A sincere young spiritual student recently related to a local audience her highly interesting story which seems particularly appropriate these days.
Encouraged by inner prompting, she had recently traveled to India to experience darshan with a renowned spiritual teacher. Her personal contact with the great teacher was very brief and her story began with the question she found herself asking of this teacher. She said as soon as she came into the presence of this teacher the question arose within her spontaneously and surprised her:
"What can we do to create peace in the world?"
The great teacher's answer actually startled her:
"There is nothing you need do but wait ... and see what happens!"
She remarked in her story how she was unprepared for such an answer and caught herself sputtering out an objection:
"But many argue we should actively support the movement for world peace?"
The teacher seemed to answer with great authority:
"That is because they do not yet know peace inside themselves, so they are looking for peace where it cannot be found."
The young student told how she was somewhat awed and her mind was not able to put together an answer, but again a question rose inside her as if from nowhere.
"Are you saying," this young woman asked the teacher in so many words, "that all my friends who work for world peace are deluded?"
The great teacher smiled and answered by asking her a question:
"Believing in the illusion of war and violence gives them an excuse to not look at the truth, yes?"
She stated in her narrative how again her mind went numb with awe, but again she heard words coming out of her mouth:
"Well, I think my friends understand that it all starts with inner peace, but they also feel like working for peace out in the world."
She said she remembered how the teacher's eyes seemed dazzling with wisdom as he answered.
"If you allow yourself to see the real world," the great teacher replied, "you can only see peace. If you do not see peace, you are not looking at the real world, you are not looking deep enough."
In telling her story, this student said she felt a sort of certainty inside herself at these words even though another part of her felt that she didn't understand what was really being said. She told her audience how in previous years she had experienced a great deal of peer pressure to pray for peace, dance for peace, hold vigils for peace ... yet the goal of world peace was not the most important goal in her life. It was as if the great teacher was planting thoughts in her mind. She found herself saying:
"In America there are some who want to set up a Department of Peace in the government!"
She reported that the great teacher actually chuckled at this and answered in a joyous voice:
"That is because for all their talk of peace, they actually enjoy war."
Again, she felt impelled to voice an objection:
"Oh, no! Why do you say that?"
She described how a dialog seemed to start, with the teacher seeming to lead her along.
"How is your government financed? Is it financed voluntarily, like a church?"
"Well, no. Not exactly. People pay taxes."
"And if some people don't want to pay taxes?"
"I don't know. I guess they are forced. I guess they would go to jail...."
"So your government is financed by war against its citizens."
"Well, I never thought of it that way."
"And how are decisions made in your government?"
"I'm not really sure, but I guess everybody kind of fights back and forth, and eventually those with the most support win."
"And if the losers feel they would compromise their integrity if they obeyed?"
"I guess they would be forced. Maybe they would be put in prison."
"So again ... your government is at war with its citizens."
She told her audience how at this point she was starting to get confused. The great teacher seemed to be playing with her. She found herself on the defensive.
"But I always thought democracy was the best...."
"A government with roots of war cannot produce peace as a fruit."
"But certainly a more peaceful world is possible."
"Oh, yes! But you need to recognize that your friends who want to set up a new government department do not really want peace."
"But they do! They hate war!"
"They need to learn to love peace so much that they do not hate anything."
"We do love peace, but we can't stand the pain of war!"
"Yet you are enjoying the pain of war. Otherwise you would not be aware of any pain or any war. You believe in the illusion of pain and war because you enjoy believing in it."
"But it's really hard to be at peace when there is war going on in the world!!"
"Are you finally admitting that you don't really want to be at peace, so you choose to see war?"
"You are confusing me!"
"Certainly you are confused. But you confuse yourself because you look at the world and judge by surface appearances when surface appearances are not what is really going on. You simply have it backwards. When you no longer choose to see war or violence, you will be at peace. And when you are at peace, your world will be peaceful, regardless of what appears to be going on."
This student told how she returned to America feeling not exactly sure what her spiritual teacher was doing to her. She said she felt that somehow her beliefs were being toyed with, even undermined to some degree. She felt her teacher had left her a little disoriented.
Those of us who use A Course in Miracles for spiritual opening are acquainted with the feeling she described. Similar to what her teacher told her, A Course in Miracles teaches that the world we see is not real, nothing in the world we see is real, and nothing can be judged based on surface appearances ... unless we want to see war.
But this young woman told her audience that when she returned from India she was not yet acquainted with A Course in Miracles and did not have any understanding of Course principles, so she spent at least a month looking at different possible interpretations of what this great spiritual teacher had really been telling her. She described how she prayed intensely for clarification and really tried to make herself open to any answers which might come her way.
She shared with the audience how clues and snatches of understanding started coming to her in strange ways. She even read aloud some quotations which had come her way, which she had written down.
She described how one day at a local library some words of the great newspaperman H. L. Mencken practically jumped off the shelf at her:
"Every government is a scoundrel. In its relations with other governments it resorts to frauds and barbarities that were prohibited to private men by the Common Law of civilization so long ago as the reign of Hammurabi, and in its dealings with its own people it not only steals and wastes their property and plays a brutal and witless game with their natural rights, but regularly gambles with their very lives. Wars are seldom caused by spontaneous hatreds between people. They must be urged to the slaughter by politicians who know how to alarm them."
She said there was no way to describe her feeling that these words were somehow related to what her teacher in India had been saying. Upon reading these words she had felt a sort of weird awe. She had quickly written down notes, then flipped some pages and copied some more:
"The government I live under has been my enemy all my active life. When it has not been engaged in silencing me it has been engaged in robbing me. So far as I can recall I have never had any contact with it that was not an outrage on my dignity and an attack on my security."
She told how on another occasion she was channel surfing on her television and a history program caught her attention. She heard some words of the famous English philosopher John Locke and again felt compelled to write them down:
"Whenever the legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people."
Again she felt that somehow these thoughts that were being presented to her had something to do with what her teacher was trying to teach her. But it wasn't as if she could figure it all out at this point.
Then on a brief outing one weekend she ended up talking about these things to a hiker she met on the trail. He said to her that possibly he could provide another piece for the puzzle, but he would have to let her know. The next day when she checked her phone messages, he had left a quote from novelist Ayn Rand:
"What is the basic, the essential, the crucial principle that differentiates freedom from slavery? It is the principle of voluntary action versus physical coercion or compulsion.... The issue is not slavery for a good cause versus slavery for a bad cause; the issue is not dictatorship by a good gang versus dictatorship by a bad gang. The issue is freedom versus dictatorship."
She wondered how this could be a puzzle piece until the very next week she was reading a book about Mohandas (Mahatma) Ghandi and learned that Ghandi had been a disciple of America's Henry David Thoreau. One of Ghandi's favorite writings was Thoreau's piece, "Resistance to Civil Government," in which Thoreau had written:
"I heartily accept the motto, -'The government is best which governs least,' and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which I also believe, -'That government is best which governs not at all.' "
She told the audience how she remembered slowly lowering the book into her lap, closing her eyes, and silently asking her teacher, "What are you trying to tell me?"
The very next day she was introduced to A Course in Miracles.
In A Course in Miracles she read the words of Jesus telling her that those who truly do not want to see war ... see only God, and thus see only peace.
She began to learn in the Course that those who have great concern for peace in the world are choosing not to see the only peace there really is, the peace of God. Those who truly feel the peace of God know that there is nothing to do but be at peace.
She showed her audience how sometimes as she read A Course in Miracles, she expanded the reference to include the whole world:
"No one sees himself (or the world) in conflict and ravaged by a cruel war unless he believes that both opponents in the war are real. No one finds himself (or the world) ravaged and torn in endless battles if he himself perceives them as wholly without meaning....
"You are but trying to escape a bitter war from which you have escaped....
"Nothing in this world can give peace, for nothing in this world is wholly shared."
Now the puzzle pieces were falling into place. She thought to herself that she probably didn't fully understand, but was at least beginning to grasp what her great and wonderful spiritual teacher had conveyed in an enigmatic way.
Then one day she felt a very strong impulse to read in the Bible. She opened to a passage in which Jesus was speaking:
"And ye shall hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that ye be not troubled! For all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet." (Matthew 24:6)
She described to the audience how lightening went through her as she finished reading these words of Jesus. In a flash she understood totally what her teacher had been saying. Her whole being knew there was nothing to do but wait ... and see what happens. She felt unbelievable peace, which she described as far beyond all understanding.
She ended her story by telling her audience:
"World peace is already achieved! I experience it! My teacher taught me well!"
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