September 2005 Books
Peace Is The Way; Speak Peace In A World Of Conflict
Peace Is the Way
"There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.”
Thus spake Mahatma Gandhi. And in Peace Is the Way , Deepak Chopra encourages us to stop fighting, even against war, and walk the path of peace.
To do that, he tells us, we have to end “not just one conflict, and not just thirty. What we have to end is the idea of war, which has turned into the habit of war, and then into the numbing constancy of war.”
Peace Is the Way is about replacing the groove war has worn in our minds with something… dare I say groovier ? “The way of peace is love in action,” Deepak affirms. For yes, violence is human nature. But so is love. And it's time to evolve, time to reach for the higher aspect of human nature. It's time to create peace consciousness. But to do that, we must acknowledge the ways each and every one of us have benefitted from war consciousness, and then retrain ourselves by substituting benefits based on a leap in consciousness similar to the one that ushered in the age of science.
“The peace movement will succeed as long as people can grasp small achievements every day,” he writes. To that end he proposes a seven-step program, one step for each day of the week, that every one of us can follow without having to give up any of our cherished “feelings of anger or our thirst for revenge” and without having to “become saints overnight.”
The people of the world are well on the road to peace, he asserts; all we need is to know what it is. “The way of peace isn't a revolution,” he tells us. “It's a consolidation of everything that's already here.” It is the desire to find a way to live together. And to find it, we must move above and beyond the divisiveness of “us versus them” consciousness, above and beyond toxic nationalism, above and beyond the myths that support destruction.
“The way of peace… depends upon acquiring the confidence to say, ‘This is my world, and it runs as my vision of perfection wants it to run….' The deepest mystery of all is that each person is more powerful than the seemingly iron laws that control us.”
The first chapter title is “War Ends Today.” And at the end, in the Appendix, we find “How to end war one person at a time.” This thoughtful book offers insights and practices to assist each one of us in doing what only we can do: bringing peace to life—to our own life and to the collective consciousness, which must respond to our thoughts.
As a reader of The Light Connection you already know that peace is the way. I find satisfaction in the fact that a man of Deepak's influence has taken the initiative to show us the changes we all need to make to evolve to the point of living each moment in peace, and in knowing that he has created a work to introduce the message of peace to any who may still believe that either war or the fight against war can ever bring the peace we so strongly desire.
—Chiwah
Speak Peace in a World of Conflict
What You Say Next Will Change Your World
When I first picked up this book it opened to a page highlighting the following words: “We need to know how to hear people's feelings and needs no matter how they're communicating.” Sounds like Marshall Rosenberg, I said, having read and attempted to put into practice the teachings of Marshall's first book, Nonviolent Communication .
If you found it frustrating to try to learn the difference between a thought and a feeling and to follow the formalisms of Nonviolent Communication , I recommend Speak Peace in a World of Conflict for its easy-to-follow explanations and helpful illustrations of how to create peace-enhancing communication.
Marshall draws time and again on real-life situations to clarify important but elusive distinctions—for example, the difference in intentionality that distinguishes a request from a demand, regardless of the words used, or the difference between saying you're sorry (opening the door to self-blame), on the one hand, and mourning the fact that your behavior did not meet the needs of the situation (opening the door to new learning) on the other.
Speak Peace offers insight, practical skills, and inspiring stories to help us move out of the old “me versus you” paradigm and into a way of communicating that honors our aliveness, our love, our mutual right to express and be heard, and our potential for finding a way to meet the needs of all parties. And then it takes all that and gives us clear examples that have worked in the real world to transform conflict into peace and understanding in a wide variety of situations: with friends and family, in the workplace, with gang members and terrorists, and more.
The wisdom that formed the basis of Nonviolent Communication, the notion that we are all valuable beings capable of transcending the mindsets that tend to give rise to verbal fisticuffs, is alive and well in this book. But it's conveyed in a more anecdotal format, without “how-to” lists of words that do this and words that do that. It makes compelling reading. And it can be read and digested one easy bite at a time, or savored as a series of meals.
Speak Peace in a World of Conflict is a book for our time and place in the evolution of human consciousness. Grown out of decades of healing and peacework, it is brilliant in its ability to present the complex with simplicity without losing the wisdom. No matter where you may be on your path to living peace, I recommend it to you.
—Chiwah
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