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May -16th Saturday Afternoon
12:30-2:45 PM
Crestone Interfaith Gathering 2009
Saturday Interfaith Gathering Presentation 3
Sanctuary House – William Howell
World Peace Experience
1) Most everyone in the world wants world peace, but to most people it remains a dim hope, especially if we listen to the nightly news and consider ourselves to be realists.
2) What could change this perception...for you?
3) What would be vital would be an experience of world peace. But how to do that?
4) What do you think world peace would feel like, as an experience? (Get 3 responses)
5) Let's see if we can get a little glimpse, a tangible hint of what world peace looks and feels like in our own hearts and minds and bodies.
6) First, please select for yourself that quality that you most want or most appreciate in yourself or in others: peace, love, happiness, strength, joy, beauty, truth, light, abundance and so many others. Pick one, for the purpose of our personal world peace experiment.
7) Now, pretend that we are all sitting in a circle. If there are 200 people here, that would mean our circle is about 1/3 of a mile in circumference, two acres in area and close to 300' in diameter.
8) Next, imagine that I have brought many many skeins of yarn and have passed to you all the yarn required to connect you to your neighbors and people across from you in the circle and on every side--so that in your right hand you each hold 199 strings that are intricately fanning out to link you up with every other person present today.
9) Experience what this total connection feels like. Then let's pretend that one of you pushes away. How far does this member of our tribe get? And what is your experience of this effort by one person? We each feel the tug, the pressure, right? So each of us actually knows the effect of everyone else, yes? Now let us all try to pull back at once. Can you imagine how tight our web becomes, how powerful it is and how little we can do to escape our mutual energy field?
10) This is a palpable hint of what extended family really feels like--we've established here a human ecology. Everyone of us is related to every other of us. The 'us' is just as important as the individual. If we expand our circle to every member of our human family, we begin to experience the truth of our human race. This is what a saint like Meishusama experiences--the inter-connectivity of all souls, indeed, of all life.
11) Our circle is a fractal, an emblem of humanity. It is also emblematic of life itself. Life is innately, inherently, a priori whole and complete. It is humans with limited vision--due to doubt, dishonesty, fear and other phobias--alone of all the creatures who do not experience this holistic fullness.
12) This web of relationship, also a fractal of life itself, can be a teacher to us. The rim of the circle is the surface appearance of life via the five senses. As we each look right down the line that connects us directly to the center, we are looking into the vertical dimension of life. The rim represents each of our personalities with its attachments, angers, traumas and the like. The center, home to all our radii, is the silent core that does not move even if our wheel were to turn, no matter how fast. Likely we have one or more names for this fundamental intersection, hub of all the spokes of our wheel: God, Reality, Pure Consciousness, Nirvana, the Peace that passeth all understanding, and others.
13) Let's each remember the quality we chose, just for this ecology experiment. Let's say it's Beauty. What does beauty look like at the rim, on the surface of life: beauty of form, of motion, of color? Now imagine that your chosen quality is moving down your spoke slowly toward the center. Remember, that our fractal represents all of life--and that from the surface to the center of life means moving from the gross to the subtle and beyond the subtlest, and that the more subtle anything is, the more powerful, creative and intelligent it is. Just like breaking a pen at its surface level simply means it's in two pieces, whereas if we could break a pen at its atomic level, we could light the whole of the San Luis Valley for centuries. So what does Beauty look like a quarter way toward the center? Beauty of heart? Half way--Life as art? 80% of the way--who can say? It boggles the mind, and the heart can only yearn and wonder.
And how about Peace? On the surface, it may appear as putting your feet up, then moves to some sense of greater ease, a sense of inner abundance, then to real contentment, then to deep appreciation, to unbelievable security, to lasting gratitude, to universal love, and finally...to the Peace which passeth all understanding, the innocent power out of which all Creation was born.
13) So, what does world peace feel like now that we've engaged in our little experiment? (Note three responses). It would be unbelievable, right? And it can never be legislated, never achieved with mere treaties. It must arise from within us. Only then is it tied to the fullness of life.
14) Finally, what does our web connection tell us about who we are? (Note three responses) We are unique and universal, limited and unlimited, never alone, ever complete, the fractal of heaven and earth, finiteness and infinity. And the greatest renewal resource that exists. Imagine all the qualities we each yearn for and multiply by 6 billion. And, what if just one of us realized our full potential, we could light the world for a thousand years.
15) Let's think globally and act locally with regard to ourselves. If one Meishusama is great, two become three times as great, three become nine times as great. Ours is the age. This is the time. And, if you're here, this is the place.
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