Chapter 19 - The Gateway to Sympathetic Joy
from Cultivating Inner Peace by Paul R. Fleischman, M.D.

A person who has learned the skill of sorrow paradoxically will be lightened by kinship and communion with all beings, and will spontaneously speak in phrases of emphathy and saliency. Words and sorrow are a couple with a long, strong marriage.

Regardless of what we believe the meaning of our life to be, we feel peaceful when our sense of concern is directed outside ourselves toward others, not as a substitute for selfcare, but as an extension of it. Sorrow is what enables pity, dread, or condescension to become compassion. This is one of the deepest ironies of human nature, that our sorrow also contains a leavening celebration.

Dr. Paul Fleischman
Massachusetts, USA
2020
16 minutes

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Copyright, 2020 Paul R. Fleischman

There is more information about vipassana meditation at Dhamma.org, and books and audio resources available for purchase in the Pariyatti bookstore.

Chapter 18 - Sorrow Is a Skill
from Cultivating Inner Peace by Paul R. Fleischman, M.D.

Some people can successfully avoid the depths of life, but if you try to deepen your feelings of peace, you’ll unearth within yourself and the world profound unpleasantness. We saw this to be true in the lives of ecstatic visionaries like Walt Whitman, and in the lives of great nature lovers like Thoreau and Muir. Logically, the world is unknowable to us, who are brief visitors. In spite of that, because of that, to find peace, we have to confront our despairs, ignite our faith, and learn to feel sorrow. Hold on, Reader! We’re headed toward a magnificent campsite, but first we have to be roped for safety across an icy traverse.

Dr. Paul Fleischman
Massachusetts, USA
2020
19 minutes

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Copyright, 2020 Paul R. Fleischman

There is more information about vipassana meditation at Dhamma.org, and books and audio resources available for purchase in the Pariyatti bookstore.

Chapter 17 - Peace Is Facing Sorrow
from Cultivating Inner Peace by Paul R. Fleischman, M.D.

If a reader were using this book as a practical guide to cultivating inner peace, he or she might now be thinking: I know that mere situational adjustments won’t essentially improve my life, which gains its trajectory only from my own actions and feelings. I want to sail toward peace, easy in the currents of myself, harmoniously related to people and circumstances, and to achieve this I have to consciously steer with peace as my polestar. When life storms and batters me, my goal is to return to course, and the will to do so creates the dynamic resilience I need. I’ll limit myself to sail light and trim. I’ll absorb the wise directions of those who’ve already negotiated these straits, soaked in the soothing sounds of peace, and my own words will add to this score. I’ll befriend all I meet on wing and wave, an unwalled, welcoming life.

But you might feel confused to find, having taken these steps, that you are oppressed by a cloud of sorrow. Yet this would be a good sign, because impersonal and surprising grief is the harbinger beyond the known world of yourself to the horizonless peace you seek, as the story of the Buddha will show.

Dr. Paul Fleischman
Massachusetts, USA
2020
33 minutes

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Copyright, 2020 Paul R. Fleischman

There is more information about vipassana meditation at Dhamma.org, and books and audio resources available for purchase in the Pariyatti bookstore.

Chapter 16 - Celebrating with Everyone
from Cultivating Inner Peace by Paul R. Fleischman, M.D.

A peaceful heart celebrates with everyone. “Nature” is a construct, the imposition of a category over the living, vibrating, collections of atoms and molecules, shaped into hearts and minds that are swaying, flying, and yodeling around us today. When even the concept of “nature” is removed, rivers and bears are seen to be as consanguineous as spouses and store clerks.

The process of impermanence and change unites the world. Nature and people have no clear demarcation. We are all tumbling on together. What we subsume under the rubric “nature” is the screen onto which we project our own love and compassion—or lack of them—and when we say “love of nature,” we refer to our capacity to pour out nurturant and fond delight toward all or any “others.” “Nature” is inner peace flashed back and forth between a human being and any other kind of cloud.

Dr. Paul Fleischman
Massachusetts, USA
2020
8 minutes

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Copyright, 2020 Paul R. Fleischman

There is more information about vipassana meditation at Dhamma.org, and books and audio resources available for purchase in the Pariyatti bookstore.

Chapter 15 - Henry David Thoreau
from Cultivating Inner Peace by Paul R. Fleischman, M.D.

Thoreau was foremost a spiritual seeker, a Transcendentalist, a student of the inner light. Keeping himself free of social institutions like governments, churches, and jobs, he studied, thought, and wrote out his innermost thoughts, and sauntered through nature, observing every detail as a communication from a higher sphere.

He stands at the pinnacle of this world wide tradition of keeping nature in focus as a method of tuning the heart to peaceful vibrations. Of all the people I have written about so far, Thoreau probably attained the most abiding equanimity. His story will perfume your mind with peace.

Dr. Paul Fleischman
Massachusetts, USA
2020
32 minutes

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Copyright, 2020 Paul R. Fleischman

There is more information about vipassana meditation at Dhamma.org, and books and audio resources available for purchase in the Pariyatti bookstore.

Chapter 14 - John Muir
from Cultivating Inner Peace by Paul R. Fleischman, M.D.

Muir made harmony his orienting point and built a lifestyle around it. He refused teaching positions at Harvard and the Boston Academy of Science, and instead cleaved to the environment he wrote about.

John Muir’s intimacy with nature deepened to mental states of fusion, during which he lost his sense of individual identity to blend with the whole. “You bathe in these spirit-beams, turning round and round, as if warming at a campfire. Presently, you lose consciousness of your own separate existence; you blend with the landscape, and become part and parcel of nature.” By “nature,” Muir always meant one mood: harmony in every thing, harmony over and over.

Dr. Paul Fleischman
Massachusetts, USA
2020
34 minutes

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Copyright, 2020 Paul R. Fleischman

There is more information about vipassana meditation at Dhamma.org, and books and audio resources available for purchase in the Pariyatti bookstore.

Chapter 13 - Peace In Nature
from Cultivating Inner Peace by Paul R. Fleischman, M.D.

Nature is a stern guru. Those who are not simultaneously knowing themselves as they study nature will be shaken into rude awareness of the great dark truths of the natural world and of their own psyches. Just as nature is the realm of light and beaches and bluebirds, it is the realm of the shadow winter, storms, cold, and death. Immersion in the natural world doesn’t provide a sanctuary from human suffering; it augments and clarifies the deepest origins of distress. When that augmentation is a step toward confrontation and resolution, it is also a step toward inner peace.

Dr. Paul Fleischman
Massachusetts, USA
2020
15 minutes

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Copyright, 2020 Paul R. Fleischman

There is more information about vipassana meditation at Dhamma.org, and books and audio resources available for purchase in the Pariyatti bookstore.

Chapter 12 - Mahatma Gandhi's Mantric Collage
from Cultivating Inner Peace by Paul R. Fleischman, M.D.

India's great political and religious leader, Mahatma Gandhi, intended his monumental public life to be merely an extension of his inner cultivation of peace. Foremost among Gandhi’s peaceful qualities were his reverence for world spiritual literature, his awareness that words transmit feelings as well as ideas, his steady immersion in peaceful language, and his use of linguistic vibrations to transform his followers.

On your own path, peace means listening and speaking as if your words and actions were playing one instrument in the orchestra of the universe. What you say, read, listen to, will influence how your molecules and nervous system dance, and what messages you will conduct and broadcast. Whitman’s poetry may spring you free of foreshortened time; and Gandhi’s dhuns might, if you could reconstruct them, prepare you for noble social action. The words that you absorb will be important contributors to the peace that you will transmit, intentionally or not.

Dr. Paul Fleischman
Massachusetts, USA
2020
22 minutes

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Copyright, 2020 Paul R. Fleischman

There is more information about vipassana meditation at Dhamma.org, and books and audio resources available for purchase in the Pariyatti bookstore.

Chapter 11 - Walt Whitman’s Poetic Peace
from Cultivating Inner Peace by Paul R. Fleischman, M.D.

"A hundred years after his death, Whitman’s life transpires the atmosphere of outdoor freedom. He is known as America’s pagan poet, who set the style of bohemian bard, beckoning to listeners today from old photographs that capture him in his rustic livery, cocked Stetson, open collar, and spirit of dusty rambles on timeless summer days.

The story of Whitman’s relationship with his literary ancestors is not only instructive but intriguing, since he intentionally distorted fact to sculpt a poetic truth. Both what he initially intended to hide, and what his writing and later confessions reveal, highlight the role of the vibration of language in his journey toward poise, since Whitman’s life, for all its breadth and creativity, was an increasingly dynamic, selectively honed pilgrimage into peace."

Dr. Paul Fleischman
Massachusetts, USA
2020
34 minutes

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Copyright, 2020 Paul R. Fleischman

There is more information about vipassana meditation at Dhamma.org, and books and audio resources available for purchase in the Pariyatti bookstore.

Chapter 10 - Speak Your Peace
from Cultivating Inner Peace by Paul R. Fleischman, M.D.

"If I could do one thing for my society today, it would be to create community in which everyone was encouraged to speak from the heart, and to listen to the messages of others. I have spent most of my life listening to varieties of justified complaints that no one listens to or understands. Unfortunately, we live in a non-listening, mass-market, person-inattentive society. The emphasis on efficiency, productivity, pleasure, and hurry that pervade society leave little room for building personal relationships around resonant communication of feelings. We live in a society uniquely devoid of conversation about the backdrop of infinite reality, through which every shaft of light that falls on us has passed. We see the tint of this passage everywhere, but we suffer from derealization when we try to speak about its presence in our lives. Yet this cultural repression is changeable, every time we ourselves dare to refer in our talk to the reality always present around us."

Dr. Paul Fleischman
Massachusetts, USA
2020
22 minutes

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Copyright, 2020 Paul R. Fleischman

There is more information about vipassana meditation at Dhamma.org, and books and audio resources available for purchase in the Pariyatti bookstore.