Pariyatti

Chapter 27 - A Great Cry On Earth from Cultivating Inner Peace by Paul R. Fleischman, M.D. The practices from which inner peace derives, and which it in turn furthers, transcend material reality without rejecting it. To find inner peace, a person must be turned completely around. A challenge is set before us by the radical perception of “the flow of nutriment,” which means: Is there anything more to your life than the tumbling on of animal instinct—“the male collects food, and the female lays eggs”? People contain an invisible wavelength that grows out of the feeling of “enough!” It is not exotic nor esoteric, for it is found in every person, more or less developed. Peace ascends through the aperture of psychic fullness. Energy to pursue high values, mindfulness of the ephemeral sensations of every moment, thoughtful inquiry beyond complacency—these are the seeds of enlightenment. Concentration, calm, joy based on perspective rather than acquisition—these are seeds of enlightenment. Equani

Chapter 26 - Our Inner Peace Is Earth's Frontier from Cultivating Inner Peace by Paul R. Fleischman, M.D. Cultivating Inner Peace is the most important action we can take to help planet Earth, on whose back we all ride, whose breath we breathe, whose plants provide our food, and whose properly intense sunlight is the source of energy for the molecules that form our body. Rather than solipsistic disinterest, the cultivation of inner peace activates our fundamental human calling: to overcome our predatory egotism—which is the source of war, over population, and environmental destruction—and to reorganize our lives around the deepest gratifications we can feel: love, sympathetic joy, compassion, and peace of heart and mind. Dr. Paul Fleischman Massachusetts, USA 2020 34 minutes Listen to Streaming Audio Your browser does not support the audio element. Download Audio (17 MB) Copyright, 2020 Paul R. Fleischman Th

Chapter 25 - A Personal Experience of Vipassana Meditation from Cultivating Inner Peace by Paul R. Fleischman, M.D. I took my first Vipassana meditation course in 1974 under the guidance of Mr. Goenka... In those days, Vipassana wasn’t being taught in the West. I made several trips to India and returned with the technique half-learned. I didn’t know where it fit into my life, but I saw it as something honest, free, and useful. I could own it myself, practice it without being swallowed by a religion or being wafted away in a pointless vacuum of career and convention. I became increasingly committed and serious because every time I “sat” I felt I got something out of it. I never had any mystical or unusual experiences. I both experienced my mind-body, and was able to get some distance from it. I kept returning for ten-day courses, and practicing with increasing devotion in between. By now I’ve lived half a lifetime this way, and am archeological proof that meditation isn’t “Eastern thought.”

Chapter 24 - Peace Is Purity from Cultivating Inner Peace by Paul R. Fleischman, M.D. The nucleus of inner peace is purity of heart and mind. When you say, “I want inner peace,” you mean that you want to be able to live with what’s inside you, to be at ease in the depths of yourself; and that integrated positivity, without cracks or seams, is called “purity.” We have no difficulty in becoming aware of our mind. It floods us: it spawns epics and anecdotes and vacation plans. We all dwell in the captivity of our own melodrama. No one who has not spent whole days sealed alone inside her own head can know the fantasia of multiscreen ideation that will not stop for a moment. How can this self-entranced mind gain a more embracing and enduring perspective? Purity, transcendence of imaginary and divisive selfhood, is the outcome of the experience of ineluctable change throughout the dream of the self. When the bodily basis of the self dissolves into the impersonal flows of universal m

Chapter 23 - Peace Is Participation from Cultivating Inner Peace by Paul R. Fleischman, M.D. Among those who passed through the cloud chamber of existence and left a track of inner peace to hover behind them and to guide those who follow, none left a more exquisite trace or lived a more complete life than Rabindranath Tagore. His life is exemplary of a life of inner peace and participation. He mastered and manifested the intricate rhythm of solitude alternating with service in an atmosphere of dynamic harmony. He participated in every sphere, an energetic and active life with a broad sweep of interests that brought him into contact with a world fellowship, a bold life of competence and engagement. Yet his residual vapor unambiguously condenses into peace. Dr. Paul Fleischman Massachusetts, USA 2020 25 minutes Listen to Streaming Audio Your browser does not support the audio element. Download Audio (12 MB) Copyright,

Chapter 22 - Peace Is An Ambiance: Rabindranath Tagore from Cultivating Inner Peace by Paul R. Fleischman, M.D. There is a charmed quality to Rabindranath Tagore’s biography that enables us to inhale the fragrance of a life of peace-in- action. Not only the facts, but his atmosphere inspires peace, like the smell of transpiring grass on a summer evening. His history reveals how insight and action are complemented by relationship to an ambiance, producing an infectious feeling tone of dynamic equipoise. The events of his life and his poetry form a bouquet of images that can pervade our own peaceward dreams. As peace seekers, our strongest motivation arises from seeds of our own planting, but we are encouraged onward by the mythic potency of images derived from the lives of those who have absorbed and suffused the atmosphere with peace. Dr. Paul Fleischman Massachusetts, USA 2020 70 minutes Listen to Streaming Audio Your browser does

Chapter 21 - Individual Identity Within Egolessness from Cultivating Inner Peace by Paul R. Fleischman, M.D. Peaceful living derives from balance in a world of torque. The world shakes, but our gyroscope must remain upright. The student of peace envelops deep habits about how to live intentionally, selectively, naturally, knowledgeably, and harmoniously amidst losses, defeats, and gradual decline. Like an acrobat with eyes fixed on the horizon, peace focuses beyond self. Peaceful people inhabit landscapes where perspective derives from an infinitely distant vanishing point. Peace is transcendence of flux. Mountains erode, continents and oceans slide into one another, stars burn out. Still, men and women find within themselves an unshakeable something-else. Regardless of language, culture, religion, or its absence, inner peace means detachment from anxious narcissistic immediacy and entry into the impersonal. Peace is the simultaneous expansion and contraction of the world beyond measurement.

Chapter 20 - Peace Is Humility or Egolessness from Cultivating Inner Peace by Paul R. Fleischman, M.D. Generally, we experience the details of our week as earth-shattering. To live a life of inner peace, we need to cultivate detachment from those gripping ups and downs on which our well-being appears to depend, because it is the delusion of importance that blinds us to the real panorama. The humility that will help you cultivate inner peace is a continuous falling back down to earth, like the leaves of birch trees spilling down in golden autumn showers. The growth of humility, downward, creates an upward expansion of starry sky to contemplate. Traditionally, this attitude of greeting toward the world has been called “egolessness” in the East and “humility” in the West. I want to remove humility from its churchly old lace and make this realization helpful and regular as denim. Dr. Paul Fleischman Massachusetts, USA 2020 30 minutes Listen to Streaming Audio Your browser does not support the audio elemen

Chapter 19 - The Gateway to Sympathetic Joy from Cultivating Inner Peace by Paul R. Fleischman, M.D. A person who has learned the skill of sorrow paradoxically will be lightened by kinship and communion with all beings, and will spontaneously speak in phrases of emphathy and saliency. Words and sorrow are a couple with a long, strong marriage. Regardless of what we believe the meaning of our life to be, we feel peaceful when our sense of concern is directed outside ourselves toward others, not as a substitute for selfcare, but as an extension of it. Sorrow is what enables pity, dread, or condescension to become compassion. This is one of the deepest ironies of human nature, that our sorrow also contains a leavening celebration. Dr. Paul Fleischman Massachusetts, USA 2020 16 minutes Listen to Streaming Audio Your browser does not support the audio element. Download Audio (7 MB) Copyright, 2020 Paul R. Fleisch

Chapter 18 - Sorrow Is a Skill from Cultivating Inner Peace by Paul R. Fleischman, M.D. Some people can successfully avoid the depths of life, but if you try to deepen your feelings of peace, you’ll unearth within yourself and the world profound unpleasantness. We saw this to be true in the lives of ecstatic visionaries like Walt Whitman, and in the lives of great nature lovers like Thoreau and Muir. Logically, the world is unknowable to us, who are brief visitors. In spite of that, because of that, to find peace, we have to confront our despairs, ignite our faith, and learn to feel sorrow. Hold on, Reader! We’re headed toward a magnificent campsite, but first we have to be roped for safety across an icy traverse. Dr. Paul Fleischman Massachusetts, USA 2020 19 minutes Listen to Streaming Audio Your browser does not support the audio element. Download Audio (10 MB) Copyright, 2020 Paul R. Fleischman There is

Chapter 17 - Peace Is Facing Sorrow from Cultivating Inner Peace by Paul R. Fleischman, M.D. If a reader were using this book as a practical guide to cultivating inner peace, he or she might now be thinking: I know that mere situational adjustments won’t essentially improve my life, which gains its trajectory only from my own actions and feelings. I want to sail toward peace, easy in the currents of myself, harmoniously related to people and circumstances, and to achieve this I have to consciously steer with peace as my polestar. When life storms and batters me, my goal is to return to course, and the will to do so creates the dynamic resilience I need. I’ll limit myself to sail light and trim. I’ll absorb the wise directions of those who’ve already negotiated these straits, soaked in the soothing sounds of peace, and my own words will add to this score. I’ll befriend all I meet on wing and wave, an unwalled, welcoming life. But you might feel confused to find, having taken these steps, t

Chapter 16 - Celebrating with Everyone from Cultivating Inner Peace by Paul R. Fleischman, M.D. A peaceful heart celebrates with everyone. “Nature” is a construct, the imposition of a category over the living, vibrating, collections of atoms and molecules, shaped into hearts and minds that are swaying, flying, and yodeling around us today. When even the concept of “nature” is removed, rivers and bears are seen to be as consanguineous as spouses and store clerks. The process of impermanence and change unites the world. Nature and people have no clear demarcation. We are all tumbling on together. What we subsume under the rubric “nature” is the screen onto which we project our own love and compassion—or lack of them—and when we say “love of nature,” we refer to our capacity to pour out nurturant and fond delight toward all or any “others.” “Nature” is inner peace flashed back and forth between a human being and any other kind of cloud. Dr. Paul Fleischman Massachusetts, USA 20

Chapter 15 - Henry David Thoreau from Cultivating Inner Peace by Paul R. Fleischman, M.D. Thoreau was foremost a spiritual seeker, a Transcendentalist, a student of the inner light. Keeping himself free of social institutions like governments, churches, and jobs, he studied, thought, and wrote out his innermost thoughts, and sauntered through nature, observing every detail as a communication from a higher sphere. He stands at the pinnacle of this world wide tradition of keeping nature in focus as a method of tuning the heart to peaceful vibrations. Of all the people I have written about so far, Thoreau probably attained the most abiding equanimity. His story will perfume your mind with peace. Dr. Paul Fleischman Massachusetts, USA 2020 32 minutes Listen to Streaming Audio Your browser does not support the audio element. Download Audio (15 MB) Copyright, 2020 Paul R. Fleischman There is more information ab

Chapter 14 - John Muir from Cultivating Inner Peace by Paul R. Fleischman, M.D. Muir made harmony his orienting point and built a lifestyle around it. He refused teaching positions at Harvard and the Boston Academy of Science, and instead cleaved to the environment he wrote about. John Muir’s intimacy with nature deepened to mental states of fusion, during which he lost his sense of individual identity to blend with the whole. “You bathe in these spirit-beams, turning round and round, as if warming at a campfire. Presently, you lose consciousness of your own separate existence; you blend with the landscape, and become part and parcel of nature.” By “nature,” Muir always meant one mood: harmony in every thing, harmony over and over. Dr. Paul Fleischman Massachusetts, USA 2020 34 minutes Listen to Streaming Audio Your browser does not support the audio element. Download Audio (16 MB) Copyright, 2020 Paul R. Fl

Chapter 13 - Peace In Nature from Cultivating Inner Peace by Paul R. Fleischman, M.D. Nature is a stern guru. Those who are not simultaneously knowing themselves as they study nature will be shaken into rude awareness of the great dark truths of the natural world and of their own psyches. Just as nature is the realm of light and beaches and bluebirds, it is the realm of the shadow winter, storms, cold, and death. Immersion in the natural world doesn’t provide a sanctuary from human suffering; it augments and clarifies the deepest origins of distress. When that augmentation is a step toward confrontation and resolution, it is also a step toward inner peace. Dr. Paul Fleischman Massachusetts, USA 2020 15 minutes Listen to Streaming Audio Your browser does not support the audio element. Download Audio (7 MB) Copyright, 2020 Paul R. Fleischman There is more information about vipassana meditation at Dhamma.o

Chapter 12 - Mahatma Gandhi's Mantric Collage from Cultivating Inner Peace by Paul R. Fleischman, M.D. India's great political and religious leader, Mahatma Gandhi, intended his monumental public life to be merely an extension of his inner cultivation of peace. Foremost among Gandhi’s peaceful qualities were his reverence for world spiritual literature, his awareness that words transmit feelings as well as ideas, his steady immersion in peaceful language, and his use of linguistic vibrations to transform his followers. On your own path, peace means listening and speaking as if your words and actions were playing one instrument in the orchestra of the universe. What you say, read, listen to, will influence how your molecules and nervous system dance, and what messages you will conduct and broadcast. Whitman’s poetry may spring you free of foreshortened time; and Gandhi’s dhuns might, if you could reconstruct them, prepare you for noble social action. The words that you absorb will be

Chapter 11 - Walt Whitman’s Poetic Peace from Cultivating Inner Peace by Paul R. Fleischman, M.D. "A hundred years after his death, Whitman’s life transpires the atmosphere of outdoor freedom. He is known as America’s pagan poet, who set the style of bohemian bard, beckoning to listeners today from old photographs that capture him in his rustic livery, cocked Stetson, open collar, and spirit of dusty rambles on timeless summer days. The story of Whitman’s relationship with his literary ancestors is not only instructive but intriguing, since he intentionally distorted fact to sculpt a poetic truth. Both what he initially intended to hide, and what his writing and later confessions reveal, highlight the role of the vibration of language in his journey toward poise, since Whitman’s life, for all its breadth and creativity, was an increasingly dynamic, selectively honed pilgrimage into peace." Dr. Paul Fleischman Massachusetts, USA

Chapter 10 - Speak Your Peace from Cultivating Inner Peace by Paul R. Fleischman, M.D. "If I could do one thing for my society today, it would be to create community in which everyone was encouraged to speak from the heart, and to listen to the messages of others. I have spent most of my life listening to varieties of justified complaints that no one listens to or understands. Unfortunately, we live in a non-listening, mass-market, person-inattentive society. The emphasis on efficiency, productivity, pleasure, and hurry that pervade society leave little room for building personal relationships around resonant communication of feelings. We live in a society uniquely devoid of conversation about the backdrop of infinite reality, through which every shaft of light that falls on us has passed. We see the tint of this passage everywhere, but we suffer from derealization when we try to speak about its presence in our live

Chapter 9 - Peace Is the Vibration of Language from Cultivating Inner Peace by Paul R. Fleischman, M.D. "Words of peace educate us, temper us through rational inquiry, inspire us with what has already been attained, and transform us in the mere receptivity we have to their tremolo. The practice of imbibing words of peace will create within you a hum of peace. Syllabic peace sends transforming shafts of sound shivering through its listeners. Our hearts continue to beat in rhythmic sympathy." Dr. Paul Fleischman Massachusetts, USA 2020 6 minutes Listen to Streaming Audio Your browser does not support the audio element. Download Audio (3 MB) Copyright, 2020 Paul R. Fleischman There is more information about vipassana meditation at Dhamma.org, and books and audio resources available for purchase in the Pariyatti bookstore.

Chapter 8 - The Shakers: The Benefits and Limits of Selectivity from Cultivating Inner Peace by Paul R. Fleischman, M.D. "The Shakers are an example. Paragons of selectivity, they produced one of the great outpourings of spiritual peace in American history, yet their heritage is masked by an intensely ambivalent reception that speaks to the essential tension which selectivity addresses. The Shakers deserve our attention as exemplars of both the strengths and pitfalls involved in selectivity. Their example highlights how you can intensify your relationship to peace every day via rigorous selectivity, but also how selectivity can be overdone and become paradoxically un-selective. The Shakers command our attention around the question: Just how much selectivity is peace-bearing, and how much is stifling?" Dr. Paul Fleischman Massachusetts, USA 2020 27 minutes Listen to Streaming Audio Your browser does not support the audio element.