Outside Looking In

I ended my last post on the thought that actions springing from the Fear move us further away from inner peace and, more generally, the Peace. But this concept (the Peace) has been entirely unreachable for me up to this point. I haven't even really begun to see what it would entail, and today I think I began to understand why.

Rousseau wrote that it is impossible to know what the true state of nature is, because to ask any question about it is to necessarily distance ourselves from it. By looking at the state of nature from outside it, we automatically impose some ideas that we hold to be normal. However, those same norms in the state of nature could very well be abnormal.

To bring this back to a discussion of the Peace, I'm starting to believe that it is impossible to truly know what the Peace entails. To ask any questions about it is to recognize that we are not there yet, and this recognition brings with it the same conditions that a similar recognition of being outside a state of nature brings. We can only know, I suppose, that the Peace is completely outside our current existence, to the point that we cannot even begin to conceptualize it.

Moving beyond this, the Peace is then something to strive for precisely because it removes us from the conditions of physical existence. There are no shortcuts to the Peace, and even the idea of a path (which the colonel and I have been discussing) is inadequate because it indicates logical start and end points. This is not to say, however, that the taoist path itself is inadequate. Instead it is entirely useful in terms of moving toward the Peace because it offers ways of attaining and honing your inner peace.

-the ambassador