Being Peace – Rev. Linda Jackson
This recording features the Sunday Talk portion of the service. For the full service watch here.
DESCRIPTION
As we close our December theme, Peace Begins Here, we turn our attention to peace as a lived experience—not a distant ideal, but a way we walk each day. When peace is realized within and embodied through love, awareness, and service, it naturally moves into the world. Join us as we explore peace as the way forward—guiding how we live, serve, and step into the New Year.
SUMMARY
The key points from the Sunday talk are:
– Peace is an inner experience before it is an outer experience. It is a state of consciousness that must be cultivated through disciplined spiritual practice, not just a result of rearranging external circumstances.
– The root of conflict is undisciplined thoughts, such as resentment, fear, and reactivity. To find peace, we must take responsibility for our inner lives and manage our thoughts.
– Peace grows when we seek to understand rather than dominate, choose principle over impulse, and value connection over being right.
– When we dedicate ourselves to mindfulness and align our thoughts with our deepest values, we embody and radiate peace into the world.
– Peace is not a passive state, but a disciplined spiritual practice that requires ongoing choice and commitment.
TRANSCRIPTION
This transcription was auto-generated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
Rev. Linda Jackson:
I’m Rev. Linda. I use she/her pronouns and I’m closing out our December theme. The Peace Begins Here theme. And we’ve been working with the book, it’s James Allen’s book, The Way of Peace. It’s about this big. It’s poetic. It does sort of take me on a journey when I read it. And it really aligns well with our science of mind teaching, stating that the conditions of our life follow our consciousness. And so when the mind is reactive and fearful, resentful, our life reflects that with turmoil, struggle. And when the mind is centered, loving, self-governed, our outer life reorganizes itself around that inner order. So peace begins here in our inner world, in our thoughts and our conviction, then our outer experience reorganizes itself. I love that idea, that we have this power within us and it can reorganize our outer experience. And in the song, imagine … I chose that because I mean, obviously the lyrics are just so beautiful.
And again, thank you so much for a beautiful version of it. But this idea of imagining world peace, I’m thinking of it not as a fantasy or a pretend imaginary concept, but imagining as creative consciousness, a disciplined cultivation of that quality of peace. So as we imagine or cultivate the experience of peace within us, our outer world reorganizes. We can create this together.
And likewise, when the power of our thoughts focuses on what’s wrong in the world, we experience more of what’s wrong. Have you had any thoughts about what’s wrong in the world lately? Oh my goodness. Social media, the news. I just have to sort of abstain. It’s too much for my nervous system. And with everything going on, we could understandably question how will there ever be peace? And when we focus on that, we’re cultivating more of that. So we have to really get disciplined. Disciplined with what we cultivate, what we take in, what we dwell on.
And back to the lyrics, imagine all the people living life in peace. Is that how you’ve been imagining all the people? We have to get disciplined in what we cultivate. So we are talking about being peace, doing the inner work, cultivating peace within, and bringing peace into our lives, into the new year, into the world. And we’ve had several speakers on this, and again, the book is only this big, so we’re repeating a lot of the same ideas. I can only tell you my version of it, right? But we’ve heard peace is an inner experience. Struggle and conflict come from unregulated thoughts. Our responsibility is to discipline our thoughts through meditation, prayer, communing with the divine. My … What is going on here? My Siri was trying to talk to me. Thankfully, I have my laptop muted. So through meditation, prayer, coming in with a divine, we have to get our minds right, lifting our thoughts into high consciousness.
And then as we align with peace, love, truth, all those qualities of the divine, as we align with peace, we bring peace everywhere we go. We might even say peace could precede us. Have you ever felt someone walk in the room and you could just feel them?
We’re being called to be that. So I’m just going to remind us of some of these core messages. This peace is an inner experience before it’s an outer experience. It’s not an absence of conflict out here. It’s an inner state of ordered thought. Conflict stems from unregulated thought, like resentment, fear, reaction. So peace is not dependent on circumstances, on politics or people’s behavior. Peace depends on us, and it depends on us regulating our thoughts. We need to do our work to release our resentment, fear, reactivity. Peace depends on us doing our work, and then we bring peace into the world. So we don’t find peace by rearranging life to our liking out here, making things nice, right? This is temporal. It will change. We find peace by aligning our thinking with truth. That’s truth of the capital T, high consciousness. It’s the eternal quality, the eternal nature of the divine.
So peace is a state of consciousness and it’s cultivated through discipline. I’m going to repeat that. Peace requires discipline. Communing with the divine, cultivating high consciousness, and having dominion over our thoughts.
So paraphrasing some of his concepts, the root of conflict is undisciplined thought. Suffering, violence, and unrest begin in the mind long before they appear in the world. And in today’s language, we would say our anxiety, the outrage culture. Someone just told me about a newer phrase called rage bait. That’s how much I don’t pay attention. It was new for me. Polarization, burnout. These are more than just social problems. These are symptoms of an unmanaged inner life. And he says, this is an actual quote, “The peace of the world must be brought about by the peace of individuals, and the peace of individuals can only be arrived by the conquest of selfishness. Yeah. The conquest of selfishness essentially means that we must overcome our selfish ways, overcome this rehearsing war internally, judging, blaming, resenting.” So let’s pause for a moment, take a breath.
Are there places in your life where you hold judgment or resentment? Is there someone or something you blame? We’ve been reminded the root of conflict is undisciplined thought. We need to take authority. Notice where your inner life is unmanaged. Notice where you’re rehearsing conflict, where you’re judging, blaming, resenting. Essentially, we’re feeding a belief in separation. And please, this is not to make you wrong. This is inviting you to take responsibility, each of us to take responsibility and to make new choices. That through line is responsibility, not blame, not shame, or guilt, because that just perpetuates that inner war. Responsibility as in taking spiritual ownership.
We experience inner peace when we stop saying they or this needs to change so I can be at peace. And when we start asking, what is needed in my consciousness right now? So I’m inviting you to ask yourself, where in your life are you thinking something out there needs to be different in order for you to be at peace? And then lean into that and ask yourself, what is being asked of my consciousness? Peace is realized. Peace is made manifest when we stop letting our mind run unchecked, not as a repression, but as conscious stewardship of thought, spiritual ownership and awareness gives us choice.
We are always a choice. First, we’re invited to choose to pause before responding, and in that pause, we can make new choices. We’re invited to choose principle over impulse. So instead of reacting from fear or urgency, we respond from our deeper values from who we want to be, not from impulse. We’re invited to choose clarity over reflex or our patterns. We’re invited to get clear what’s really happening in here and around me. And then we’re invited to choose compassion over the need to be right. We teach this in nonviolent communication. We’re invited to value connection more than winning or proving a point. You have to be more interested in connecting with the person in front of you than you are in trying to prove them wrong.
To recognize that peace grows when we seek to understand rather than to dominate. That’s another part of nonviolent communication. Peace grows when we seek to understand rather than to dominate. I had an experience recently with one of my family members. They’re having a challenge at work. I’m trying to remain neutral, so if they would by any chance happen to listen to this talk. So they’re having a challenge at work. And as a practitioner, as a minister, I’m trained to stay centered in love and in high consciousness and to know truth. It’s a little harder when it’s personal. That’s why we have prayer partners. That’s why we have our own practitioners. That’s why we ask for support, right? And I could feel fear coming up in me. What if they get in trouble? What if they get fired? What if they do something wrong? In seconds, my mind was futurizing about possible financial stress.
All the things, right?
My job is to stay centered in truth. My job is to pause and remember, who do I want to be here? Instead of reacting from fear and impulse and saying, “Don’t do that. Are you crazy?” If I can stay present and stay in high consciousness, I can respond with more insight, with more space, not driven by my patterns, my emotional reflexes, right? I’m called to choose discipline, not to project my own anxiety, which just fuels their frustration. I have to choose to take dominion over my thoughts, choose to come from compassion, not needing to convince. And I admit it’s easier with clients than it is with my family.
Peace requires choice. So consider this for a moment. What thoughts do I feed? What stories do I spin? Where do I place responsibility outside or within? When we really dedicate ourselves to a life of mindfulness, then we are the peace. It all starts with us, but we have to choose it again and again and again. So peace is not granted. Peace is not a personality trait. Peace is earned through practice and the spiritual discipline of choosing wisely. This quote is attributed to both AJ must and to Mahadam Gandhi. There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.
So we won’t find a way to a peace out here. Peace is the way, as Connie said, it brings it right back here, back to being peace. We must be disciplined in our practice through daily meditation, elevating ourselves in consciousness through daily practice. We develop a spiritual strength so that we steadily resonate with peace and that we are the presence of peace in the world. In the reading from The Way of Peace by James Allen, if it helps replace the male gender in your mind, it’s a time that it was written in. “He who lives in love is at peace with all and does not strive nor resent nor hate. He has conquered the storm in himself and the world outside is powerless to disturb him.
Such a one has realized the peace which is independent of circumstances and which no outward event can take away. Abiding in this peace, he becomes a source of blessing to others and his life flows out in gentle service to the world. So the key is cultivating that inner life, calming the inner storm, being undisturbed by the world, cultivating peace that no outer event can take away. Then your life is a blessing and you offer gentle service to the world. I shared this Facebookism before a previous time when I was speaking on peace. My friend Carla shared this with me, and I’m sorry I don’t know who to credit for the original story, but I enjoyed it, so I’m sharing it again. So imagine you’re holding a cup of coffee and someone bumps into you and the coffee spills everywhere. And someone says,” Why did you spill the coffee?
Because somebody bumped into me. “No, you spilled coffee because there was coffee in your cup.
If there was tea in the cup, you would have spilled tea. Whatever is inside the cup is what will spill out. So you’re invited to ask yourselves,” What’s in my cup? “You can’t fake it when something shakes you up. When you bump up against things, whatever is inside will come out. Peace and humility, anger, and bitterness. You choose how to fill it. You choose what spills out of your cup. When we dedicate ourselves to a life of mindfulness, then we are peace. It all starts with us, but we have to choose it. James Allen uses the phrase perfect peace, not as an idealized fantasy, but as a lived spiritual maturity. In contemporary language, perfect peace is emotional steadiness, even when life is uncertain. Inner authority that doesn’t collapse under criticism or praise. A grounded sense of belonging in life itself.
And perfect peace comes forward when our thoughts are consistently aligned with our deepest values. When our actions flow from conscience and not from conditioned response. And when our identity is rooted in spirit, not in circumstance. That piece is not fragile. It’s not dependent on comfort or agreement. It is what allows us to stay present, loving, and awake in a fractured world. When things get bumpy, what will spill out of your cup? So inner peace does not mean we will never feel fear. It means we learn to listen to the fear and ask what’s there for us, asking what’s being asked of my consciousness now.
When we take responsibility for healing our trauma responses so that fear is not running us, when we listen, integrate our learning and choose peace, we move from inner peace to world peace. In the reading we heard Alan say,” Abiding in this peace, he becomes a source of blessing to others and his life flows out in gentle service to the world. “In current language, we might say the peaceful person becomes a quiet power for good because regulated nervous systems can change the entire room. Grounded presence is contagious. A person anchored in peace can interrupt cycles of escalation. We don’t bring peace in the world by preaching it. We embody it through how we listen, through how we disagree, through how we hold pain without projecting it.
And in this quote, Thomas Merton affirms that our outer work must be matched by our inner work. Activism without inner peace eventually recreates what it opposes. That’s important stuff. There’s another quote,” Don’t become what you hate, “sort of thinking, right? Peace is not found at the end of conflict. It’s found at the beginning of consciousness. When we tend to our inner world, our outer world slowly but surely begins to reflect a different order. Peace is not passive. It is disciplined love in action. To find peace in our relationships, peace in community and peace in the world, we must cultivate inner peace. It starts within us. We must choose it.
We must avoid giving in to the impulse to express negativity, oh, and it’s seductive. We bond with one another over our suffering, and we must avoid giving into that impulse. I’m inviting your reframe. Let us focus instead on the presence of peace within each of us, on the presence of the divine within the nam must stay. In summary, peace is an inner experience before it is an outer experience. We have to practice peace. Practicing the presence, communing with the divine supports us to embody and radiate peace. We must choose peace, take spiritual ownership of our thoughts and actions. And as we align with peace in high consciousness, we are being peace. We bring peace everywhere we go. And as part of our practice, I’m offering you each a little peace sign pin scattered around on the seats. And I’m inviting you to take that wear it as a reminder so you can see it.
And it will remind you that peace starts within and you get to choose how you’re being in each moment. Let’s take this into some practice.
So I invite you, if you’re willing to gently close your eyes or soften your gaze, and take a couple of slow, steady breaths in and out at your own pace, getting anchored in your seat, bringing your awareness fully present in this moment. And notice how the breath begins to calm the nervous system. Allow your body to settle. Feel the support of the chair beneath you. And with your attention inward, in that place where peace begins, focused within. Take one more breath and bring to mind a place in your life where you may be thinking someone or something needs to change so that I can have peace.
There’s no forcing, not an intellectual process. Just allow it to rise up. And sitting in this awareness of where you’re wanting someone or something else to change, silently ask yourself, what is needed in my consciousness right now? Nothing to figure out. Just noticing what arises. Keep breathing and imagine releasing any tension. Releasing judgment, reactivity, letting it soften, letting it loosen. It’s not the truth of who you are. Now gently begin to cultivate the quality of peace within you, not as effort, just aligning with truth, capital T, truth, remembering the divine within. Allow your awareness to lift, elevating your consciousness above habit, above reaction, above judgment.
Resting your attention in the presence of the divine. The love, intelligence, the peace that is always here, always available within. No striving, no effort. Simply communing and remembering your oneness. Perhaps you experience peace as a feeling or a warmth, a steadiness, a quiet center. However, it feels you know peace when you feel it. Let this peace fill your inner life. Let this peace fill your thoughts, your breath, your nervous system. As it fills you, you embody it and it naturally radiates outward, effortless, present. From this place, silently affirm. I choose peace. Maybe let’s say it together out loud. I choose peace. I am peace. I am peace.
This peace naturally extends beyond you into your relationships, your work, your world. You don’t have to direct it. Your presence does that on its own. Continuing with those nice, slow, deep breaths in and out. And I will close us with a simple blessing from this space of oneness, the space of knowing each of us as individual expressions of the divine, each of us as the peace that we are cultivating within and bringing naturally, gracefully, easily into the world. I affirm we are deepening in knowing ourselves as peace. We are disciplined in our thoughts. We are managing our inner lives with love and presence. We are supported with any necessary healing work. We are the presence of peace. We are able to calm our nervous systems, to restore our peace, knowing peace is the way, and it begins here. And I’m grateful for the yes, for each one here, practicing this online, practicing it.
Anyone who’s listening later grateful that I am not the only one, that you have joined and the world is one. So much gratitude. I let it be so, and so it is.