First Step: Peace through You

Why have we strayed so far from peace? In order to realize peace on earth, we need someone to take peace by hand and plant it in the ground. Who will it be? When we all wish to be beneficiaries of peace, who then will be the benefactor of peace? Who will be the creator of peace?

Generally, we think that peace is a concept too abstract and remote to have any bearing on our personal lives. When someone answers that his highest hope or dream is for world peace, we are skeptical, and may think he is being facetious. We think that peace is a matter for politics and religion, outside of our own realm of experience.

When people speak publicly of world peace or of curing social ills of humanity, they tend to be people with high visibility. When such influential people talk about peace and human welfare, we tend to nod at their words of wisdom. However, nine out of ten times, their talk of peace contains a personal agenda.

Most business people are primarily interested in making money. When a person talks about peace in the context of business, we wonder whether he is using peace as a marketing ploy. There is an easy way to find out, however. Ask if he or she would be willing to take a profit loss or forgo a lucrative deal in the interest of world peace.

The same goes for a politician. The primary goal of a politician is to attain and maintain power. When a politician speaks of peace, he may be using it as an issue to keep his grip on power. Ask him whether he would be willing to relinquish his power in order to facilitate world peace, then you will see his true intentions. The primary job of a military officer is to win a war. When he justifies killing with rhetoric of peace, ask him whether he would willing to surrender a battle or lose the war in the interest of peace.

The divine mission of a religious leader is to bring more people to his particular faith. Ask him whether he would be willing to forsake his religion for world peace and you will know of his true will. Similarly, celebrities focus mainly on expanding popularity. Ask if they would accept anonymity for world peace. If not, when a celebrity speaks of peace, he is using it as a tool to gain popularity and fame.

For many of these people, peace is not an end, but a means to personal gain, without any real bearing on world peace. Of course, I am not discounting the people who are willing to give their best in the interest of world peace. Though I am perhaps a bit cynical, peace will not come out of blind naivete. Peace will come about only by the conscious choice of fully informed and determined people who are masters of their own brains.

Many people continue to exploit the issue of peace for many reasons. Yet, peace seems farther and farther away from our immediate realm of experience. A wall of experts has made the choice for peace inaccessible to most of us. We have surrendered our inherent right to, and responsibility for peace.

When I point my index finger to the ceiling, unless there is a problem with your vision, or you are predisposed to see more than one finger, you will see one finger. If you turn this eye on the world today, you will see what I have just described. The amazing thing is that we have ignored such obvious hypocrisy and doubletalk for such a long time. Not only is Denmark rotten, but the whole world is.

Who then, will be the protagonists of peace? Who will actualize peace on Earth?

Peace will not occur as the result of rhetoric by people who exploit the idea as a means to some other end. Peace will be the result of the effort of people who see peace as the end. Their ultimate goal is peace, and their means must be peaceful. Peace will not be the result of a triumphant biblical battle against dark, mythical forces of evil. The ways and means used to bring about peace on Earth must be of the same peace they seek to realize.

Therefore, what we need to know now, is how we ourselves can become an expression of peace. As we experience peace and become peaceful, peace will prevail. When you experience peace within yourself, and develop full confidence in the power of this peace, you will communicate it to others.  

You are the Creator of Peace

Peace, like our breath, exists very comfortably and very close to us. Peace is our very breath and life. This is why anyone can discover peace and help to bring it about. Peace is everyone's purpose in life, not the province of a few select individuals. It is not something that a select group of politicians, artists, or even religious leaders can do for us. You and I, one individual at a time, are all creators and benefactors of peace, as well as its beneficiaries. Until now, responsibility for peace fell to people of influence. Now we must reclaim our own responsibility and right to peace. Those who truly love humanity, the Earth, and peace are experts in peace. One who truly loves life is a specialist in peace.

The first step toward peace is to realize that you are the creator and benefactor of peace. You have a responsibility to change the unsustainable direction of current civilization, and you have the power to change the direction of humanity toward peace.

From Inhaling to Exhaling

Breath is the most natural and immediate expression of life. Inhaling and exhaling, expansion and contraction? this rhythmic cycle maintain s its specific and mystical order even in midst of disorder . Breath is the epitome of perfect balance, cycle, and rhythm. We are breathing at this very moment and will do so as long as our life will last. Grab onto your breath and feel, gently and calmly. Breathe in slowly, and breathe out just as slowly. Deeply. Inhale until your lungs are full to their capacity, filled to the brim with fresh air. What then? What do you have to do next to complete your breathing? Exhale, of course. In order to complete the cycle of breathing, and thereby live, you have to exhale every time you inhale. Otherwise, the lungs will burst and we will all die. Breath is life. When the cycle of inhaling and exhaling ends, then a life ends. A new life is begun when a new breath is started. Our life is a process of a breath. We inhale our life, growing and maturing, and then we begin to slowly exhale, getting older, eventually returning to where we started. Beginning and End are not separate, but one. Life's indescribable beauty and sacredness arise out of this completeness and perfection of the cycle. All life is a dance of this endless cycle of the breath. It is fortunate that we do not have to consciously control our own breathing, for we would not be able to sleep, eat, or do anything else . However, without our effort , we breathe naturally and without fail, as long as there is life. This is an immediate example of the natural order of the cosmos and an intimate example of the love of the Creator.

The Korean term for this rhythm of life is Yullyo. Although today, Yullyo is also a musical term to denote harmony of contrasting notes, it originally describe d the rhythm of the cosmos , the source of universal harmony . Yullyo is the underlying principle and original energy of the universe expressed through light, sound, and vibration. Yullyo is nothing less than Cosmic Energy and Cosmic Mind.

There are countless manifestations of this endless rhythm of life. Pounding waves, curving of mountaintops, and breasts, infinity signs, the geometric representations of our own brain waves, and the brain waves themselves, the shapes of leaves, and the forms of fish are all living examples of this rhythm.

Consciously or unconsciously, we follow the rhythm of breathing faithfully. In accordance with the laws of breathing, we must exhale in order to inhale, or contract in order to expand again. We can fill up again when we have emptied ourselves. Life moves with natural rhythms and cycles of the universe. Our breath, our heart beat, all our crucial life functions follow this rhythm without fail. Our lives are an essential part of the rhythm of Yullyo. Yuln'yo

The life of an individual, the life of a nation, and the life of each species moves according to this rhythm. How well and healthy an organism's life is, depends on how well and harmoniously the organism maintains this rhythm. This goes for an entire nation as well as the whole of humanity. On an individual level, we are healthy in body and mind when we adhere to the laws of breathing. On a larger plane, all of society will be in harmony when this rhythm is collectively recognized and maintained.

Unfortunately however, our current way of living is not following this most basic law of life. Let us see what our current civilization teaches us to pursue and what it considers growth or maturity. When we equate ourselves with our physical bodies, and consider our consciousness to consist merely of the knowledge and information that we have injested since our birth, we are unaware of our true place as a grand expression of the cosmos. Then we have no choice perhaps, but to pursue goals that are external and material. Some may dismiss this notion of human beings as an integral part of the whole fabric of the universe, interconnected to all other organic and inorganic forms of life through a weave of energy, possessing of an eternal and unchanging soul, as mumbo-jumbo spirituality or, even worse, superstition ? however, we must not confuse ignorance or lack of awareness with superstition. Just because we have not proven something to ourselves using the latest ­�scientific? methods does not mean that it is not deeply true. In a day, we breathe in and out countless times. We cannot exist without this cycle of in and out. Despite our differences in race and culture, we can be sure about one thing: that the human life and culture and everything else is maintained because of the existence of the breath. We are One through the breath, if nothing else. We breathe in the same sky through our nose, and eat the same fruit of the Earth through our mouths. We are all life with roots in the same sky and the same earth. Is this spiritual or superstitious? Do we really need to prove this now by tagging a molecule of oxygen with radioactive isotope and following it around as I goes in into one nose and out another mouth?

The desire to possess and control, govern the drive to pursue external goals. With these, competition, victory, and defeat are inevitable. The need to win

Far exceeds that which can be possessed or controlled. More and more people are fighting for smaller and smaller pieces of the pie. The driving force of our current material civilization has been competition. Competition cannot satisfy everyone, for it is a system of separating the players into winners and losers. For every winner there is a loser, for every success a failure, and for every feeling of happiness, a sense of despair. This creates a pool of losers filled with insecurity and fear. Eventually this results in violence, creating even more victims to perpetuate further violence. In this cycle of competition, winning is necessarily temporary, for winning plants the seed of its eventual downfall through the creation of ­�losers.? And as time goes, more losers are created per every winner, creating a social caste system of an elite group of winners controlling and dominating an increasingly large number of losers with a correspondingly large pool of insecurity, fear, and anger.

The harder we pursue the goals set by our material civilization, the more we destroy our own ecosystem, deplete our resources, pollute our air, and lay barren mental and spiritual richness. Our material civilization is ever growing and becoming more complicated. When a system gets too large, its efficiency decreases dramatically, requiring more and more energy to maintain less and less of the system. Ironically, we call this process, ­�growth.?

Since such ­�growth? destroys the very platform it rests on, it is bound to self-destruct. We are riding on a bicycle that we cannot stop pedaling because if we stop, we will fall. Although we know that we are heading toward a cliff, we cannot stop for fear of falling and skinning our knees. In spite of knowing that our demise is imminent, we cannot stop this process of endless competition for the thing called ­�growth.? We are breathing in only, without breathing out. If we continue to pursue only external goals without pausing to breathe out, we will surely be history ourselves in the near future.