Pariyatti

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 awar...

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 mas...

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...

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....

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 humil...

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...

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 Mu...

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...

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 b...

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...

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 ide...

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,...

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 a...

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 du...

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 li...

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 shaf...

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 Shaker...

Chapter 7 - Selectivity in Contemporary Lives from Cultivating Inner Peace by Paul R. Fleischman, M.D. "In a complex society, a certain level of intricacy must be added into the life of each citizen in order to be able to functionally mesh with multiple social and economic gears. Simplicity in a farmer doesn’t consist in planting a monoculture. Selectivity doesn’t mean constricted, impoverished, o...

Chapter 6 - Selectivity and the American Family from Cultivating Inner Peace by Paul R. Fleischman, M.D. "Our children have lost permission to dwell in their spacious reverie of newness. They no longer inhabit the structureless domes of uninterrupted afternoons. In order for us to function efficiently, we need them to be busy. We also—out of well-intended concern—want to prepare them to deal compe...

Chapter 5 - Peace Is Selective from Cultivating Inner Peace by Paul R. Fleischman, M.D. "In Part II, I discussed the dynamic quality of peace, the action of returning, like a compass needle to the north. Selecting peace is different, more like writing a song. You quell the sounds of the traffic around you, and a halting tune emerges. If you let it rise and expand, but at the same time contain it,...

Chapter 4 - Scott and Helen Nearing from Cultivating Inner Peace by Paul R. Fleischman, M.D. "In this section of the book, I am focusing your attention on the need for a dynamic relationship to your mood and your idea of peace. Lifetimes of peace derive from flexible, problem-solving commitments that reassert peace as the core goal in the solution of your current problem, whether that problem be i...

Chapter 3 - Peace Is Dynamic from Cultivating Inner Peace by Paul R. Fleischman, M.D. Cultivating inner peace doesn’t eliminate problems, but it facilitates overcoming them with a particular flavor. You can’t strive for uniform bliss in the name of peace. The pursuit of inner peace is a self-regenerating way of life. As long as we live, we will be spun with demand and action, but we can design an...

Chapter 2 - Peace Is a Personal Encounter: Juan and Kathleen Mascaró from Cultivating Inner Peace by Paul R. Fleischman, M.D. "The possibility of a life devoted to personal peacefulness that then atomizes outward to others is conveyed from one person to another. For a sustaining image of such a life, I am indebted to Juan and Kathleen Mascaró. They drew me like a magnet into their world. This is h...

Chapter 1 - The Quest for Inner Peace from Cultivating Inner Peace by Paul R. Fleischman, M.D. The cultivation of inner peace is as rational and orderly as any other aspect of the human condition, and pertains equally to all of us despite our differing starting gates, nervous systems, and life experiences. Out of my own life, and the lives of teachers and friends and those I have been privileged t...

An ethical life is composed of purity of action, purity of speech and purity of livelihood. Upholding it requires not only determination but proper comprehension as well. From the perspective of abstaining (vārittaṃ) to the perspective of performing (cārittaṃ), this talk aims to support the understanding of the deeper aspects of Sīla. Integrating selected quotes from the direct words of the Buddha...