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Peace Begins with Oneself
Silvia Baena
Translated from Spanish
by Kate Whittle
In the face of a challenge so complex, but
on the other hand so beautiful, such as bringing peace to
the world, something came into my head which after all we
cannot do and is nothing. Before starting this essay,
I asked the people nearest me, my workmates, and the replies
have been varied, from the use of force to let the women rule
or to abolish all religions, amongst others. What did predominate
was the assumption of the challenge as something utopian.
The small debate concluded that it was something unattainable
and that human beings do not have the capacity to live in
peace.
Personally I think that we are used to wishing
for change on a global scale, that things somehow happen on
a large scale, but that someone: governments or scholars,
should make everything better. And rarely, at least as far
as I'm concerned, do we stop to think that to achieve a great
change, like that which is suggested: world peace, millions
of small changes are necessary. This is what I am learning
from Buddhism. It is necessary to transform yourself as an
individual in order afterwards to transform the world, bit
by bit, like the work of little ants. Each individual working
on themselves can eradicate the hate and the anger in themselves,
or at least transform them into something positive and create
a little paradise, and so on.
This thought of mine is not at all original,
but is at the moment the only way I can find that peace could
become possible. If we do not liberate ourselves from our
internal afflictions, we will continue being selfish, not
seeing reality as a whole on which we all depend and are part
of.
The Buddha and the bodhisattvas have repeated
it to us in their teachings, right now ecology and physics
demonstrate it, but we continue clinging to our little "me"s,
looking away from others' pain, hoping that the tempest will
not touch us.
In the 'developed' countries we live a fictitious
peace in the vapours of an anaesthetic called comfort. Our
comfort however, is the pain of our neighbours. But I am an
optimist and I believe that little by little we are awakening;
on the other hand, we have no other. We will hope that it
is for the good.
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