Touching Peace

Rainbow Hawk and Wind Eagle, my dear friends have requested me to share some insights from my tradition, Tibetan Buddhism.However, when I think of that I remember that Buddhism did not begin in Tibet but in India. And the Buddha was not Buddhist but Hindu.

Further, Hinduism is and was a gathering of compartmentalized deity practices brought together in a method to live in non-competitive harmony. They in turn were influenced by Egyptian mystical tradition and we might arrive at religions of Atlantis, Lemuria or the earth as living and evolving organism or even other civilized cultures beyond the cover of our sky.

Like a spiral that winds inside and outside touching everything I imagine Buddhism energetically touching us here and now as it gracefully flows through Tibet, China, Japan and many other countries touching and inviting myriad beings to higher development.

This is the living force that is only one expression of the Eternal Religion that calls every living being to perfection. The actual path is built into the DNA of all living beings and how we develop and express it in our own lives defines who we are, where we are going and who and how we touch living beings on that journey.

Peace is the excellent word to describe that intricate process that include big and small, past, present and future, inside and outside.In the West there are many models to achieve that peace including psychology. Abraham Maslow, the founder of humanistic psychology summed up the concept of Self-Actualization or the description of the superior human being as: "A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be. This is the need we may call self-actualization ... referring to a person's desire for fulfillment, namely to the tendency to become actually what we are potentially ..."

This brief description reflects the need to express a higher human value to feel peaceful. The qualities of caring and self-determination are described in his work as behavioral excellences to emulate. This wellness is a result and expression of inner peace and not a call to make music or paint fly.

Peace is not an aggressive peace and not easy to define. Therefore, the method of learning this produces peace rather than acquiring peace or mandating peace.

Let us look at one aspect that I define as balance. As one begins a course of transformative study there are hundreds of questions that are in nature energetic explosive requests for closure to confusion. The inner logic in energetic form is the actual process that needs to be resolved. The process, questions, meditations and inquiry are its outer forms.

When these are resolved one by one there comes a tiny still point when the energy is not seeking anything but rests in balance. This only comes when energetic closure or inner energetic logic is satisfied. Peace comes- then it begins again- more questions, more uncovering and more excitement. This still point is not the goal but we rejoice in the clarity of the stillness without clinging to it.

We cannot force peace or this balance. Buddha Shakyamuni practiced the method to arise this extraordinary balance and described it as follows “I reached in experience the nirvana which is unborn, unrivaled, secure from attachment, undecayed and unstained. This condition is indeed reached by me which is deep, difficult to see, difficult to understand, tranquil, excellent, beyond the reach of mere logic, subtle, and to be realized only by the wise.”

This peace is the result of the preparation stage for transformation. That transformation will definitely change you into a new kind of being, enlightened, Bodhisattva hero, champion and savior of all living beings, capable and eager to serve. As you join the spiraling inner-outer energy touching everywhere you will become part of the healing, causing all living beings to remember something they never knew. My friends, the new frontier is peace.