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PREFACE It is amazing to think of how many lives we touch in our one lifetime! Worlds of family, study, work, travel, play, and everyday living seem to be ever-overlapping circles of mutual contact and continuous change. Not a day goes by that we are not relating to growing living beings — plants, animals, humans, even microscopic creatures in the earth, water, sunshine, and air. Every moment we are relating to our own physical and mental energies as well.
What kind of effect do we have on these interrelating worlds? Is it a loving touch? Are others refreshed by our presence, as if by a soft breeze or a sweet song? Is our heart open to the quality of our relating? Without paying attention to these questions, many of us tend to live by habit, on many levels of discontent.
As just one of us becomes free from discontent and from its hovering companions - greed, anger, conceitimagine the myriad lives which would be benefitted! Multiply that single equanimous person by a vast network of individuals who radiate kindness, wisdom, and peace! Perhaps the highest vision each one of us cherishes in our inmost recesses can be actualized after all!
The possibilities of suffusing our universe with goodness or God-ness are, we believe, limitless. All it takes is turning our attention in that direction. The philosophies of the East clearly indicate that the causes of unhappiness lie within our own minds. They also give hope that there is a way to uproot those causes and that it is within our power to do so.
What way do they suggest? First of all, to take a
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