Peace Class: Self-Love is World Service

LIVE for the first time a month ago. Mandy Kahn (mandykahn.com) Earth Day, April 22

 

Peace Class, Wednesdays, 6:00 pm on Zoom

Friends, Peace Class meets Wednesday nights. Join in via Zoom at 6:00 pm (Pacific). 

• Feel free to share link with friends
• ALL are welcome
• Zoom: us02web.zoom.us/j/82150472713
• ID: 821 5047 2713

This is the text of the talk delivered at last week's class:

 

Self-love is world service

By Mandy Kahn at PRS, Earth Day 2026, edited by Dhr. Seven, Wisdom Quarterly

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When we are kind to ourselves, when we have compassion for ourselves, when we love ourselves without reserve, we create the conditions in which to most easily evolve.

All of this evolution is towards a more peaceful and loving version of the [conventional] self.

 

Self-love creates a state in which one can hear the voice of our higher self and also feel that voice in the heart.

 

That higher voice points to the path ahead. The path ahead is always evolving [becoming] towards a more loving version of self. Self-love creates a kind of quiet in the mind/heart.

Lower mind

 

Not sex but symbolism of union

The lower mind is the place of judgment. That which is not love, that which is harsh, is loud in the lower mind. Self-love is the antidote to this loud voice. It balances and heals the harshness, restoring a kind of homeostasis, a calm, equitable ground [dzogchen]. Self-love creates neutrality in the self. It creates openness, and openness is peace. Into the true openness of peace, the presence of universal love, universal kindness, universal knowing arrives.

Tibetan Dharmacakra - Ground (Dzogchen)

All those who walk with universal love walk in service to all beings.

So self-love creates the conditions for one to more easily become peace, and into that peace of the self, the great wisdom of universal loving-kindness arrives. And the individual into which it arrives now carries it as a remarkable offering for all.

Higher mind

It is as if self-love builds the room. The empty room is peace. And universal love always arrives to fill it. Put simply:

• Unconditional self-love creates neutrality.
• And into [out of] this neutrality, peace is born.
• And this neutrality is peace.
• And into this peace, love-without-end [absorption or samādhi through metta] is born.

This peace flows from the individual consciousness into the collective consciousness, where it heals that which has not been loved which has remained there as residue.

• ["One-pointedness of mind/heart (cittass'ekaggatā), Ven. Visakha, is called concentration (samādhi, stillness, coherence)" (MN 44).]

Flower power made in the USA

When peace has flowed into the collective consciousness and has healed that which is not-love that is there, new possibilities emerge for humankind.

• Old wounds are healed.
• Old grievances are healed.
• And more people, no longer held in bondage by old grievances, are able to hear their higher selves' voice, which is a loving voice.
• And more people, hearing their highest voice, choose to act in love.
• And things begin to change.
• Old patterns suddenly end.
• There is more harmony between people.
• There is more peace.
• And that peace, felt by any one person, enters the collective consciousness and heals another layer of what is there
• calling to be loved,
• calling to be witnessed,
• calling to be healed,
• calling to be honored for all that it is, exactly as it is.
• Peace does that.
• [EDITORIAL NOTE: When Goenka talks about observing sensations (feelings) in the body, he says to observe each one “AS IT IS.” The Pali phrase he uses is “yathā-bhūta.” Buddhist Sanskrit (tathātā) akin to the Chinese term rú zhēn (如眞) “suchness.”]

It's as if our hearts were burning as one at BM.

So all is honored, all is healed, and another wave of people feel called to lean into that voice at the center of their chests, their own heart's voice, the voice of a higher self, a voice that speaks of their purpose. That voice is loving, the font of love at the center of each being, what we can call the heart's voice. So it is better perceived, easier to hear and learn from.

An act of service to the world

Earth and every living being on it is so much more beautiful and unbelievable close up.

 
Our self-love is an ACT [karma] of service (sevā) to the world. Is builds our peace first, and our peace builds all peace.

Yes, it builds our neutrality (equanimity, unbiased looking on, upekṣā), which allows us to hear our higher voice. The peace it builds in our own heart/mind travels into the collective consciousness, where it heals and creates new opportunities for future peace, our own and the peace of others.

The "peacening" process

Buddhist Goddess Prajnaparamita (personification of Perfection of Wisdom), Java

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Goddess Sophia (Wisdom)

Our self-love powers this whole peacening [pacifying, cooling, slaking, quenching towards the highest peace of all, which is Nirvana or the "nirvanering"] process.

• Our self-love is local -- planetary service to others.
• Our self-love is holy.
• Our self-love is a holy offering that changes things.
• It changes us and everything else at once.
• It loves us and everything into wholeness.
• It loves you, it loves me, it loves everyone and everything at once (immediately, instantly, timelessly, akāliko). [The Gnostics knew it.]
• Boho chic; Girl in Yellow; text by Mandy Kahn, edited by Dhr. Seven, Wisdom Quarterly, Earth Day 2026