Peace IS the Way

This is the speech I delivered at American Heritage School in Plantation,celebrating International Day of Peace (Actual day is 9/21 but celebrated on 9/14)

I am delighted to be with you, this morning, such a vibrant group of young people, to celebrate International Day of Peace. I commend you and congratulate you for taking the time to reflect on the topic of peace because as former UN Sec. Gen. Boutros Boutros Ghali said, “Thinking about peace is already a powerful means to contribute to peace.”

I am passionate about peace, because I am a devotee of Mahatma Gandhi, one the greatest peacemakers of all time. Besides, I am also a follower of Jesus, the prince of Peace. I have been very active in a local organization called One Planet United which was started in Coral Springs a few years ago, by one of my friends Jack Bloomfield.

Wee have been celebrating World Peace Day since it was established by the UN in 1981. The Catholic Church has celebrated Peace Sunday for hundreds of years. Numerous attempts have been made to bring about peace in the middle east. In spite of all that, peace seems to be a mirage?

I am reminded of a story of a journalist assigned to the Jerusalem bureau of CNN. She had an apartment overlooking the wailing wall. Daily, she watched this old man vigorously praying in front of the wall. One day she asked him: “Every day I see you praying at the wall; how long have you done this and what are you praying for?

“I have come here daily for 25 years. I pray for peace between Arabs and Jews. I pray that all hatred in the world end and I pray for all children of God to live in peace and harmony. How does it make you feel that after all these years of praying, your prayers are not answered. The old man looked at her sadly and said: “It is like talking to a wall.”

World Peace seems like such an impossible dream. In the past four decades America's war habit has led us into Iraq. Afghanistan, Kuwait, Somalia, Lebanon, Panama, Grenada, Vietnam, and Cambodia not to mention the more covert military operations into places like Laos, Nicaragua and Colombia.

These are examples of a nation at war with other nations. But there are wars within our nation itself that is going on right now; it is not a military conflict using tanks, bombs and weapons, and there may not be any visible wounds or bleeding bodies; but the conflict is real.

I am talking specifically about the huge conflict going on within our country about the proposed Islamic Cultural Center near Ground Zero. It has bitterly divided our nation. The groups that support the mosque and oppose it are going at each other with such vitriolic force that the wounds they create are much more serious than any weapon could ever inflict.

I am not bringing this up to make you disheartened in your efforts to work for peace. I am saying this to invite you to approach peacemaking with a whole new attitude. Because, traditional methods of achieving peace have failed. You know why? Because, our primary focus was to create peace out there, in the community, in the nation, in the middle east, in the world. It has not worked so far and it will not work, because we are operating from a basic fallacy, and that is peace is something that is out there.

The greatest threat to world peace is not nuclear weapons; but nuclear hearts filled with hatred, jealousy and anger. And how do we develop such a heart? It is developed in our mental laboratory using a pervasive substance called ignorance, and the product that is created is called SEPARATION ILLUSION.

So, if the cause of all the conflict in the world is the misguided belief that we are separate from each other, the solution to that problem is believing that we are all CONNECTED: that the apparent separation between religions, races and nations are just an illusion.

Mother Teresa who won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 19 said it so powerfully: “If we have no peace, it is because, we have forgotten that we belong to each other.


MK Gandhi a great champion of peach and nonviolence understood that we cannot create peace without being peaceful and that is why he said; “There is no way to peace, peace is the way. It compliments another saying of Gandhi: Be the change you want to see in the world.

So the way of peace is primarily, an inner process, a changing of our consciousness about the unity of humanity. So today, I invite to raise your consciousness to a higher level. From the lowest level, which is the level division, disunity and exclusion to the highest level, of inclusion, unity and wholeness.

I like to share with you a story about how I try operate from this higher level of consciousness.

I work as a hospice chaplain. There are 25 chaplains on our team and we have monthly meetings. Every time a new chaplain joins our team, we introduce ourselves. In the interest of time, we just say our name and denomination. So we began introducing ourselves as Anglican, Catholic, Methodist, United Methodist, Baptist, Southern Baptist, United Church of Christ, Disunited Church of Christ, no I just made that up.... You know there are over a 2000 different Christian denominations. Somebody called them, abominations, but that is a different story. So when my turn came, I just said, My name is Paul and I am a human being.

Everyone chuckled; at the end of the meeting, the new chaplain took me aside and said that he was intrigued by my introduction. I told him that I was not trying to be a wise guy. I had thought about it and deeply reflected on it. I really don’t like labels because, labels divide people and put them inseparate camps.

I consciously try to use language that unites rather than divide us. So if I say I am an American which I am by citizenship, I am connected to 300 million people. If I say I an Indian which I am by birth, I am connected to 1.2 billion people. If I say I am Christian, which I am by baptism, I am connected to about 2.7 billion people. I want to acknowledge my connection to the six billion people on this planet and human being is the only label that will fit that bill.

As a matter of fact, my connection is not just to the people, but to the animals, plants, the planets and the whole universe.

Last year, I was watching CNN and there was this story about a national geographic study called the Genographic Project. It is titled: The greatest Journey ever told: the trail of our DNA.

New DNA studies show that all humans descended from an African ancestor who lived about 60 thousand years ago. Population geneticist, Dr. Spencer Wells who is leading this study said: “The human genetic code or genome is 99.9 percent identical throughout the world. What is left, .1% is the DNA responsible for our individual differences; the color of our skin, race, religion etc.”
I fell out of my chair when I heard that. I had thought that 50 percent of the DNA account for similarities and 50 percent for our differences. That is what my friends thought. When I told them about this study, their jaws dropped, their eyes popped out, and they told me: “You cannot be serious.” I told them that I read this in the National Geographic and not the National Inquirer.

I have no intention to prove to you today that we are all connected. It is like gravity; whether you agree or not, it is the reality.

The fact of the matter is that we are the same genetically, 99.9 percent. Only .1 percent of our genes account for our differences. All the anger and jealousy is about the .1 percent? All our divisions and acrimony, is about the .1percent? All our prejudices and fighting, hatred, killings,terrorism and war
are about the .1 percent?

Mind boggling right? It is happening because we are not conscious of our basic identity as human beings and our connectedness to each other. It is happening, because, most of the time, we are just sleep walking through life.

In the Disney movie Lion King one and Half, Timor, a meerkat, leaves home to find a life for himself.On the way, he meets Rafiki, the wise baboon, who asks him where he was going. Timon tells the baboon “I am looking for a life without worries.” The monkey said: “So you are looking for hakuna matada”: Rafiki gave Timon this advice: “If you are looking for a life without worries, look beyond what you see”

All of us are looking for a life without worries; a peaceful life, a harmonious world, a united planet,but it seems to elude us all the time. Looking beyond what we see can be a beneficial exercise in achieving that goal.

We often live superficial lives, at the level of our five senses. The world around us is experienced and interpreted using our five senses. However, our senses can be very deceptive. For example, the senses tell us that the earth is flat, but that is not true; our eyes tell us that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, but when we look beyond what we see, we know that the sun neither rises nor sets.

It is the same with our view of people. On the physical level, people look different: different colors,different races, different religions, different languages, different sexual orientation, but on the level of the soul, they are all the same, members of one human family, each one intimately connected to the destinies and dreams of the other.

You have seen birth announcements on mail boxes. When a child is born you see a balloon tied to a mail box and it will say: “It’s a Boy” or “It is a Girl.” It never says: “It is a white American Catholic Boy” or a “Brown Mexican Methodist Girl”: A week after we are born, we get the birth certificate, it is our first label of nationality, a few months later, we get a baptism certificate which gives the
second label of religion, Later we acquire labels such as conservative, liberal, republican, democrat,etc. Some labels may be necessary for civic purposes, but they should have no place in our enterprise called life.

Few months ago, I received a phone call from a company doing a survey. At the end of the survey, the caller told me that for demographic purposes, she needed three pieces of information: my age, sex and race. And I said: I am 50 years old, I am male and I am human. There was this silence for a moment; And she said: “I only have boxes for White, Black, Asian or Other. I have to put you in one of those boxes.” And I said: “I don’t want to be in a box.” Always remember that God did not create separate boxes; God created the universe.

That is what each one of us need to start saying: “I don’t want to be in a any box created by our limited consciousness and narrow minds”: According to Neal Donald Walsch,all our problems are due to our desire to be in separate boxes:

“Every sadness of the human heart, every indignity of the human condition, every tragedy of the human experience, can be attributed to one human decision: the decision to separate ourselves from each other; all of our rage, all of our disappointments, all of our bitterness, has found its birth, in the death of our greatest joy: the joy of being one.”

Always think of you FIRST as a human being.

I like to conclude by extending to you the traditional Indian greeting, Namaste. Namaste is a Sanskrit word which means: “I bow to the divinity within you”.

Today, I invite you to dream of a world in which the divinity within you is always affirmed and the divinity in others is never denied.

Let your greeting, both now and forever be, Namaste!