Peace, in general

Do plants and bacteria suffer? Or are they at peace?
Is the will to peace also a will to sleep?
‘Shocking’ things wake us, as human bodies at the least.
Adrenaline vs adenosine.
Why oh why does life act like this?

Plants and bacteria are driven by primal impulses, i.e. their respective instincts.
They don’t have the self-consciousness to experience pains and thus sufferings as a conscious concept.

‘Shock’ is a necessary reaction [often followed by ‘freeze’] to bring immediate attention to threats [perceived or real], thus to facilitate survival.

Maybe it’s just Canada, but they equate living with a variety of things. However, getting living done requires happiness, and happiness requires product consumption. Canadians are hedonistic. They are also appearantly pacified. They aren’t angry or affraid, mostly. “Living life to its fullest” somehow turned into hedonism. I think though, that peace and happiness are different things. A modest amount of happiness should be enough.

Peace is the highest value. If you aren’t content, change is needed.

Force proceeds will. – Will is a force made of force.

Peace doesn’t need force, usually. – Living is all about forcing and intending.

I wonder if my nirvana-like experience was simply inner rest.
A part of me was going without rest, then when i tried to shut down,
it all rested, then next time, nothing happened because i no longer needed any form of rest at that level.

In conscious beings, struggle is beloved.
In modern humans, struggle is set against love. Thus, love has died for modern humans. In plants and other higher beings, it still exists. Humans are the lowest scale on the ladder of life at this point.

Peace is when you win a war, when your struggle is successful and you have overcome your former self. Peace is thus a reward for a quest for something much greater, which is self-overcoming.

He who seeks peace without suffering will spread dis-ease. As all he can do is take the easiest path everywhere and make it so that al and everyone around him slips. The easiest path is the slipperiest path.

Death = The Easiest Path. “Free peace” is only in death.

All living peace is struggle, and being on good terms with that.
It is also called Courage.

No coward will ever experience peace. Peace is a reward for strength well spent.

Do you trust nature?
Do you trust the universe?

Everything eventually takes the easiest path. A coward will experience peace in death. The brave can kick and scream all they want, resist all the way to a heavenly state of true relief. Peace is not needing a reward from strength. Sorry to disagree so harshly.

The only way that we even know that other humans suffer is through both recognition of their state vs our own, and communication - and these don’t extend to sufficiently dissimilar entities such as plants and bacteria. We have familiarised ourselves with the mechanics of our own suffering via a nervous system, so the best we can do is guess that other entities with similar enough nervous systems, either combined or not with recognisable reactions to our own, are suffering or otherwise to some extent.

Are they though? Do entities that do not meet our criteria not suffer? The only way we could know for sure is to translate what’s happening to them to what’s happening to ourselves - and even then we’d only be able to be sure that we are suffering as a result of this translation. We cannot know.

But so what if we cannot know? It matters that we can guess in that it motivates cooperative behaviours which tend to be the most enduring ones. Empathetic individuals in a group tend to outperform those who do not have empathy - if they didn’t, we wouldn’t see much or anything of empathy. The fact that we do guess seems to be enough to maintain those that do guess, whether or not their guess is correct.

So only given that some are able to guess in such a way towards such a result is peace even a valid concept. Peace in general is a mutual recognition that others can correctly guess that they are at peace.

But imagine you are are peace: you are not experiencing suffering. This does not necessitate that all else is at peace, for your lack of suffering may be at the expense of some things that may be suffering in order for you to not feel like you are suffering. So it is also required that you cannot guess that they are suffering such that you may be at peace. Maybe they are suffering? Surely then there would not be peace in general, but only peace for you and others who guessed similarly that everyone else was at peace.

It follows that peace in general is requisite upon the limits of one being able to both guess and not guess that there is suffering.
Apparently some combinations of these limits are more successful at enduring than others - but by no means does their experience of peace in general mean that there is indeed peace in general.

Even if one accepts that the mutual experience of peace in general is peace, this isn’t necessarily sleep - that’s just one potential form. Cooperation isn’t sleep because one may cooperate while awake, and being at the height of one’s consciousness isn’t the only way of being awake - and it isn’t always the best or most effective way of being awake. The only reason that life acts like this is because the ways in which it currently does act like this are the most effective at enduring against other ways of acting.

Yes. :smiley:

Peace occurs when you forego mistrust, opting instead to enjoy and appreciate life like its heaven.