Better than a thousand hollow words, is one word that brings peace.
—Gautama the Buddha
 
Peace be with you.
—Jesus the Christ
 
Thought for the Day: Before peace on earth can be realized, we must find peace within ourselves. Finding inner peace has always been an exceptionally difficult task. The world pulls at us in a thousand different directions all designed to keep us nervous and distracted. We worry about the welfare of our families, where our next meal is coming from, terrorism, health care costs, and leaders who refuse to work with each other. Life is intense and intensely nerve-wracking.

Buddha and Jesus have similar ideas about finding inner peace. For Buddha, who was trying to rescue his culture from a multitude of demanding gods, the answer was transcendence. Buddha taught that through meditation, one could reach a higher level of consciousness that allowed them to see reality differently. Transcendence is a peaceful, non-anxious state of being.

Jesus was attempting to lead his people out of the legalistic hierarchy created by priests who considered themselves the right hand of God. He taught that the only way to peace is through understanding our deep, personal relationship with God. He illustrated this relationship the way Buddha exemplified transcendence. In many ways, they were teaching the same thing: Oneness.

These two enlightened spiritual teachers taught that we are all on a journey to a higher state of being and that prayer and meditation are among the most important tools in our arsenal. Both of these masters looked around their world and like many of us, were called to create a better way. They knew that for us to find peace on earth, we must first find peace within ourselves. Then, they taught us how to find that one word that brings us, and our world, serenity—whether that word is Aum or Amen.
 
Prayer: Glorious God, Eternal Universe, Supreme Consciousness—speak to me the Word that leads to a lasting peace, so that I might speak the words that lead to lasting peace. Amen.