I think your comment is wonderful.  When I heard it, I immediately had a flash to the old saying that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  Because we are all different and have different viewpoints, things that are very important to one person can be completely indifferent to another.

I believe that knowing yourself, finding your center, your peace, your bliss, is an almost impossible job, but I use the word “impossible” very sparingly.  Anything is possible, but it doesn’t happen just because we want it to happen; we have to make it happen, and to do that, we have to measure ourselves against some hard standards, which in many cases we don’t want to face up to.

The world tends to put labels on people:  All these people are bad, all these people are good.  Whole continents are written off.  Races are marginalized.  Religions are held up to great esteem or brought down to the lowest level.  This is the easy way to live a life that’s not productive, but utilitarian.  It’s the way to rule people, the mushroom approach to leadership:  “Keep ‘em in the dark, and feed ‘em shit.”

If we really want to achieve world peace, we have to open ourselves up to who and what we really are and ask if what we’re doing can really help achieve that goal—and if the answer is yes, then do it.  I can’t tell a shoemaker how to repair a shoe or a brain surgeon how to operate on a brain.  If we all wait for somebody to tell us how to achieve peace, nothing will ever get done.  The comments we are each making as individuals on this blog eventually can congeal into a rock of possibilities, and then that rock can be sculpted into something that might look like world peace.  I don’t know what it will look like, but I think the answer may be starting to emerge with your and other’s great comments.  And by the time we get to the New Los Alamos, there will be nice field there with lots of little flowers sprouting up, and each of those flowers will be manifestations of the idea that “Peace starts with me.”

That’s the main theme I hear coming out of these really earth-shattering comments:  Peace starts with me.  Get your own garden in order before you start planting the big field, and if we each till a little spot in this earth, I imagine billions of people coming together, and those little spots becoming the whole world, and the whole world becomes...  Could that be the Garden of Eden?  What a crazy thought that would be.

Matt