To bring about a lasting global peace, something is needed that opens the hearts of all people to the urgency of remembering, reclaiming, and living by our innate state of unity, harmony, and wholeness that connects us all and keeps us in peaceful relationship with all beings on our planetary home. This inner knowing seems to have been out of reach for eons.

Remembering who we really are leads us into and through an arduous transformative journey that confirms what we all share at our essence. This provides us with the needed hope – and assurance – that we deeply want to be aligned with all that is already being done in an emergent process of creating the conditions for lasting peace.

We, collectively, need to set off on a journey beginning with personal peace, following the way of unity in all its steps, guiding us from family peace to community peace to national peace, and finding its fulfillment in world peace.

To achieve this ultimate goal, in our complex, divided times, what is called for is an all-inclusive, comprehensive way to peace that clarifies an organic process that the entire human family, young and old, rich and poor, can relate to, embrace, and help bring into reality.

Lasting peace can only be the result of a long, conscious evolutionary process that requires building out the necessary preconditions for global harmony. From this foundation and framework, the realization of the unity of the human family in all its rich diversity can become manifest.

Critical to both this evolutionary process to transform consciousness and to satisfy our need to align with the energies of the universe, is individual and group meditation. The more meditation in the world, the more peaceful the world will be. Yet, no matter how inclusive, well-intended, and focused this practice is, meditation alone will not bring about world peace.

All efforts toward inner peace and well-being for raising and transforming individual and group consciousness can only result in peace on Earth if they are consciously coupled with a cumulatively expanding outer process of transforming all social structures to support the oneness of humanity and all life.

A shift in consciousness is the first step needed in an extensive process of global renewal. A unitive consciousness– seeing all things as an indivisible wholeness – is the goal that will bring into focus all that is possible when a unitive perspective is applied in all endeavors.

When this process of elevating consciousness toward wholeness is fully accomplished, it will still take decades, if not centuries, for a totally transformed multi-level local, regional, national, and global infrastructure to be built out and put into effect that would support this unitive consciousness and its continuing growth and development.

Personal, group, community, regional, national, and global efforts toward this goal of unity and peace are all essential as they complement each other and help humanity recognize the interconnectedness of all peacebuilding efforts independently and interdependently working toward their convergence.