CCXL

231. Both education and meditation are necessary for the balance of a person. Education creates the structure for interrelation with other people. Meditation removes the barriers to intrarelation with oneself.

232. In Western (i.e. Industrial) civilization, people seem to have increasingly little contact with themselves. They/we seem not to know them/ourselves very well. When removed from the structure of society, they/we seem lost, with nothing to fall back on—no real knowledge of them/ourselves.

233. Pre-industrial civilization is marked by less education than industrial civilization. Its citizens have less ability to interact with a broad spectrum of society, but generally far more peace with oneself.

234. Peace is ever-elusive on a worldwide scale. It is rare enough on a national level. And, the larger the body, the more difficult achieving and maintaining peace becomes.

235. A first step toward peace should be a moratorium on the transport of military equipment and hardware across national boundaries. Wherever those boundaries are in dispute, a neutral zone should be created that includes both suggested boundaries and no military hardware or personnel should be allowed in that zone.

236. After military hardware has been frozen to its location and a reasonable time for training and adjustment is made, all military personnel should be withdrawn to their country of citizenship. This leaves the defense of all national borders to indigenous persons.

237. As adequate stockpiles of armaments are accrued in each nation, the manufacture of military hardware would be phased out, beginning with all offensive weapons and proceeding to even defensive weaponry. That does not mean that research, tooling and testing could not proceed, but that manufacture would cease.

238. Military hardware may be defined as anything for which the principal purpose could only be mass action against opposing forces.

239. The diversion of energy from military purposes to domestic purposes should lead to an adequate discovery in the field of energy that the future could see a uniform dismantling of all nuclear facilities, both military and domestic.

240. It would be hoped that the future would see a ban on the possession of any weapon which in use does not jeopardize the life of the assailant in equivalent measure to the victim.

 

Editor’s note: Wesley shows his naiveté in dealing with peace from a strictly theoretic standpoint, probably from his years of isolation. However his conclusion in 241 (to come) is compelling.