Kenneth Small – USA
Gradually discover how to harmoniously release our inner hostages of latent harmful emotions
Modes of Inner Peace: Aphorisms, Insights and a Story
Introduction
During our daily activity how aware are we in our mundane communications and interactions of being truly present? Driving the roadways, shopping at the grocery store, riding the transit, at a restaurant, with family and friends… how truly present are we or how often are we habituated with our attention distracted and somewhere else? How often do we fill in the ‘gap of preoccupied distractions’ with fear, self-loathing, anxiety, prejudice or anger…? How often do we justify these emotions when a convenient target or trigger to hang them on comes by? … whether personal, family or group based. How may we engage in filling in this gap with wonderment, compassion and (as the popular saying goes) genuine ‘random acts of kindness’? And… the nitty gritty, how may we discover genuine inner peace and tranquility, which may even gradually, when skillfully and harmoniously harnessed, release our inner hostages of latent harmful emotions that feed collective violence and war?
How is it possible to evolve these semi-unconscious, often entrenched cultural complexes and transform them into a higher purpose? A courageous deeper dive into a universal inclusive View, combined with inner contemplative and transformative practices provides tools and solutions to heal these inner rifts. These contemplative tools united with deep universal ethics are essential. The value of contemplative practice is multi-faceted, with traditions around the globe to discover these inner resources within. One of the central human benefits found in all genuine contemplative practice is that the daily practice gradually de-compartmentalizes our human fixations, personal and even group / collective complexes that house our greed, anger, fear and trauma. Contemplative practice when skillfully integrated with a Universal View is key.
How to apply the ethics of peace in our often-fragmented world today (2024) is more and more imperative and the solution is within each one of us, with no action insignificant. Wars are but the expression of internal ‘psychic events’ and their solution is within this same internal arena.
Sri Krishna Prem[i] writes:
Wars are psychic events that have their birth in the souls of men. We like to put the blame for them upon the shoulders of our favorite scapegoat, upon imperialism, nationalism, communism or capitalism, whichever be our chosen bogey. Not any or all of these are really responsible, but we ourselves, we harmless folk who like to think that we hate war and all its attendant horrors. … Every feeling of anger, hatred, envy, and revenge that we have indulged in, in the past years, has been a handful of gunpowder thrown onto the pile which, sooner or later, explode as now [1940’s WWII] it has done
All humans contain unconscious displaced obstructive elements[ii] which turn into often harmful projections. Engaging our center through contemplative silence opens doors where ‘eating’ our ‘shadow’ becomes not only palatable but centrally nourishing and benefits the common good. We gradually discover how to harmoniously release our inner hostages of latent harmful emotions.
The poet Robert Bly gives us a view of our inner and outer worlds interlinked with inner process. For outer peace we need to reclaim our ‘projected material’ through creative expressions, through language, art, music, poetry etc.:
People who are passive toward their projected material contribute to the danger of nuclear war, because every bit of energy we don’t actively engage with language or art is floating somewhere in the air above the United States [and globally ed.] …”
Eating our shadow is a very slow process. It doesn’t happen once but hundreds of times.’ [iii]
Contemplative inquiry and practice give us the tools to reclaim our lost and often toxic ‘projected material’. This becomes the firm foundation for outer peace.[iv]
A Story – the Korean War Veteran, Mercenary
Korean War Veterans Memorial
It was a wilder time, the early and mid-1970’s, also in a special way there was at times more openness to a sense of freedom for greater risk taking, necessary for both inner and outer transformation. Our current time sees some of this flavor returning (2024). Our story is about Jim (as I will call him) who was a Korean war veteran.
During the Korean war time he had once been sent to blow up a bridge above a river, prematurely interrupted by the approach of enemy troops, to save his platoon, he had to detonate the explosives while he was still under the bridge. Found a day later, Jim had somehow survived being washed down the river without drowning. He was bold, carefree, but inside hardened and had become fanatical, espousing extreme views. He wrote for extreme periodicals spewing hateful rhetoric, engaged in semiprofessional boxing and became a mercenary in central Africa in the late 1950’s.
Inside Jim, there was deep trauma and anger. One day around 1970, with his family, he was out on a mountain hike and ended up inadvertently walking along a pathway through the small cabins of the Hermitage[v]. It seemed empty but something about the silence drew his curiosity. Suddenly the Abbot appeared in his formal robed attire, he was Austrian with piercing blue eyes, his sternness and resoluteness was set within a deep pool of presence and being. Jim asked him curiously: ‘What is this place? What do you do here’ The Abbot replied tersely: ‘You wouldn’t be interested… it’s too difficult for you…’ and began to walk away. Jim stunned, persisted and the Abbot abruptly replied, ‘We have a weeklong meditation retreat in a month… you won’t be able to get through it… this is more challenging than anything you’ve ever done in your life’ and as suddenly as he had appeared the Abbot was gone.
The Abbot had penetrated Jim’s armor and Jim couldn’t get the retreat out of his head. In the following weeks, he was hooked, had vacation time coming and decided to go on the retreat, knowing absolutely nothing about what he was getting into. By mid-week the silence was killing him, his body ached and the incomprehensible short interviews with the head Teacher were driving him crazy. A few years later he shared with me, by then with a calmness smiling at his own foolishness, how all he could think of mid-week during his first retreat was how he could get away with killing the Teacher, whose unanswerable questions were maddening to him and then finish off everyone else and escape without getting caught!
Jim made it through, but ‘something’ had shifted inside, and he was ‘hooked’. A few months later he went again and yet again, more and more each year. He then took off from work to live for an extended time at the Hermitage, gradually engaging deeper and deeper penetrating through his trauma and anger. During retreats he would sometime vividly relive his wartime traumas, perspiring, even reliving hallucinatory events and shaking, yet he remained steadfast in his meditation practice through these episodes and persevered. They gradually melted, losing their grip on him and his anger, prejudice and fears subsided. They were not replaced with some kind of fabricated or artificially fake overlay but transformed.
Jim’s strong irascible character remained with a courageous spirit bent toward being Awake in this moment. Jim settled into a lifestyle that integrated his spiritual meditative practice where his anger and prejudices and extreme views and traumas melted away. There were still ups and downs and challenges, but his personal life was more fluid, open and content … in his mid-eighties he passed away peacefully.
FOOTNOTES:
[i] Initiation into Yoga p. 103 by Sri Krishna Prem (Ronald Henry Nixon 1898-1965) a Quest Book, the Theosophical Publishing House, Wheaton, Illinois / Chennai, India.
[ii] In Buddhism, these are the samskaras or ‘inciting nafs’ of Sufi tradition.
[iii] A Little Book on the Human Shadow by Robert Bly Harper and Row 1988, pp. 43, 38.
[iv] Faith and Violence by Thomas Merton - University of Notre Dame Press 1968, pp. 112-13. “The self-affirmation that springs from ‘using up’ something or someone else in the favor of one’s own pitiable transiency, leads to the outright destruction of others in open despair at our own evanescence.
[v] A Zen Buddhist retreat