Learning peace

From my Hamburg notes on internal learning: peace. We all know that our best decisions are taken when our mind is calm and clear. Decisions taken when our mind is disturbed by negative emotions, e.g. stress, anger, fear, suspicion, jealousy or hatred, we later on always have to regret and repair. Negative emotions disturb a calm mind. A calm and peaceful mind can be learned by realizing that it is caused by positive emotions, such as compassion, forgiveness etc. and that it has to protect itself and get immune from negative emotions.

We should realize that most of our negative emotions, are not so much created by external objects or people, but are merely our own mental projections. If we are able to analyze these objects or people more objectively and from different perspectives, we find that they are not totally bad, repulsive etc. And we have to realize that we should make a distinction between persons and actions. The actions which upset or harmed us maybe totally unethical or bad, but the person may not be completely bad and may have previously done very positive actions. So we still can develop some compassion for the person, though we may have to protect ourselves from the negative actions.