Recently I have been awestruck at the considerable amount of pain to which I have access. This is not physical pain, it is emotional and psychic pain. It is a deep well from which my soul is emerging, step by step, covered with muck, bewildered by the bright sunlight at the surface. Sure, I can point to events in my life that I might attach this pain to, setting blame and making them the cause of my woes. But I feel certain that the pain is more primordial than all of these "causes". I have attracted all the events that unfolded because of this primordial pain. I have never for a moment been an innocent bystander in my life. Even as an infant and child, before the age of self-awareness, my disposition and inborn personality attracted "causes".

Here's what happened. A few weeks ago I tried a session of Yoga Nidra guided by a very capable yoga teacher. I experienced an excruciating nameless and formless pain. Again this was not physical pain. But it left me literally gasping for breath. It has taken weeks to integrate this experience, during which time the pain has made a few encore appearances, as if to test the progress of my emergence. Through this I have been able to gain a breathtaking perspective on how I have in part created my identity around this pain, how I have clung to the pain as if my life depended on it.

Now I know that my life does not depend on it one bit. Only my identity did. What I have come to realize is that pain needs to be exposed to the full bright light of conscious awareness in order to reveal its ultimate deception and falsehood completely. I suppose this has been said in a million different ways through many schools of thought and spirit. But knowledge is certainly no substitute for experience.

I suppose that the turmoil and crisis in the world is the expression of this primordial pain, which everyone is compelled to experience in their own way in order to move beyond it. Difficult but necessary. And I suppose further that the highest duty of the propeace community is to encourage and support the process of the realization of the deception and falsehood of the pain. If we say to each other, "you are not your pain," we can wake each other up from our insane identity delusions.

Humanity at peace is humanity that no longer identifies itself with pain, neither individually nor collectively.