Peace is finding the good about people and nature and showing how good these people and things really are. It is getting along with the world, no matter how much confrontation there is. We can still find peace ... Once on a school retreat I met a lot of people I didn't know well. In the past I had judged them harshly. Through discussion sessions and prayer together, I got to know these people and found they were so good inside. This taught me how important it is to get to know people, even ones we might not like.
True meditation is about waking up from the dream of separation to the truth of unity . . . awakening to the realization of what you and everything actually is, the oneness of all. To perceive everything as one is not an altered state of consciousness; it's an unaltered state of consciousness, the natural state of consciousness. Enlightenment is the natural state, the innocent state which is uncontaminated by control or manipulation of mind. We wake up by allowing ourselves to rest in the natural state from the very beginning . . . by "allowing everything to be as it is."