Beloved Students:

Let us again take time to feel deep and abiding appreciation for the myriad blessings that have graced both your individual lives and the collective life of planet Earth. It is good to take note of the precious elements that arise in life. In these times, it may become tempting to focus only on the things that are not working so well. However, if such becomes the primary focus of your internal spaces, you will indeed get stuck in a suffering mode.

I am writing this to you through Kathlyn early this month, because our upcoming Peace Convocation makes it necessary to do April's lesson a bit ahead of schedule. Today is a day when many people are celebrating by speaking in funny accents, telling jokes, wearing green clothes, even drinking green beer. Since our topic of focus for April is Peace, I thought it might be a fun thing to combine the two, and say we are actually celebrating Green Peace. And if our focus lends energy and support to any environmental group, we can celebrate that too!

When you look around at the world at this time, you can clearly see, feel and experience the difficulties that exist in the establishment of any kind of global peace. It is for this reason that I am asking all of you (and please feel free to ask everyone you know as well) to spend some time each day thinking about, meditating upon, Peace. A few years ago, all of you were seeing bumper stickers admonishing you to "Visualize World Peace." What do you suppose ever happened to all those bumper stickers? Oh, I don't mean literally, I mean in the collective consciousness. As the idea becomes common, the bumper stickers disappear. In fact, hardly anyone even knows where to find one any more. Like many other engaging thoughts, once everyone caught on, the idea became common place and went out of popular interest.

Now this is not some kind of advertisement for a particular bumper sticker. It is my desire, however, to get you to think about what you need to set in place to remember to hold a conscious internal state to receive and shine Peace. While it is easy to see the frantic state of much of the world at this time, it is not always so easy to know just how you can contribute to creating a different kind of reality. As you have already learned about so many other things, it all starts in the mind. The frantic state so many experience in their own internal worlds is really a state of mind. Oh, yes; it is reinforced by outer events, but the actual state of "frantic" resides in the mind. Likewise, the experience of peace is also a state of mind. Whether we are talking of an individual or a whole collection of individuals matters little, for just as a given person is routinely ruled by his or her own mind state, so, too, is the collective run by a kind of collective mind state. Whether individually or collectively, where there is fear and paranoia, where there is hatred and the inability to see goodness in others, where there is a perceived need to dominate and control, there can never really be peace. Where matters of dogma collide, where there is little or no tolerance for the ways and beliefs of others, peace is usually distant. While this may, indeed, be obvious, less obvious is the course of personal action when one is living in a time where peace seems illusive, at best, impossible at worst.

If you find yourself (as many of you do) surrounded by individuals who want to go to war, your desire of creating a state of internal peace may be a bit more challenging. If you have simply become acclimated to warring factions in the political arena, the educational arena, the medical arena, perhaps even that dubbed the spiritual arena, you may have forgotten what it is to embody something called "peace."

If we consider what peace really is, perhaps we must also look at what it is not. Often people confuse a sort of checked-out quality for peace. While some may know these too are not the same, they might not know exactly how to tell the difference. In both cases it would appear that the individual in question is somehow able to move through his/her life without being overcome by stress or the frantic pace of modern life. Yet if we look a little deeper, we can see there is a difference, and that difference is quite palpable if you know where to find the pulse.

In the checked-out person, there is a flat, or dead, quality that can be perceived quite easily, if you pay attention. In the individual that truly embodies peace, however, there is a quality of aliveness that sparks through a calm, placid demeanor. This aliveness, too, is palpable, and the good news is you don't ever have to hunt for the pulse - the aliveness simply oozes out into the individual's field of experiencing. Peace embodied has other fruits as well, such as kindness and generosity, gentleness and a sense of humor, an honest concern for others as well as a sense of the preciousness of every moment in life.

To really get on with the attainment of embodying peace, perhaps the most important threshold to cross is this sense of how precious every single moment really is. Because life is uncertain - in truth, none knows which breath will be the last - everything that confronts the senses is precious. Take time to enjoy the signs of Spring that are coming. See each as a rare and precious gift of the moment in which it arises, and know that nothing else could arise in this particular moment that would impact you in quite the same way as has "this." When you leave your dear ones, have the full and conscious knowledge that you may never see them again, and appreciate them as if, in fact, you wouldn't see them again. When you arrive at work, look around the workplace. Let in every sight, sound and sense as if it were the first time you had ever taken it in. Look at as if you knew you would never see it again, or as if you are seeing/feeling/experiencing it for all those who died in the past 24-hours. Go through your day looking at the world around you and marveling at how many precious moments if offers you - not because you deserve it, but just because it's there.

Please join me in listening to Precious Moment, a talk I did in Denver this past March 3rd. If I could give you each a special gift this month, it would be the rich experience of the preciousness in all aspects of life: your relationships (yes, even the tough ones), the beauty that surrounds you, the vivid colors in your spectrum of light, and the experience of everything you deem "good."

Please continue sitting (or start, for those of you who are still putting it off) for 30 minutes per day just following your breath, and watching (dropping) your thoughts. I know this seems boring to some of you, but that's only because your egos are trying to divert you. But this month, try holding your heart open to/with/for peace and just notice how that may affect both your sitting time as well as your "post meditation" time. In as much as you can, remain at peace with all beings - particularly yourself. You may find that you are your own deepest and most compelling challenge here.

Walk in love and kindness, holding well the preciousness of life. Cultivate peace and generosity as you become alive with the wonder of Creation.

Your beloved guide and mentor,
Djwhal Khul