peace

What does a Solution Oriented have to Contribute?

From The Dalai Lama

Inner Peace – world peace.

Dear friends around the world:

The events of this day cause every thinking person to stop their daily lives, whatever is going on in them, and to ponder deeply the larger questions of life. We search again for not only the meaning of life, but the purpose of our individual and collective experience as we have created it--and we look earnestly for ways in which we might recreate ourselves anew as a human species, so that we will never treat each other this way again.

The hour has come for us to demonstrate at the highest level our most extraordinary thought about Who We Really Are.

There are two possible responses to what has occurred today. The first comes from love, the second from fear. If we come from fear we may panic and do things--as individuals and as nations--that could only cause further damage. If we come from love we will find refuge and strength, even as we provide it to others. This is the moment of your ministry. This is the time of teaching. What you teach at this time, through your every word and action right now, will remain as indelible lessons in the hearts and minds of those whose lives you touch, both now, and for years to come.

We will set the course for tomorrow, today. At this hour. In this moment. Let us seek not to pinpoint blame, but to pinpoint cause. Unless we take this time to look at the cause of our experience, we will never remove ourselves from the experiences it creates. Instead, we will forever live in fear of retribution from those within the human family who feel aggrieved, and, likewise, seek retribution from them.

To us [Buddhist thinkers] the reasons are clear. We have not learned the most basic human lessons. We have not remembered the most basic human truths. We have not understood the most basic spiritual wisdom. In short, we have not been listening to God, and because we have not, we watch ourselves do ungodly things.

The message we hear from all sources of truth is clear: We are all one. That is a message the human race has largely ignored. Forgetting this truth is the only cause of hatred and war, and the way to remember is simple:

Love, [in] this and every moment.

If we could love even those who have attacked us, and seek to understand why they have done so, what then would be our response? Yet if we meet negativity with negativity, rage with rage, attack with attack, what then will be the outcome?

These are the questions that are placed before the human race today. They are questions that we have failed to answer for thousands of years.

Failure to answer them now could eliminate the need to answer them at all.

If we want the beauty of the world that we have co-created to be experienced by our children and our children’s children, we will have to become spiritual activists right here, right now, and cause that to happen.

We must choose to be a cause in the matter.

So, talk with God today. Ask God for help, for counsel and advice, for insight and for strength and for inner peace and for deep wisdom.

Ask God on this day to show us how to show up in the world in a way that will cause the world itself to change. And join all those people around the world who are praying right now, adding your Light to the Light that dispels all fear.

That is the challenge that is placed before every thinking person today. Today the human soul asks the question: What can I do to preserve the beauty and the wonder of our world and to eliminate the anger and hatred--and the disparity that inevitably causes it—in that part of the world which I touch?

Please seek to answer that question today, with all the magnificence that is You. What can you do TODAY...[at] this very moment? A central teaching in most spiritual traditions is: What you wish to experience, provide for another.

Look to see, now, what it is you wish to experience--in your own life, and in the world. Then see if there is another for whom you may be the source of that.

If you wish to experience peace, provide peace for another. If you wish to know that you are safe, cause [others] to know that they are safe.

If you wish to better understand seemingly incomprehensible things, help another to better understand.

If you wish to heal your own sadness or anger, seek to heal the sadness or anger of another.
Those others are waiting for you now. They are looking to you for guidance, for help, for courage, for strength, for understanding, and for assurance at this hour. Most of all, they are looking to you for love.

My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.

Dalai Lama

James Wolfensohn, the Australian born President of the World Bank wrote in The Melbourne Age on 15th October, 2001.

The horrifying events of September 11 have made this a time of reflection on how to make the world a better and safer place. The international community has already moved strongly to do so by confronting terrorism directly and increasing security., and working to avert global recession - seeking, international responses to international problems.

But we must go one step further. The greatest long-term challenge for the world community in building a better world is that of fighting poverty and promoting inclusion. This is even more imperative now when we know that, because of the terrorist attacks, growth in developing countries will falter, pushing millions more into poverty and causing tens of thousands of children to die from malnutrition, disease and deprivation.

Poverty in itself does not directly lead to conflict, let alone to terrorism. The vast majority of poor people worldwide devote their energy to the day-in, day-out struggle to secure income, food and opportunities for their children.

Yet we know that exclusion can breed violent conflict. Civil wars have often resulted not so much from ethnic diversity, the usual scapegoat, as from a mix of factors, of which, it must be recognised, poverty is a central ingredient. In turn, conflict-ridden countries become havens for terrorists.

Our common goal must be to eradicate poverty, to promote inclusion and social justice, to bring the marginalised into the mainstream.

We can do this through steps that help prevent conflicts. Equally important, we can help peace set down roots in societies just emerging from conflict. Success may take years of hard work, but the alternative is a never-ending cycle of violence.

Central to conflict prevention and peace-building must be strategies for promoting social cohesion and inclusion. Inclusion means ensuring that all have opportunities for gainful employment, and that societies avoid wide income inequalities that can threaten social stability.

But inclusion goes well beyond incomes. It also means seeing that poor people have access to basic services. It means enabling people to participate in key decisions that affect their lives.

But can we really make progress against poverty? Recent history tells us that we can. After increasing steadily for 200 years, the number of people living in poverty worldwide started to fall 15 or 20 years ago.

... And ... act internationally on global issues. This includes confronting terrorism and internationalised crime, but also combating communicable diseases such as AIDS and malaria, building an equitable global trading system, safeguarding financial stability to prevent deep and sudden crises, and safeguarding the natural resources and environment on which so many poor people depend for their livelihoods.

And all this we must do with developing countries in the driving seat, designing their own programs and making their own choices. But we must also bring in the private sector, civil society, faith-based groups, and international and national donors.

Ours must be a global coalition, to fight terrorism, yes, but also to fight poverty.

Get real!!!

A Danish therapist friend, Grethe Bruun, spoke of us all having our own Bin Laden our own Stoltenberg, and the value of honouring what is happening, to get these parts better integrated or accepted as part of you. Of course there will alway be some kind of “inner civil war”, or “the Greek chorus” alive in all of us … but I believe in that our psychic forces meet, confront, melt, blend ... and if there is a profound meeting your heart is involved as well as your gut-feelings and only in the meeting a melting between love and hate you can create harmony. She concluded by quoting the wife of a Danish author was asked if she ever had been thinking of having a divorce and she replied : “No never, but I often considered murder !”

Maturana writes with Varella on page 244 of The Tree of Knowledge [Shambala 1988 Boston] “Knowledge of knowledge compels ... us to adopt an attitude of permanent vigilance against the temptation of certainty. ... If we want to coexist with the other person, we must see that his certainty – however undesirable it may seem to us – is as legitimate and valid as our own ... A conflict is always a mutual negation. ... [and] can go away only if we move to another domain where coexistence takes place. ... This is the biological foundation of social phenomena: without love, without acceptance of others living beside us, there is no social process and, therefore, no humanness. ... we are not moralising, we are not preaching love. We are only revealing the fact that, biologically, without love, without acceptance of others, there is no social phenomenon. ... we have only the world that we bring forth with others, and only love helps to bring it forth. ... We affirm that at the core of all the troubles we face today is our very ignorance of knowing. ... as our actions – all without exception – help bring forth and validate the world wherein we become what we become with others, in that process of bringing forth a world. This is a misunderstanding that only knowledge of knowledge can correct.”

To emphasise again that “... we have only the world that we bring forth with others, and only love helps to bring it forth.” Compels us to ask the question “What world do we wish to bring forth?”

Thank you.