I believe in world peace viscerally. I have great faith that it is possible.
There are a number of reasons why I have come to believe in world peace.
One is the example of my hero, Peace Pilgrim.
She walked for decades on her pilgrimage, working towards peace through her deeds and her days. Her life was a prayer for peace.
A pilgrim is a wanderer with a purpose. A pilgrimage can be to a place—that’s the best known kind—but it can also be for a thing. Mine is for peace, and that is why I am a Peace Pilgrim.
My pilgrimage covers the entire peace picture: peace among nations, peace among groups, peace within our environment, peace among individuals, and the very, very important inner peace—which I talk about most often because that is where peace begins.
The situation in the world around us is just a reflection of the collective situation. In the final analysis, only as we become more peaceful people will we be finding ourselves living in a more peaceful world.
Peace’s prayer was not answered in her lifetime. That doesn’t mean that she failed. It means that these things take time. All in God’s time.
Something else that has given me faith in world peace is my experience with parts work and Internal Family Systems.
I’ve done a lot of parts work over the years, and experience myself as largely internally harmonized as a result. There can still be internal conflict sometimes, of course, but I feel more internally aligned than not. Connecting to Self energy, resolving inner conflict, finding internal harmony, has given me faith in that possibility at other scales.
I’ve already seen examples of this kind of harmony at the scale of small groups: in my collaborations and dyads, in The Service Guild and other groups and organizations and scenes. Collaborating with other people, believing problems are soluble, that creative omni-win solutions are always possible, makes me believe in the possibility of peace at even larger scales.
But above all, something that has given me faith in the possibility of World Peace, as an actual, practical, believable possibility, is coming to understand Malcolm’s Non-Naive Trust Dance (NNTD). A better understanding of trust and distrust seems necessary (but not sufficient) for global coordination and ultimately world peace. That’s part of why I hope to distribute NNTD more widely—in service of world peace.