Communication 

What has struck me more than anything this past month is how our lives are affected by communication on any thinkable level, or sometimes the lack thereof. Our world of 2003 would be totally different without our tools: our (cell) phones, radio, tv, the internet, our transportation vehicles and so on. Without our high-tech communication systems the war that is going on could not take place the way it does, or at least we would not be part of it the way we currently are. We could not have our feelings about Mr. Bush or Mr. Hussein without communication. Through the media we are informed, maybe mis-informed, influenced, confronted with some kind of truth, or different truths. We are part of one big event. It is awesome what modern technology contributes to our lives, even to the degree that we may have difficulty to handle it all and feel an urge to shut ourselves off from taking in all the details. 

Higher Communication

Now, what is the purpose of all this? Is it just to get us involved in a war going on or could we take it further? Could we use it to increase our understanding that we are part of it all, that the outside reflects the inside, that we are all one? What about using our sophisticated equipment to create peace rather than war? That is a great idea. However, those who play the power games and take certain decisions may be able to operate the technology, but they don't seem to be able to hear the voice of the many who want peace or to listen to the voice of their own heart. Maybe it is time to develop and use ways of communication that go beyond modern technology. Maybe all that is happening is an invitation to increase our trust in the power of our minds and of our hearts to a degree that we have not done so far.

Peace

If so many people on the planet want peace and love, then let us join forces and create it. Of course, karmic issues have to be played out. At the same time each and everyone of us can work on creating peace in our hearts, work through and learn from issues with those around us in our daily lives and contribute to the creation of one large energy field of harmony. How do we do that if we also have to deal with our own frustration and concern? I just received this wonderful article by Robert Thurman below. Please read it!
If each of us focuses on the deeper messages, on joy and love, on the first green of springtime, on the returning of the birds, without feeling guilty, we contribute to peace, as I feel it. If then we communicate that with all those others with the same focus, in our minds and our hearts, in our prayers, a shift has to occur.

Initiative 

I also urgently invite you to participate in the Peace Vigil on Tuesday April 1, initiated by the Psychic Children and communicated to the world by Peace Ambassador James Twyman. For details, see below.

If we really acknowledge how powerful we are, what this kind of communication does and how much it counts when each of us contributes while linking in with this world-wide prayer, we can create an extremely powerful act of peace.

Here’s to ‘Communication’.

Love and Peace Blessings,

Amayra Hamilton

P.S. Did you know that April 1-8 is pronounced as ‘Star Gazing Week’? Please turn off your lights and enjoy the skies!

Peace Initiative from the Psychic Children

From: James Twyman [[email protected]]
Sent: Monday, March 24, 2003 8:31 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Psychic Children to visit White House?

Beloved Friends, 

Last weekend 600 people gathered on the Big Island of Hawaii to listen to the messages of peace from several of the Psychic Children we have been working with over the past year. I believe it was one of the most profound experiences any of us have ever had, and the Children themselves were overjoyed with the opportunity. In fact, during a panel discussion on Sunday, they presented their idea of a world-wide prayer vigil that they believe would have a profound effect on the current crisis in Iraq. Its simplicity and wisdom is overwhelming, and the fact that the idea comes from children makes it irresistible.
They want to call this:

A Prayer Vigil for George Bush

They explained that there is so much energy against President Bush that we are not helping him make decisions for the highest good of every person on the planet. The more we focus on what we don't like, the more it increases. They suggest that we see him as God would, and focus on the Light in the President, thereby amplifying the Light. The children believe that if hundreds of thousands of people do this at the same moment, then the effect on his consciousness would be profound. I have to agree.

Therefore, we have decided to conduct an emergency "Great Experiment IV" and are asking all the Spiritual Peacemakers around the world to join us in this important project.

Here are the details:

Tuesday April 1, 2003, 11 AM New York time, 8 AM California Time (determine your own time zone based on this) hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, will join together for fifteen minutes as one mind and pray for President Bush (and all those who influence his decision making) to make all his decisions based on the highest good of all beings on earth. The Children suggested that we begin by imagining him as a little boy, and use our energy to empower his heart. They say that the boy is still within him, though he is very afraid. He doesn't need to be attacked for what he is doing, but loved, not for his actions, but for the Truth within him. We call this: "Seeing as God Sees and Loving as God Loves." If possible, gather with other people during this vigil, and please pass this E-mail on to as many people as you can to help spread the word.

Hundreds of people will be joining together in Washington, DC to anchor these important prayers. We are in the process of securing a permit for a location as close to the White House as possible, and we will have children present a section of the "Children's Cloth of Many Colors" at the White House that same day.

(The Children's Cloth of Many Colors is over one-third of a mile long, and is made up of pieces of cloth that have been infused with the energy of peace from tens of thousands of children from around the world. It came from the original "Cloth of Many Colors" peace project I started in 1999 which has been presented at the UN in New York, the US Capitol, the Pentagon, and many other places around the world. For more info on the CCMC, go to www.themastersgroup.org .)

If you live in the Washington area and would like to join the group praying near the White House, send an E-mail to: [email protected]. You will receive a reply as soon as the location has been secured. 

The Children wanted me to stress that this has nothing to do with agreeing or disagreeing with President Bush in regard to the war in Iraq. They say that in order to be Spiritual Peacemakers we must release our judgment and focus only on the higher good. George Bush has the power to affect the lives of so many people, and we pray that he will do so with compassion and peace. The intention of this vigil is to break down the walls of fear and increase the love in his heart. It is the gift of the children. Please join us.

Once again, April 1, 11 AM EST, fifteen minutes sending George Bush all the love you have in your heart. And tell the whole world.

In Peace,

James Twyman

Here's a link to an Internet site with a tool to convert time zones: http://www.timezoneconverter.com/cgi-bin/zonehelp.tzc (uncheck the "use current date/time" check box to calculate our vigil time)

Second message: 

From: James Twyman [[email protected]]
Sent: Saturday, March 29, 2003 4:12 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Follow-up: Psychic Children at White House

Beloved Friends,

IMPORTANT UPDATE ON THE APRIL 1 PRAYER VIGIL.

On April 1 at 11 AM Washington, DC time, people all over the world will focus their prayers of peace on George Bush, Saddam Hussein and the leaders of all the countries of the world. 

The plea for prayer came from the Children who gathered on the Big Island of Hawaii last weekend for the "Psychic Children Speak to the World" conference.

Now they have asked that we expand the vigil to include all world leaders, especially those who are most involved in the current war in Iraq. They believe that offering our prayers of peace will actually inspire them to make their decisions based upon the good of all. I personally believe that this is the most powerful and positive action we can take, especially for those who believe that violence can never lead to real peace. 

Wherever you are at that time, please stop and join the world in prayer. We believe that millions of people will participate, adding their energy to this essential movement. 

Also, around a couple of hundred people will gather outside the White House to anchor the prayers. We are asking that as many people as possible join that group, and bring as many children as you can. That is the most powerful aspect of this vigil, the fact that it comes to us from the Children. If you would like to attend please meet no later than 11 AM at the Northwest corner of the Ellipse, between Constitution Ave and the White House. (Parking is very limited, so the metro is best.) The Children's Cloth of Many Colors will be there, and a section will soon be received by the Children's Correspondence section of the White House as a symbol of all our prayers.
Please join the group there if you can.

During the vigil, the Psychic Children are asking that we imagine President Bush and the other leaders as children, not as adults, and to appeal to their original childlike nature. They believe that this is the only way to not only end this current conflict, but to initiate a world where wars like this are impossible. Spend at least ten minutes holding this vision.

Also, please pass this update to as many people as you can. The power of these vigils is the way they spread around the world in a matter of hours.

Thank you for spreading the word.

The Emissary of Light list has grown to over 110,000 people. I envision that within six months we will have a network of at least a quarter million people from around the world committed to promoting spiritual solutions to all world problems. If you are not already on our regular list, please join us. You can go to emissaryoflight.com or send an email to: [email protected]  

Peace Prevails on Earth,

James Twyman 

To sign up to this list again, or have a friend sign up: http://emissaryoflight.com/emaillist_signup.html
OR click on any of the sign up links on our site ("Sign up for the Emissary of Light Email List").
OR simply send an email to: [email protected]

COOL HEROISM
By Robert Thurman

To deal with feelings of anger and fear and frustration, we can start by finding relationality. As the Lakota Indians say, Mitakuye Oyasin: "All beings are my relatives." When I'm particularly mad at George Bush and company for warmongering, I remember that in another lifetime he was my mother, and that even the most evil people were at some point my errant siblings. That immediately takes a certain edge off the anger.

The second step is to realize that we too have the potential to be demonic. Given certain conditions and confusions and insecurities and fears, any of us could do bad things. It might start with an imperceptible change; we wouldn't think we were being bad - just a little naughty here and there. Pretty soon we would take it too far and be really bad. People can become deluded like that.

Third, we develop real sympathy for the people who are doing harm, because if they bomb people, if they pollute, if they poison the food chain, they will have the bad karma of having banned so many people.

By taking these three steps - finding one's relation to all beings, acknowledging the evil potential in one-self, feeling sympathy for the evil person - one gets the strength and energy to be an activist and to try, by voting and organizing, to stop harm caused by others. This is cool heroism: developing a tolerant, deliberate, and wise energy.

People are afraid that if they let go of their anger and righteousness and wrath, and look at their own feelings - and even see the good in a bad person - they're going to lose the energy they need to do something about the problem. But actually you get more strength and energy by operating from a place of love and concern. You can be just as tough, but more effectively tough. It's like a martial art.

My wife once met Morihei Ueshiba, the man who founded aikido. After he did a demonstration where he left about seventeen big bruisers on the ground, she asked what his secret was for disarming his attackers without harming them. He giggled and told her, "A long time ago, I realized that every person was just my sister, my brother, my cousin. All those guys lying on the floor are my brothers, you are my little sister! Everybody is just one family." That's cool heroism.

To conquer hate, you have to find unshakeable tolerance. The seventh-century Buddhist saint Shantideva was the great master of that. The sixth chapter of his Guide to Bodhisattva's Way of life (Bodhicharyavatara) is considered to be a special magical precept from Manjushn, the Bodhisattva of Wisdom, for replacing anger with tolerance. The essence is: Why get upset if you can do something about something? And if you can't do something about it, then why get upset? Anger, the text says, comes from feeling uncomfortable because something you don't want to happen is happening, or something you want to happen is not happening. Then you lose your good cheer - your joyousness in just being - and start operating from a place of misery and anger.

When you understand interconnectedness, it makes you more afraid of hating than of dying. But people will not be more afraid of hating than dying as long as they hold the worldview that death is the final conclusion of the self, of all chains of causation and consequence that they could be connected to. That's the problem for spiritual nihilists, or materialists. You don't have to believe in future lives to be a Buddhist since Buddhism isn't merely a belief system. But in the mind-reform practice, if you're going to deal with your own explosive and obsessive impulses at a really deep level, then the sense of being locked into a potentially endless continuity of consequence - what I call "infinite consequentiality" - gives you the power in the moment to find a deeper resource to use against those seemingly uncontrollable impulses. If you take the view that you're an infinite prisoner of those forces - that if you don't deal with them now, you'll have to in future lifetimes - then you will not make the excuse "I can't do it." You're going to have to do it. It's what Milarepa said: He was grateful he had the awareness of hell - of infinite negativity. He had killed many people with black magic in his youth, before he turned to the dharma, but understanding the dangers of hell gave him the power to become a buddha and escape these consequences.

We all have the potential to be killers; realizing that is the key. Years ago some academics and I did a study of religious violence. We found that the people who are the most violent are those who are incapable of embracing their own potential for evil. By projecting their shadow, their evil, onto the other, they justify their violence. They think they're emphasizing their purity, or restoring their purity, by destroying someone else.

If there were a really bad person who was about to launch nuclear weapons or engage in germ warfare, the most compassionate thing would be to have somebody take him out without hurting innocent people. In the Theravada ethic, you say, "We don't know the real story here. I don't know whose karma is what, so I can't get involved." But in the bodhisattva ethic, if you see someone about to kill a bunch of people, you have to stop him or you're an accomplice. If you don't stop him, not only are you letting others lose their lives, but you're also harming the killer because he's going to have very bad karmic effects. You try to stop him without killing, but if you have to kill, you do. You get bad karma, too, but because you are acting out of compassion, not hatred, the good karma will outweigh the bad.

Surgical violence - killing the one to save the many - is part of the bodhisattva ethic. The problem with American-style warfare since World War ll is that we've relied on carpet bombing - civilian bombing. Civilian bombing is a kind of terrorism in itself, and there's nothing surgical about it. It's just blanket annihilative violence. And that produces this terrible blowback of terrorism and people filled with revenge and hatred. It incites more violence, whereas surgical violence had better be surgical -aiming to heal.

So our outer work is to resist and protest and try to maintain clarity and speak out forcefully against the kind of violence that kills so many innocent people. Our speaking out forcefully will be more effective because we won't really be angry, we'll be fierce. We'll realize that we can get greater energy out of love and joy than out of hatred.

Hatred is so off balance. You can blow your adrenals in one minute, then you're shaky and weak. But if you're joyful, you'll get an endless source of energy.

Robert A. F. Thurman, PhD., named as one of Time Magazine's 25 Most Influential People of 1997, has been a college professor and writer for 30 years, and holds the first endowed chair in Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies in America (Jey Tsong Khapa Chair, Columbia University). He is the co-founder and president of the non-profit organization, Tibet House New York. He was the first Western Tibetan monk, a student for over 35 years and a friend of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. He is the author of several books, including Inner Revolution and Essential Tibetan Buddhism and is acknowledged as a key figure in American Buddhism. Thurman lives in New York City with his wife, Nena, who is managing director of Tibet House New York. Thurman also is the father of five children including actress Uma Thurman. His special interest is the exploration of the Indo-Tibetan philosophical and psychological traditions, with a view to their relevance to parallel currents of contemporary thought and science.