Awakening Inner Peace

I was sitting in a restaurant in San Francisco watching a ship going out to sea.

And it struck my mind very forcefully how very different the worlds we live in are, even though we're all on the same planet or in the same city or even in the same home.

Here we were living our normal San Franciscan lives, and there people were going out to sea in a completely different consciousness, going out into the night, into the unknown, into the darkness, and building a whole new little world around them as they went.

And each one of us, as I looked around in the restaurant, was living in a sense in his own world.

When you look at the different, well, when you think, for example, of the violence on television, and you consider a community like Ananda where there's no violence, where there's real harmony, where there's love and kindness and supportiveness, where, to give you an example, one of our little girls went to the library with her mother.

She was, the girl was five years old, and she saw another mother with her child there, and the mother was very angrily scolding the little child.

And this little Ananda child looked up at her mother in astonishment, and she said, why is that mommy behaving so badly? She hadn't seen that kind of thing.

And yet, if you will go to many places in this country, they'll tell you, well, that's the norm.

To us, it isn't the norm.

You find so many different levels of reality, even in one culture, even in one country, and as I said, even in one city, where some people, to them the norm is drug addiction, a world that is hard to believe.

And yet there it is.

It's very real to them.

There are others, their norm is crime, murder, incredible states of consciousness.

Some man that a friend of mine met talked about how he felt so powerful going down the streets of Harlem, knowing he had a gun in his pocket and nobody would dare touch him because they knew he had a gun.

This kind of consciousness to us and probably to everybody in this room is something very foreign.

Well, as we look at the whole world and as we look at the ages, we see that mankind as a whole has produced an incredible variety of what you might call specializations.

It's not just different levels of consciousness, but different applications of our own potential, our divine potential, our human potential, whatever it might be.

Some cultures have specialized in art.

Others have specialized in science.

Others have specialized in politics or in religion.

In the West in general, our specialization has been in one way or another to externalize our energy, so much so that we take that for granted.

In the Orient, the consciousness and the concentration has been much more on internalizing the energy.

These two, the time has come for us to bring into harmony with one another.

But in the whole world, there is one part that has somehow remained completely above, literally and metaphorically too, completely above all this seething mass of human turmoil, of human ambition, of desire and disappointment, of greed and hatred and envy and anger and love and kindness, all these human interrelationships.