Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.~Thomas Merton
Good evening and welcome to Monday Group Meditation, we will be sitting from 7:30 to 10:00 PM EST. It is not necessary to sit for the entire extended time, which is set up to make it convenient for people in four North American Time Zones; sit for as long as you like and when it is most convenient for you.
Monday Group Meditation is open to everyone, believers and non-believers of all stripes who are interested in gathering in silence. If you are new to meditation and would like to try it for yourself, Mindful Nature gave a good description of one way to meditate in an earlier diary, copied and pasted below:
"It is a matter of focusing attention mostly. In many traditions, the idea is to sit and focus on the rising and falling of the breath. Not controlling it, but sitting in a relaxed fashion and merely observing experiences of breathing, sounds, etc. Be aware of your thoughts, but don't engage in them. When your mind wanders (it will, often), then return to focus on breath and repeat."
What is the price of peace? The Thomas Merton quote we opened with tonight is one of my favorites, because it gets right down to the essence of what it takes to have peace. We are required to look at ourselves honestly, with fidelity to the truth of what and who we are.
Chogyam Trungpa called them our "private parts" and he wasn't speaking of the naughty parts of our bodies, he was speaking of the selfishness, greed, desires, all the afflictive emotions that exist within us, some of which we are aware and others hidden so deeply in our psyches we are not consciously aware of them.
It's hard work and it takes real courage to look at ourselves deeply and honestly. The profound and subtle work of developing the compassion required to overcome the common human trait of seeing what we dislike only outside ourselves is heroic. Surrendering the illusion that all of that is separate from us is a tremendous sacrifice.
When we do the necessary work to uncover our private parts, when we can soften and accept the totality of ourselves both good and bad, light and dark, positive and negative, then we've made room for stillness and peace, which also exist within us, to emerge and become apparent. When the experience of peace deepens and spreads in us we become vehicles to bring peace to the rest of the world.
May we become channels for peace.