How to Create World Peace
The Best WE Can Do for Children (including the child inside all of us)
Here’s how it works (when I talk about my mission of expediting a day “….when children grow up knowing that it is always an inside job, ….that there are no outside enemies…and that anytime “THEY” can upset us, they are just reflecting to us the mind through which we see the world.”)
We can’t teach that level of peace until we have it inside ourselves.
Because it illuminates how this ‘reliable symmetry’ works in the face of injustice or cruelty, I want to share my response to a FB post about a 6-year-old boy, Hunter, who was made by the principal to eat lunch separate from the other kids with a cardboard box screen in front of his tray, because his mom’s car wouldn’t start and he was one minute late for school. (See photos and read actual caption by clicking on this link).
BOY RECEIVES UNFAIR CONSEQUENCES>>>>BUT WHAT ABOUT THE PRINCIPAL?
Did you instantly feel compassion for the principal in this situation? Whether or not this is the whole story, we know things happen all the time that we think are unfair, unjust, or just plain horrible–and yet we fail to look at the ways WE, in our own minds, treat the perpetrator of that crime (for example the recent University of North Carolina shootings) in a way that lacks as much compassion as the principal lacked for Hunter. But how? By using the almost magically healing symmetry in our reactions to others.
“Oh my goodness So much compassion for that principal, too, that s/he is believing her fear-driven thoughts to that extent. Wow. I hope there is someone there to help Hunter see that it’s not personal and help him to not perpetuate the cycle by starting a story of his own that it is ever possible to “do it wrong,” or to deserve punishment…. To see that the worst any of us is EVER doing is believing a scary thought, and that drives our behavior, and whatever the principal is believing has nothing to do with him.
I am passionate about getting the word out so that children grow up knowing that it’s ALWAYS an inside job–for us when we feel upset and for others when they act cruelly toward us. The best we can ever do for inner and world peace and to heal what hurts is lovingly question our own thoughts that drive our emotions and reactions. It was just our own innocent monkey mind (that started believing something when we were little after events like this) trying to save us from something that was never a problem to start with, and hold together an identity of someone who needs to maintain power over another to be safe.
The only way we can communicate this faith in what unfolds and be present for the Hunters of the world is to question our own thoughts that would cause us to do JUST THIS kind of thing to our husband or the waitress or our own sweet self. When we are believing there is anything anyone could do that warrants us ‘re-asserting’ our own power by withholding our love, appreciation, or approval from someone. We all experience so much compassion for the boy, but that principal is the one who is really living in thought-hell at this point.
Being able to see the ‘reliable symmetry’ in whatever she feels toward Hunter would be her path out of that hell—it is what I help people do (and in fact just did a RADICAL piece of work with a client around her intense hatred of the North Carolina shooter). Our only job here is to use The Work or prayer or whatever works for each of us to completely and lastingly UNDO the line of thinking that ever separates us from another human and from the unfolding of all that is (God).
That separation is the only source of our own private hell–and the only thing that would ever drive us to treat our own most cherished loved ones (including ourselves) in ways that are just as cruel.
So in this case OUR only job toward creating world peace is to UNDO in ourselves any line of thinking that would make us lack compassion for the principal and assert our identity as ‘the one who is different from or superior to’ that dear being who just got hold of a thought along the way and believed she was serving herself or humanity by acting on it.”
Questions and comments are VERY welcome below. I would be so happy for a discussion to ensue, especially if you feel you don’t really understand this or can’t find the innocence in the principal.
It is a radically new way of seeing the world that we definitely were NOT taught, so please don’t hesitate to share your resistance, confusion, or even criticism of anything I say in these posts to you. If you are OK to share more publicly or get feedback from others, please put a comment at the bottom of this post in my new baby blog.
If not, you can respond to me personally, or even set up a time to talk with me about it. This kind of thing can create a lot of suffering in us that wants some help.
Happy Sunday! LIFE IS OUR MOST BLESSED CHURCH. 🙂
xoxo
Shawn
PS–If you like these things I send, then I know you are already contributing to this movement and beginning to live in the symmetry paradigm in your own way, I’d love for you to pass anything I share along to others so they can let me know if they’d like to get them too.