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Peace
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focus |
blood |
| Outer
focus |
work in higher dimensions |
| Color |
blue |
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Welcome
Report from Chicago, Illinois
Dreams of Peace
Why Blood?
Film and Book Recommendations
Peace in the News?
Who’s Who in Peace
Annette’s Poem and Prayer
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From the Editors |
This month we are featuring PEACE, one of the Descending Principles (numbered 20-29). As we know, translating our everyday understanding of words used to name the principles into a spiritual understanding is not easy. This is even more true with the Descending Principles, because they emerge from a level of consciousness beyond the human spectrum. Mystically, they possess a higher degree of unification. Ordinary and technical languages, which focus on making distinctions and define words in terms of their opposites, simply do not work. Think of PEACE and the other Descending Principles as yearning for poetic language, asking us to explore them through dream and meditation, pun and metaphor.
If you would like to discuss the ideas or teachings in this newsletter, please post your question or comment at http://www.generositydreams.blogspot.com/. We look forward to hearing your thoughts.
Robin Moore & Tamar Frankiel, Editors
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Report from Chicago, Illinois |
This month's principle is Peace. Here is a teaching from one of our dream sisters: |
Meditation on Peace
I believe there is the essence of invisible peace and there is the experience of visible peace. When we look up and into the night sky, it may be we are seeing peace. The space we call the sky seems empty at times, particularly when the moon is hidden in its newness, and when the stars and planets are hidden under blankets of clouds and fog. Yet the sky is not really empty. We know that it is filled with the bubbling energy of the Universe. Similarly, when we are quiet, pretending we are night owls or sleeping cats, we can sense an energy in our blood. It is a feeling of being full without having eaten anything. At those times, I am reminded that when we shut our eyes and open our minds, we know the peace of the planet; we experience the peace that is birthed from the vibrations of silence.
Peace was awakened in me through my grandson, Nick. It happened when he invited me on a field trip to see the Nutcracker Suite ballet. I left Chicago at 5 a.m. to meet him on the school bus at 11 a.m. It was a stormy, cold day, and the children on the bus were loud, aggressive, and rude. I can still feel the blood rushing through my body as I tripped over feet and book bags to find him at the back of the bus.
Even though chaos was swirling around me like a cracked-open kaleidoscope, it didn't matter. I was running to be with him. When I saw his trademark half-smile and twinkling eyes, when I felt his heartbeat in the warmth of my hands, peace descended into me and continued as we sat quietly watching the raindrops. As they slipped and slid on the windowpane, we wondered what invisible force held the water droplets onto the glass.
Was this peace? I believe so. I've understood the meaning of peace as a running into the invisible mystery I call God. In this experience, I knew peace as a power running into me. Maybe the truth about Peace is that, as the heart of the Cosmos flows through us from the invisible realms, we in turn can radiate and bring contentment beyond understanding to anyone we encounter.
--Annette Hulefeld
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Dreams of Peace |
We
can learn about the principles by examining our dreams.
Here are two dreams of Peace:
The dreamer witnesses herself as a small girl. The girl is in a chair like the ones used in laboratories where they draw blood. The chair is in a very wide hallway in a hospital, and her grandmother is standing behind the chair. The girl thinks she is about to receive a transfusion. She sees a line of people coming toward her down the hall. When they get closer she recognizes her great-uncles, the Blackwells. These men are gamblers -- charming but on the edge of the law -- one a pimp, others alcoholics. When the first one gets to her chair, she realizes that she is there to receive blood but to have her blood transfused into them. She is completely shocked!
Trans-fusion: a unity that crosses all boundaries, even the boundaries of the body that usually differentiate one self from another. Here the power of Peace that runs in the blood also crosses the boundaries of time as the younger gives to the elder, the small to the great. "Black-well" reminds us of the black hole, an extemely dense object whose gravitational force can swallow even light. It is "at the edge of the law" -- a reality that seems to threaten existence as we know it, reminding us that life is a gamble - an extreme unlikelihood. But the outer focus of Peace is "work in higher dimensions", trans-fusing and unifying even those unimaginable realities.
The Peace aspect of the following dream is signaled by the reference to the Pacific; it occurred when the dreamer's Sun in Peace aspected the Moon.
I have a social worker credential and I receive a letter saying I've been assigned to Tagalog. I go down to the office where the assignments are made, with the intent of encouraging everyone to take on a positive attitude. I bounce in and ask, "Are you happy?" My efforts don't go over too well. The lady at the main desk starts telling me about my assignment in some American town in the South. I say, "What about the South Pacific?" I didn't really think I'd get to go to Tagalog, but I was hoping.
The descending principles are suggested by the allusion to "going down" and the southern direction. The dreamer is a social worker, telling us that Peace is not an individual attribute. Nor is it about being happy as usually understood. Tagalog is a language (the Filipino language), not a place, so the dream may be saying that PEACE is more a way of communicating than a state of being. Perhaps it is a way of inquiry, and a work of hope.
Look
in your dreams for references to the blood or circulatory system
... to all-embracing images like the open sea or outer space... to the colors blue or tanzanite (indigo-blue).
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Why
Blood? |
Blood circulates through every organ and muscle; the circulatory system embraces everything. Similarly, Peace is all-embracing yet circulates inwardly, quietly infusing all dimensions of the cosmos.
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Book and Music Recommendations |
Light of Oneness , by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee.
One of a trilogy, this book has a chapter on Peace which complements Connie Kaplan's chapter on Peace in The Invisible Garment. He writes, "We might achieve some sense of peace through struggle and effort. But peace that is given has a different quality that comes without effort. This peace is not a resolution of conflict, either outer or inner. It does not belong to the dimension of struggle, but to the dimension of the soul." --RM
Music can sometimes be a doorway to the Peace which passes understanding. Richard Rudi's Terma Yana (www.buddhistartifacts.com), music by Deva Premal, and Stephen Halpern's Inner Peace have been recommended in connection with the principle of Peace.
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Peace in the News |
Ask
yourself regarding the following stories from recent
news items: Is Peace appearing in its common meaning,
or in its spiritual meaning as a basic principle of
form?
- Headline: Peace Department Proposal Rattles Small Town
Saturday, March 24 - www.npr.org, Weekend Edition, Daniel Zwerdling. To the members of a women's group in Fairmont, Minn., it seemed like a simple idea: the United States has a Department of State, which promotes America's interests overseas. And it also has a Department of Defense, which fights for them. So why not create a Department of Peace, to promote creative ways to resolve conflicts?
A national coalition of human rights groups has been campaigning for the idea, which has been around in some form since the days of America's founding fathers. There's currently a bill before Congress that would create such an agency. When the Fairmont Peace Club learned of the idea last year, they decided to help. Instead, they triggered fears in their community about the very survival of America. . . .
Eds: The Fairmont City Council first unanimously passed the resolution and then, after a backlash and much controversy, rescinded their decision. One of those who testified "worried that if Congress were to create a Department of Peace, Americans would become 'a bunch of wusses.'" How does this understanding of peace as opposite to war differ from the spiritual meaning of the principle of Peace?
Headline: Hamas Breaks Truce, Kills Israeli Electrician
Jerusalem, March 19, www.allheadlinenews.com. A Palestinian gunman affiliated with the ruling Hamas terrorist organization shot and wounded an Israeli electrician working at the Gaza Strip's Karni Crossing on Monday afternoon. The shooting marked the first direct attack on Israel carried out by a member of Hamas since the group agreed to adhere to an informal ceasefire last November.
Eds: Who knew? Who noticed that there had been four months of peace in the Israeli-Palestinian areas? It's really hard for even the everyday understanding of peace to make the news. Peace circulates silently like the blood in our bodies which is unnoticed until the skin is broken; suddenly we realize peace is missing.
As dreamers, we can take responsibility for making the invisible visible. We can find ways of reminding ourselves and others that Peace runs inside and among us.
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6.
Who's Who in Peace |
Famous
people through whom Peace came to life – these
have sun in Peace:
- Alfred Nobel, 1833-1896
Native of Sweden, founder of the Nobel Peace Prize - himself an engineer and manufacturer of armaments. Best known for the invention of dynamite.
- Pope John Paul II, 1920-2005
The first Polish pope, whose papacy was the second longest in modern times (1978-2005). He was notable for opposing communism and for speaking out against war, fascism, dictatorship, militarism, abortion, relativism, unrestrained capitalism, and what he called the "culture of death."
- Benjamin Franklin, 1706-1790
Writer, inventor, shaper of the American Revolution and its subsequent government, Franklin was generally recognized as a polymath, that is, a person of encyclopedic knowledge and extraordinary breadth of learning. He was an accomplished diplomat credited with improving Franco-American relations.
- Menachem Mendel Schneerson, 1902-1994
A New York Hasidic rabbi who founded a network of 2600 institutions to encourage Jewish observance and reach out to unaffiliated Jews. He also was honored by Congress and the President for his work in ethical education generally. His extraordinary accomplishments led some followers to claim he was the Messiah.
Eds: Peace workers seem to strive for breadth and wide scope. Not everyone contracted with Peace is called to public service as these people were, but they remind us of the potential impact one person can have.
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Annette's Poetry |
Annette Hulefeld, a dreamer from Chicago, has written poems
and prayers for all the thirty principles.
Here is her contribution for this month.
Peace
There has never been a time in history
when you've needed me more,
I am Peace
an 'is-ness' beyond separation,
beyond conflict, beyond interpretation.
I am
a living, dynamic flow of fullness within the Divine,
an emptiness
that has no need.
Like the blood that flows in my body,
peace
removes the toxins of mind, heart, and spirit,
filling the body with the truth
of
Oneness with All.
In Oneness
nothing is lacking,
all is blessing.
Not unlike a child so full of happiness, that eating dinner is just not
necessary.
Peace --
indescribable.
As a person of Peace
I may have a tendency to argue or debate.
This stems from an inability to speak the unspeakable or
to convince others of the absurdity of division and conflict.
In those times, peace will appear
as rushing rapids daring to be mastered.
In these moments, please remember
I desire only to touch your heart with the gentle, rippling, ever-flowing
grace of the Divine.
ahulefeld '06
Peace Prayer
I am empty
I am full
I am a child nuzzled at my mother's breast
I am a rainbow birthed from the eye of a tornado
I am a grateful heart standing in the wreckage of a flood
I am a lover listening to the beloved's heartbeat
I am stillness when death steals the final breath
I am a receiver of stillness from Silence
I am giver of abundance from Love
I am a never-ending flowing transfusion
of
Divine life source.
ahulefeld 12/05
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