The Power of Love - 3 - Heart and Peace

by Stefan Shavulev
(Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria)

‘Follow your Heart’ should be the slogan of United Nations. This is the only prescription the world needs. Follow the dictates of your heart. Purity resides in your heart; when you get anchored there you become one with love; loving thoughts, loving words and loving deeds. Feel that love, that energy, that vitality, that light which emanates from an awakened heart.
The unforgivable mistakes of the past can be best rectified if the collective wisdom of the modern age is best used to mingle the conflicting ideologies by being flexible and understanding each other from the heart and the understanding the other point of view and developing a sense of empathy and caring for others. Call it the process or call it the transformation from the heart, but we must change our collective consciousness…and if we don’t we will face extinction! We have to have a clear vision and see beyond the fog, we have to be flexible and patient to change and know each other’s point of view, we have to understand and bring about the change in the collective consciousness of everyone who inhabits this planet. What is critical, is the understanding and negotiating from the heart and raising the level of our collective consciousness, and forming it into energy, fueling the evolutionary growth of everyone on our planet.
In our turbulent times, the need of today is to devise ways to better use this “Energy” and to live a better life not only for ourselves and our children but our neighbors as well, not only for the people of our country but all living beings who inhabit our planet, whether it is protecting the polar bears and other species or the effects of global warming or taking care of the trees and vegetation or our eco systems.
We need to invent newer and better ways to use, harness and convert, whether it is compressed air, solar power, geothermal energy, wind power or the endless source of energy from the oceans. Each wave is beckoning the human intelligence to find the ways to harness it. We need to retrofit our industries with alternate energy resources or face catastrophe in the face of greater competition and Earth’s limited resources.
The question is not what the United Nations can do for us but what we, each individual who inhabits this planet can do or should do. “Be the change…” said Mahatma Gandhi that you want to bring to this world. The world is full of rich philanthropists and generous entrepreneurs, but they only touch 1% of the population with their contributions. What is needed is to create a model at the grass root level in every remote village and every remote outpost where there no access to even clean water facilities, much less hospitals or educational institutions. The model has to be affordable and based on social entrepreneurship, where people start from a good heart or heart?based qualities of compassion, kindness, selflessness and generosity, where the rich at heart, contribute their time, resources and skills, without expecting anything in return. This model can be easily duplicated anywhere in the world with a little bit of ingenuity. We cannot under?emphasize the charitable contributions made by major religions but at the same time be aware of the spread of the hate and violence, instead of love and empathy, by the fanatics in every religion.
As Dalai Lama puts it very empathetically “…to develop scope of one’s empathy in such a way that it can extend to any form of life that has the capacity to feel pain and experience happiness. ”
Heart is the meeting place between science and spirit or between mind and spirit; and we have the power to transmute our emotions and passions into matter. It is in our hands to travel through times, from the past to the future within a heartbeat. We need that leap of faith, that quantum leap when we transfer possibility into reality, when we integrate the material with the spiritual, in the common good of human race. A time will come in the near future when we can communicate with each other telepathically from our hearts. We all have the capacity to develop the super-minds, the essence of God in us. We are the gods…the co?creators of our universe and not the least our own little destinies. We need to see the god in us with the eyes of God!
Unfortunately the evolution of our higher consciousness has not evolved enough, for that we have to be completely anchored in the heart chakra. So long as inequalities among humans exist, so long as crimes of hate and violence exist, so long as disharmony and conflicts of any kind exist, there won’t be any peace in the world.
The fact is that it takes more than two billion dollars a day to keep up with expenses of maintaining troops and war infrastructure in Iraq and Afghanistan. Needless to say these funds can be better utilized for building a better infrastructure in the U.S. What if that money could be used to build two hospitals a day or build fresh water facilities in every village in every third world country, instead of wasting money in one of those war torn countries, this wealth could heal millions and millions around the world.

What good are the booming economies across the planet, if we cannot feed the hungry masses and put food on their plates? Big corporation and vested interests behind every government are only interested to take care of their own interests. There are more than one billion people across the third world countries that are slowly starving to death and facing permanent disabilities. The so called progress is destroying the resources and needs of the poor. The need of the day is to recognize the corporate greed and eradicating the abuse of power by the vested interests. The need of the day is to educate and feed every child that goes to bed hungry, create housing for 800 million plus homeless across the planet (including 3 to 4 million homeless in the U.S. (the richest country in the world), clean water facilities in each village in every third world country, not just the cities alone, providing permanent security for every elderly person who cannot take care of himself, providing free medical aid and dignified living for those who cannot afford.
We are so unfortunate that we do not count our blessings, we feed on endless consumerism and shameless waste of natural resources, and in spite of all the abundance we are not content. We conveniently forget that there are people like us who do not eat even one meal a day. Here it is fashionable to be on diet, there in those poor countries, they die from it…they have no choice!
The fact is that the U.S. treasury is being ransacked by one million dollars per minute by the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, displacing at least 3 million people in Iraq alone. That money can very well be utilized by taking care of the millions of homeless people in the U.S., and directing those resources to human needs and necessities. Until we awaken our heart?consciousness, until we can feel from our hearts to the suffering humanity, until we expose the brutal nature of so?called capitalism of selfishness and greed; we cannot live in peace.
The peace that is enforced by military cannot be permanent and cannot be of the kind the human hearts need and desire. When the dominant powers will abandon all notions of aggression and violence, when mistrust and hate will leave the hearts of the poor and the oppressed, when various nations, large and small, strong and weak, white or black, yellow or brown, civilized or uncivilized, will live united as one by the bond of love and oneness of mankind, then only will peace reign on this planet. Foreign control of any kind breeds contempt, hatred and bitterness in the hearts of the oppressed people. If one nation shows signs of aggression and power, other nations get the cue, triggering rivalry in the name of self?defense. Every nation has the right to govern itself without meddling from mightier nation. There can never be any kind of world peace without the equality and unity of all nations. The threat to world peace originates from greed rooted in worldly outlook on life. Trying to secure world peace through, military, political or economic readjustments is like treating symptoms without caring to uproot the cause of the ailment. What is needed is the deepening of our faith in spiritual values. Most people seek the world through God. God for them is this all powerful deity who fulfills all their worldly needs. They forget that real religion starts from the heart and the heart?held values of kindness, compassion, empathy, non?violence and generosity. Our value?judgment based on sense perceptions makes the material world real to us, creating attachment and bondage, to satisfy the craving of the lower senses.
You don’t have to be religious or believe in God to be philanthropist or kind-hearted. The fact is that we cannot love others without feeling some kind of a relationship or a bond of unity from the heart. This bond of unity should exist between friends, families, societies, communities, races and nations. Different kind of interests such as physical, economic, political, cultural, spiritual, religious tie us together in the collective life. The deepest and the most lasting of these relationships are those built on truth and spiritual values of head and heart. Though all religions teach love, yet in the name of religion more wars have been fought; brothers have killed brothers in the name of justice and all kind of acts of violence in the name of peace.