It is not possible to cultivate a consciousness of peace without actively maintaining a predisposition to neutrality in the activity of our thoughts and feelings. This does not just apply to some of our thoughts and feelings. It applies universally to all of our thoughts and feelings. Unity’s third principle reflects this truth. We are literally creating, and co-creating, our experience by the thoughts and feelings we allow to dominate in our consciousness. If peace is going to be in our experience, neutrality is the key.
The key to cultivating a predisposition to neutrality is to first understand that the energy of neutrality is not passive. On the contrary, neutrality is a quite active creative power, especially where your personal peace is concerned. As Dr. David Hawkins maintains in his work, the energy of neutrality is the next step in our collective evolution. It takes great courage to maintain neutrality. Without neutrality, universal love is impossible. Without universal love, peace is impossible.
It Is Only Your Peace at Stake
My personal peace is my responsibility. Your peace is your responsibility. It is quite impossible for anyone outside of our own selves to guarantee our personal peace. If peace is going to be my experience, it is quite literally up to me. I must maintain neutrality around all of my thoughts and feelings, about anything and everything, anyone and everyone. Any thought, feeling, judgment, opinion or belief that I hold that does not come from the energy of love is a potential disturbance to my peace. Rigid attachments and grievances held against anyone or anything increase the potential for my peace to be disturbed. The same is true for you.
What do we gain by maintaining a rigid attachment to being right about a particular position? If we are holding someone prisoner to our grievances or judgments, what is the benefit we derive? More importantly, what do our rigid attachments and grievances cost us? Is it worth the cost of your personal peace to maintain a consciousness of war, conflict and discord? Are our grievances more important than our experience of peace?
How do you answer these questions for yourself? Can you answer these questions honestly, without any attempt at making someone else wrong so you can be right? Can you be truly neutral and open with your own self, so as to avoid self-judgment or shame? Can you allow that the truth you are attached to right now might not be the whole truth? What if there was additional knowledge that could prove beyond a doubt that the truth you rigidly cleave to was not the truth at all? Knowing that your peace is at stake, could you be neutral and open enough to change your mind?
The Truth Takes No Sides
A big step in the direction of creating peace in our lives is a willingness to allow that the truth that leads to peace is larger than even the most informed opinion. At any point in time, there is always more truth that could be known than what we personally know. As the gateway to peace, neutrality requires that we maintain an openness to any and all truth, regardless of the source. To be neutral is to be open to changing our position if the truth warrants.
Neutrality is the awareness that the truth takes no sides. The truth is unattached to whether I am personally right about it or not. It remains the truth, regardless of my position. My need to be right does not change the truth one bit. If I am not in alignment with the truth, the truth will not conform to my position, no matter how much I insist.
Achieving neutrality requires a willingness to release attachments to being right, to say “no” to any rigid positions or grievances that disturb, block or limit the experience of peace. To aspire to neutrality is to have said “yes” to truth, and to establish my happiness and peace around the truth that is true, rather than the “truth” I wish to be true.
Neutrality Is Not Passive
Many people confuse neutrality with passivity, which they then equate with weakness. However, anyone who has ever attempted to actively create a consciousness of neutrality knows it is a full time activity, requiring great courage, mental strength, and a commitment to spiritual principle. There is nothing passive, or weak for that matter, about maintaining a consciousness of neutrality, especially when the energy of the world around us insists that we choose a side. Again, the truth takes no sides. No side that can be taken is greater than the truth. The truth, the whole truth, must be large enough to include all sides.
To achieve that end in consciousness requires that we have a predisposition to cultivate neutrality, non-judgment, and non-attachment, at the level of our thoughts and feelings. This is a matter of personal responsibility. If we wait for the world outside of us to be at peace before we allow ourselves to experience peace, we will never experience peace.
To ever have a chance at the experience of peace, we must first value peace as an experience above all else. Peace does not happen by accident, and it does not happen through resistance. Peace can only be experienced through acceptance, specifically, acceptance that what happens in the world is beyond our direct control. What others do or don’t do is literally outside of our control. The only domain where we have any real power is at the level of our own individual consciousness.
With respect to personal peace, it is not what happens in the world that matters. The world can never guarantee our personal experience of peace. Your personal peace, my personal peace, is solely determined by whether we react in fear, or respond in love. It is that simple, but it is not that easy. To love unconditionally, or universally in the truest sense, requires a willingness to maintain a consciousness of neutrality. To do this successfully is not passive at all, not even in the least.
A Peaceful Prayer of Neutrality
Entering this day courageously, I affirm my willingness to suspend my judgments of the world. I know that any grievances I hold against the world only restrict the flow of peaceful energy in my life. I willingly forgive myself for any grievances I may have placed on the world, and gratefully release anyone that I may have held prisoner to my unforgiveness. Infused with divine wisdom and deep understanding, I willingly release any rigid attachments and expectations of others, knowing they only serve to limit my potential to create and experience peace. I cultivate a consciousness of neutrality, so that I may remain open and responsive to the energies and possibilities of peace in every circumstance. With everyone I encounter, I remain actively neutral in consciousness knowing this is the clear path to peace. So it is. So I let it be. Amen.
