On the 7th of May the UK may well elect a new government. Some people may be very excited if the Tories lose and Labour gets into power and some very upset, but I will not be particularly excited or concerned either way. Since I arrived in the UK in the 1970s, I have seen a lot of British parliaments come and go and nothing much seems to have changed.

The NHS is always deemed to be in crisis, educational standards are supposedly slipping, and too many people are said to be claiming welfare benefits, or welfare benefits are criticised as being woefully inadequate. Yet most people go on leading pretty safe and abundant lives. When they get sick, they get free and pretty comprehensive health care, when they have children, those children receive free education right up to the age of 18, and if they are unlucky enough to be unemployed for a while, the state will support them. But are the British happy with their lot? Not at all! So many citizens of the UK now suffer from stress, anxiety and depression despite living in one of the safest and richest corners of the globe.

We keep changing governments all around the world, but the world still seems to be in a terrible mess. Why? Well from a spiritual perspective, humankind’s core problem is that we all keep projecting our deepest fears and self-hatred or unworthiness outwards, without having a clue about what we are really doing. We then we see a very frightening dangerous world all around us and blame it for our own fear and unhappiness, without realising that the external world is basically a reflection of our internal world.

Whilst we continue to project our self-hatred outwards, individuals and groups of all kinds will insist that they hate one another and whole countries will see each other as ‘the enemy’. Because of this, 7 billion of us are in serious trouble and the only real way out is spiritual awakening. But to awake fully, we first need to dream a happy dream, and to do this, we need to practise the life-saving skill of mindfulness.

Many human beings are mindless. It is all too easy to  sit passively watching TV every evening in some kind of stupor, absorbing the advertisements and  going out to buy stuff you do not really need. Some individuals even watch porn on TV, and then they become almost drugged by the very low vibration of the ‘adult’ film they are watching. A lot of people hate themselves for doing this, but they do not have enough higher awareness or ‘mind muscle’ to pull themselves out of this mindless state.

Mindfulness training is getting rather trendy just now, but spiritual mindfulness is not just about really tasting the food that you eat, noticing each footstep that you take, or calming yourself down when you feel particularly stressed. Spiritual mindfulness involves observing all of your thoughts, and all of your interpretations of the world around you, so that you can change your own mind and thus changing your own reality.

To practise mindfulness, just spend a minute or two every hour noticing your in-breath and your out- breath. Then, whenever you notice that your body has tensed up, pause and breathe mindfully for a few minutes, until you notice that your body feels more relaxed.

Whenever I experience any kind of challenge in life, I pause and breathe mindfully to slow myself down. But it takes tremendous discipline and willpower to master this life-saving skill. When I was a young man, I would get angry at people and then shout at them, because at that time I knew nothing about the art of mindfulness.

But now I really understand that if I shout angrily at someone and they feel hurt, I cannot undo the damage I have done by not being mindful. Once you hurt someone in some way, you really cannot take the hurt back, even if you apologise to them. We all hurt our loved ones when we mindlessly shout at them. So mindfulness training can have an incredibly positive impact on all of your close relationships – if you practise if very diligently.

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At first, you will probably find that you can only be mindful for very short periods of time during your day. Do not despair. Do not give up. Keep committing to practising mindfulness until you can actually do it for most of your waking hours. True mindfulness certainly cannot be mastered in just a few months. It will take you many years to master your own mind. But once you do so you will be able to create a truly beautiful and peaceful life for yourself.

Can we ever have peace on earth? Well, my students and I can certainly create peace in the atmosphere around us when we all meditate together. Because when we meditate together for a while, there is no longer a war going on in our minds. When we go into an Infinite Meditation together, our minds become bathed in a wholly peaceful energy. Then if we still hold this peaceful energy when we go out for lunch, we actually experience a beautiful, peaceful world for a while.

Most people misunderstand peace as the absence of war. Real peace is so much more than this and peaceful energy is so powerful that it can never be destroyed. Even a massive nuclear bomb can never destroy the peace of heaven because it is out of this world and eternal. True peace is an integral part of Life Itself – nothing to do with a Peace Treaty being signed in the Middle East. A piece of paper can never bring true peace to human beings who are determined to blame and hate ‘the enemy without’ but once you experience deep inner peace for yourself, you will find it impossible to kill another sentient being.

An awakened soul just cannot wage war on anyone or anything. It is just impossible. So if you long to save humankind from endless conflict and terrible suffering, you should dedicate your life to awakening your own trapped soul, and then to helping others to awake as you have done.

You should devote your time and energy to giving other human beings a taste of the nectar of deep inner peace. Don’t stomp around the world lecturing people and telling them to stop hurting and killing one another. Whilst their minds are tormented by fear and hatred, they just have to go on trying to project their self-loathing outwards onto others whom they insist are ‘the wicked enemy’, including the political party that they hate.

Instead of wasting your time trying to change the external world, just do everything in your power from this day forth to override the aggressive tendencies that lie deep in your own unhealed mind. Keep practising mindfulness as you go through your day. Keep diligently practising mindfulness and meditation and I promise you that one day you will be able to dwell in perfect peace, even if a political party you do not support suddenly sweeps in.

Blessings to All,

Jason Chan