We live in a world of conflict and aggression. As people who want peace, how can we respond?
The first step is to examine our view. What is our motivation? If we want peace, how do we go about creating it? We may feel inspired by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Gandhi, and other world figures who exemplify peace and compassion, but how do we follow their example? It’s not going to happen through speed or aggression, but by recognizing and cultivating the peace and compassion that we already have.
The Buddha taught that compassion and loving-kindness are inherent in the mind. So the first step toward cultivating peace in the world is to recognize those qualities within ourselves. The second step is to bring them out through meditation. The third step is to engage in our activities with this view. This is the missing spiritual evolutionary link: reaching into our heart and mind to determine our motivation, contemplating it, and then acting on it. If we want to be truly productive in our day, we have to understand our potential.
Working with our own mind and inspiration is essential to making any kind of change. Meditation is a process of getting used to what we want to happen, what we want the change to be. In Tibetan, one word for meditation is gom, which means “familiarity.” If we want to work for peace, we must first become familiar with peace ourselves. If we want the world to be a more compassionate place, we ourselves must first become familiar with compassion.
In this culture, if we sit and do nothing, people think we’re strange. In places like Tibet, where there is a tradition of meditation, sitting still is considered to be courageous. People appreciate that when someone meditates, they are working with their own mind, which is challenging. All of the pain and pleasure that we experience stems fundamentally from the mind. So when we say we want peace on earth, what we’re really talking about reducing conflict in people’s minds. War is an ancient activity, and so is the dilemma of dealing with our minds.
Meditation is proactive. We develop a stability of mind with the intention of making that the basis of our activity. Sitting there in silence, we observe thoughts and emotions pouring through our mind like a waterfall. Aggression, jealousy, and desire come and go. Even though our mind is always like this, when we first begin to meditate, we might say, “Meditation is terrible. It’s made things worse for me.” Nothing got worse; we just stopped and noticed our mind. It’s like getting out of the car on the highway and realizing how fast the traffic is moving.
Sitting still in meditation is not something we do just once in order to solve our problems. We need to do it consistently, like drinking water and eating food. Just as we spend a portion of each day making our bodies clean and strong, we need to take at least ten minutes daily to purify and strengthen our minds. We need to see how our motivation sways like a tree in the wind of thoughts passing through. Without a daily practice, we mindlessly act on those thoughts, which can easily pollute any situation. When someone acts aggressively, our own aggression rises, and then we’ve only increased the conflict in the world.
As we learn to be still, keep our mind on the breath, and watch thoughts rise and fall, the peace in our mind grows. Our view expands. We begin to see how easy it is to get hooked by aggression, irritation, and jealousy. We see how easy it is to fall into thinking that acting on these emotions is the most expedient way to solve our problems. In that space we have the opportunity to observe that ultimately, aggression is never stable. It requires continual bolstering with the props of irritation and fixation. Stability lies under the aggression in the form of peace. Cultivating it daily is a cyclical process, like turning a wheel.
Now we can get up off our meditation cushion and engage in the world. Possibly our peace is strong enough to see that everyone is in the same boat, and that we all deserve compassion. We al have the same hopes and dreams, as well as the same obstacles. We might be able to notice where somebody else is coming from before we engage in a knee-jerk response. We can see that her aggression is a result of the pain she is in. Depending on how practiced we are, we might even be able to forgive that individual.
I often hear, “Yes, I can extend compassion, except to So-and-So, who doesn’t deserve it.” We all have our list of people we exempt. But if we want to generate peace in the world, we cannot make exceptions. The way to extend compassion to all is to keep growing peace in own mind. Each moment of our day provides an opportunity to cultivate peace rather than anger and jealousy.
In the beginning, our ability to rest in peace may last only a few minutes or hours. Bringing peace to the world seems futile, like throwing a flower into a blazing fire, and we lose our motivation. But rather than trying to change everything at once, we can work with changing a small percentage of our attitude for a small percentage of the day. We can get up in the morning and say, “With ten percent of my mind, I’m going to try peace instead of irritation. With ten percent of my mind, I’m going to put others ahead of myself.” With the other ninety percent, we can still be speedy and annoyed. This approach is practical because it encourages us to notice how these smaller views overtake our bigger motivation. It encourages us to continually consider how we are engaging with the world. Pretty soon the small percentage of positive behavior begins to seep into our mind and the environment, increasing exponentially, like perennials that keep the weeds from growing.
The dignity that comes from meditation doesn’t involve putting on a face of charisma. It comes from claiming what is innately ours and letting it grow. Unlike aggression, the peace and compassion we discover are sustainable, because these are the natural qualities of our mind. They make us fully human. A tiger doesn’t think it’s half zebra, but we become confused about who we are. Then we express our doubt by engaging in aggression, as if to say, “I’m not sure that I’m a complete human, with peace and compassion at the core of my being.”
If we expect somebody else to create peace in the world, we’re going to be waiting for a long time. We’ll become even more angry or anxious, because our unmet expectations will bring frustration, disappointment, and inevitably, more instability. But if we can stabilize our motivation and learn to cultivate peace and compassion, our willingness to take responsibility for changing the environment will inspire many others.
Although there are only a small number of people meditating, even on a global scale, if we have the inspiration and courage to say, “It’s up to me to bring peace,” our influence will be larger than our numbers. We’re all living here on planet Earth, and we’re not going anywhere soon. We should try to improve our situation. Conflict and aggression are ancient issues, and so is the dilemma of dealing with the mind. Like Buddha Shakyamuni, we can use what we discover in meditation to help the world move forward.
