protection conferences, agreements to save the rainforests, and to keep the air and water clean will not succeed as long as people are not at Peace with the earth and feel and sense this Peace.

There are many who do not know Peace, for they are at war with their own bodies, they are at war with their own thoughts, they have no Peace with their fathers, their mothers, their children, they have no Peace with their friends and neighbours, they do not know the beauty of the Holy Scrolls, they do not work in the realm of Mother Earth, nor do they sleep at night in the arms of the Heavenly Father.

The Essene Gospel of Peace

The capitalist, neo-imperialist, and neo-liberal world-view has lost all these feelings, being in a constant state of combat, living off competition, exploitation, enslavement, and self-deception. The power-crazed and beneficiaries of war, violence, and exploitation have long tried to make us believe that Peace is an unattainable ideal, a fanciful daydream of unrealistic fools. They try to accustom people to the idea that Peace cannot exist because they believe they benefit from delusional power struggles and the worship of money as an idol.

It is often argued that aggression and war are inherent in humans because all of nature and animals are always fighting, and aggression is essential for survival in the animal realm. However, this is a superficial, if not deceitful, view of things.

Animals do not know war. They especially do not know war because they cannot lie. War presupposes making the opponent an object and denying them any equality. War involves killing empathy, conscience, and responsibility through lies, manipulation, and brainwashing submission training — capabilities that animals do not possess.

A hunting animal is not aggressive. Aggression involves the release of stress hormones, but hunting animals are highly concentrated and calm. Soldiers and other murderers achieve this, if at all, only through drug use (e.g. Ritalin), suppressing feelings, and self-deception.

Aggression in the animal realm occurs only in power struggles, individual “defence” or “conquest” of territories, mates, and social hierarchies.

So, what trait is responsible for humans' apparent lust for war? Compared with our fellow creatures, the animals, humans possess a capability that animals do not: the ability to lie.

It is the lie — denying the “enemy” any humanity, feelings, and right to exist — that enables wars, including those against nature. The distance created by the use of weapons and machines facilitates this. Only if we deceive ourselves into thinking that we are not part of nature, that nature is flawed, merely “living space” and “resource”, “environment” instead of “co-world” can we wage war against nature as modern “civilization” does. This refers to both external nature and our inner nature.

Therefore, Peace is also very much about truth.

However, truth in today's global society has been lost a long time ago. The truth of human equality and their fundamental rights has become a mere farce, as has human dignity, which only seems to apply to those who have not fallen from grace or are too poor and powerless to claim it. We violate and destroy the earth as if there were no tomorrow and no responsibility for future generations, which is a lie. The list could go on and be very long. Always, every violence, against oneself, against fellow humans, against animals, against nature ..., is preceded by a lie.

It is the ability to deny and lie, especially to deceive and lie to ourselves, that distinguishes us from all other forms of Life and leads to all the suffering of the past and present that we allow and perpetrate.

We seem to trust this ability more than all truth and nature, which is so obvious and ultimately always proves itself.

We have reached a threshold where we must decide what the true essence of...