Peace

If we want peace in the world, we have to start with ourselves. One of the problems of the world is that everybody’s going around trying to straighten other people out. Very few people turn around and straighten themselves out. Yet that’s where they’re really responsible.

So right now, what are you doing? What are you thinking about? Nobody’s saying anything. But what are you thinking about? Where is your mind going right now? Try to bring some peace into your mind.

As the Buddha said, “There is no happiness other than peace.” Sometimes that’s translated, “There’s no happiness higher than peace.” But what he actually said was, no, “There’s no happiness other than peace.” Which means that if you want to find happiness, you’ve got to create a peaceful place inside. If you look outside, there’s not very much peace in the world. The world is not a very satisfactory place, so people are taking out their dissatisfaction on one another.

As the Buddha once said, “Even if it rained gold coins, you wouldn’t have enough wealth for one person’s desires.” You might think, well, my desires are small. But look what happens when people get a lot of money. They suddenly realize they’re able to buy more things than they could before. Their sense of what they need, what they want, just grows bigger and bigger.

So if you’re looking for happiness out there, there’s going to be a lot of conflict. As the Buddha said, he looked around and saw that every place in the world was already laid claim to. If he was going to find happiness out there, he was going to have to fight some people off. But then he turned around and looked inside, realized that the arrow in the heart was not coming from outside. It was coming from inside. So as long as he learned how to stop shooting himself with arrows and pull out the arrows that are already there, then he’d be okay.

That’s what we’re doing as we’re meditating. We’re finding where we’re shooting ourselves with arrows. The perceptions we have, the thoughts we have—they give rise to greed, give rise to anger, give rise to dissatisfaction of all kinds. You have to realize that you can find true happiness inside if you cultivate the potentials you already have. That way, you can find happiness. And you don’t have to fight anybody off because nobody else can get into your body and experience it from the inside the way you do. This is your territory, totally.

So develop this territory as much as you can and you’ll find that you have more happiness than you know what to do with. You can start spreading it around. You have more peace; you can start spreading that around as best you can. As to whether other people will be willing to accept your peace, to learn the skills that you’re learning, that’s beyond your control. But you can make sure that you’ve developed your potentials for peace inside as much as you possibly can.