CREATING PEACEFUL MINDS

All human beings have suffered from negative minds and delusions, yet we tend to become focused on ourselves, shifting blame for our errors to others, and creating barriers with others based on our own conceptions. Is it possible for us to love others without exception? Even those who we feel have wronged us? Even those we feel are deluded? Even those we feel are the 'lowest of the low?' If we can begin to look at individuals as having been shaped by their experiences and their circumstances, we will begin to develop love and hearts of compassion. If we realize that we all enter the world the same, but our experiences shape us, we can begin to see how that it is not only others, but ourselves who over time have developed negative minds, have taken upon us deluded thought. Yet, within each of us, lies that innate benevolence, the potential to do that which is good, to be happy, and to have peace with others. If we strive to create peaceful minds and to develop patient acceptance, we will see that this will influence our interactions with others, if even but a small way. This seed, once watered, will grow within ourselves, and if others are influenced and also seek to do the same, it is then possible that we can create a society where poverty, injustice, greed, violence, etc. are no more. We created them in our minds, we can erase them with a new mindset.

-Dan L. Edmunds, Ed.D.
www.humanepsychiatry.info