page thirty-one: A Pitch For World Peace

I don’t know about you but I was feeling very emotional as I watched the inaugural ceremonies of the Paris Olympics. I kept tearing up, alternating between the highs of pure joy and the lows of sheer hopelessness. The sight of the world coming together filled me with a sense of completeness, only to be shadowed by the reminder of our seemingly insurmountable human and political differences.

“This is how we humans were meant to live on earth,” I thought as I witnessed the joy of participation, even from people of nations at war or those who have faced natural calamities and other disastrous situations. For just these days and weeks of the Olympic games, people set aside their earthly realities and lean into their spirit. They choose to keep their hearts open and embrace each other with no expectations.

I am reminded of a quote by Mahatma Gandhi: “In the midst of death, life persists; in the midst of untruth, truth persists; in the midst of darkness, light persists.” Let’s pause and savor these moments because that is how we strengthen the truth of our basic interconnectedness and allow it to persist amidst the outer realities that divide us. The more we lean into our togetherness, the more we support the intangible energies that facilitate a shift in consciousness.

If you've heard of the Hundredth Monkey Effect*, when such energy of cohesion reaches “critical mass,” we will find solutions that lead to peace on earth. Only a peace born out of our collective choice to remain connected as “God’s family,” a concept integral to Hinduism, would be true and abiding. It is a peace so vast that it makes room for all our human differences and imperfections, a peace so malleable that our disagreements would only stretch and bend it without ever breaking it.

Will there ever be such peace on earth? Can there? And if so, how can we get to such a place?

I believe it is possible but will take a lot of work. Work that may span generations and lifetimes, the fruits of which we will most likely not even live to see. Like everything else, it has to start at the personal level, with each one of us, and the time to get started is now.

It was Rumi who said, “You are a drop of the ocean and the ocean in a drop.” If each of us worked to bring about true peace in the drop that is our own mind and body, we would be working towards world peace.

My soon-to-be-published book is titled, "The Yoga of Self-Love." It is a therapeutic memoir, a how-to guide on arriving at that deep peace in ourselves and the ongoing work it takes to sustain it. By starting with ourselves, we can ensure that our sincere intention to make a difference in the world begins within us.

Such true peace is not arrived at by turning a blind eye to all that is upsetting, nor is it by figuring out solutions, because ultimately there is no lasting fix to all of life’s problems. True peace calls for wisdom — and wisdom, like the Serenity Prayer says, is a confluence of courage and acceptance, an integration of the rational linear-thinking head with the wide and limitless expanse of the heart.

This, the yoga of integrating our inner world, helps us to arrive at a more textured view of our own personal history, beyond right and wrong, perfect and imperfect. Co-existing with our imperfections would in turn help to co-exist with the imperfections in another, allowing us to accept the unacceptable and forgive the unforgivable. Over time, we master the art of creating boundaries without creating hatred, disagreeing without disrespecting, and connecting without converting. Leaning into the "Hundredth Monkey Effect*," we could each be part of ushering in the shift we wish to see in our world.

Great changes could emerge from such a shift. I imagine that in these days of electronic communication, we would start here, at the grassroots level, and build an international network of people who choose to listen, understand, and work with each other’s stories. I dream of a network based on acceptance and integrity, growing into a movement from which are born leaders and planners who will work together to find integrated solutions, to defeat the forces of distrust and division, to save the planet, and finally build heaven on earth.

*The "Hundredth Monkey Effect" is a sociological and psychological concept that suggests a new behavior or idea can spread quickly from one group to others when a critical number of people adopt it, and that the new awareness can then be communicated directly from mind to mind, even between groups that are physically separated.

(Do mark your calendars to join us in-person or via Zoom for the launch party on September 6th, @ 2pmCST)