A few years ago, an atlas unlike the usual ones was published. Instead of places, it charts imagination, thoughts, and feelings across 23 maps of human experience [1].
It’s the Atlas of Human Experience — Cartography of the Inner World.
At first glance, they look like ordinary maps, with geography, cities, forests, rivers, seas, highways, railways, streets, bridges, and notable buildings. But when we explore the city of Chaos, for example, we come upon the lake Churning Waters; an Escape Valve perched on the summit of Exasperation; Weeds and Runaway Panic in the district of Proliferation; the Tower of Babel; and the territories of Miscellany, Damage, Confusion, Trash, Shards, and more. It’s a portrait of chaos we know all too well.
I’ve been thinking a lot about peace, given so many conflicts around the world, so I pulled the book off the shelf and looked for peace. I couldn’t find it.
So—is peace not a human experience?
Peace in the Tao
Even though I didn’t find a map of peace, I did find a reference to it in the chapter on the Void. The idea of peace as an experience beyond the ordinary appears in a poem from the Tao Te Ching. It says:
Carry emptiness to its furthest limit.
Keep peace along the Way.
The ten thousand things appear side by side,
and in that I see them return.
Each one returns to its origins.
This is called peace.
Peace: it means returning to your destiny.
To return to your destiny is to be eternal.
To know the eternal is wisdom.
Not knowing the eternal is to be wild and reckless.
When you are wild and reckless, your actions lead you to ruin.
It urges us to “carry emptiness to its furthest limit” and to “keep peace along the Way.” Here, emptiness means open space, total receptivity — the place where there’s nothing left to strip away. It’s the inner state in which distractions, attachments, and turbulence subside. In that state, it’s possible to rest in peace without effort, attuned to the flow of life.
That is different from when I am I, you are you, and there’s a vacuum — an emptiness — between us. There, space separates.
In total receptivity, we are connected to everything; there is no conflict. Each of us exists in the emptiness of our own being and as a web of relationship with others, with the planet, with the whole.
Multiplicity is woven into existence. All beings, movements, and transformations — the “ten thousand things” that appear side by side — are part of me. They are part of everyone. And everything returns to its point of origin, despite differences.
That return—taking up our own destiny again, reconnecting with eternity—is what we call peace.
By knowing that eternity, we act in harmony, not against the current. We align with the Tao and find the wisdom that sustains life.
In this sense, peace is a reconciliation with life. It is the awareness that each thing follows its course and, in the end, returns to the same mystery from which it sprang. Peace, then, is accepting that cycle — understanding that the fate of everything is to return to the Whole.
In this teaching, peace is both an inner experience and a universal law. It is personal serenity and, at the same time, the principle that upholds all things.
But is that still within the bounds of a human experience?
Words of Peace
In a decidedly unscientific exercise, a working group was invited to think about the words and expressions they associate with peace. The prompt moved participants deeply. The result was a set of responses that sketched a place no one has actually visited, yet that seems to live in our intuition or in a collective memory — a place where everyone would want to live.
It hardly seems accidental that peace doesn’t appear in the Atlas of Human Experience. That absence suggests that true peace rests in an emptiness whose doorway is more-than-human. The path to peace isn’t an external map but an inner one, where a deeper essence points us toward true north.
References:
VAN SWAAIJ, Louise; KLARE, Jean. The Atlas of Experience – Cartography of the Inner World. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2000
