Many have heard the call to increase our efforts towards creating a more beautiful world.  We might look around and wonder, how do we begin? Where can we turn so that the passion and compassion we have for serving the higher good of the world can gain traction? Only through more conscious effort, as individuals and civilizations, will we be able to translate the collective yearning for peace into a way that we can actually live together.

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"We all have a great desire to be able to live in peace and environmental sustainability. What most of us don’t yet have are concrete ways of making our commitment to sustainable living a reality in our daily lives. We haven’t organized ourselves…
We are like sleepwalkers, not knowing what we are doing or where we are heading. Whether we can wake up or not depends on whether we can walk mindfully on our Mother Earth. Urgent action must be taken at the individual and the collective levels.”                                                                                                                    ~Thich Nhat Hanh

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Project Evolve imagines new ways to give structure for the values which underpin our dream for world peace to emerge, in order for that dream to come alive through the individual and collective hearts of the people. To the same aim, Pathways To Peace serves as the International Secretariat for the Global Culture of Peace Initiative (CPI), a UN-designated "Peace Messenger Initiative" with participants in all the world's regions.

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Project Evolve and Pathways To Peace join forces to present a

New Cultural Architecture for a Culture of Peace.

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We are currently in a pivoting time when there is a paramount need for healing, uplift, teaching, and encouragement, to be provided within the sacred space of conscious communities. Communities dedicated to a Culture of Peace can serve as the container for strengthening the light of each community member's genius to blossom into answers to local questions wherever a needs for greater peace arises. Therefore, our priority for organizing towards a Culture of Peace centers on supporting one another in bringing the best of what we each have to offer to this shared vision, for the purpose of bringing the human family out of millennia of darkness into new possibilities beyond imagination. 

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"My experience and research have convinced me that the world is on the verge of
the greatest change in human history: the transition from the culture of war that
we have had for tens of thousands of years to a new culture, a culture of peace.”
         ~David Adams, Director, UNESCO     

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Although a vivid dream of peace is held firmly within the human psyche, there has also been an enduring plague of hopelessness and helplessness which has set in as type of inertia in the minds of the vast majority of people. Fortunately, even if the masses continue to stumble in doubt and slumber, all it takes to reach a tipping point for change is a critical mass of awakened people with sufficient faith and determination to create a strong enough energy to bring our big dream of living in peace to life.  As we take the pulse of the world around us, we can now sense that there are enough awakened hearts on board to bring us the shores of that hope.

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The unanimously adopted United Nation's Declaration and Programme of Action on a Culture of Peace declares that "A culture of peace is a set of values, attitudes, traditions and modes of behavior and ways of life." 

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"The Declaration and Programme of Action on a Culture of Peace (A/RES/53/243) ... calls on the entire United Nations system -- all governments and all peoples -- to work together to build a freer, fairer and more peaceful global neighborhood through 'a positive, dynamic participatory process where dialogue is encouraged and conflicts are solved in a spirit of mutual understanding and cooperation'." 

~David Wick, President of Pathways To Peace, Co-Founder of the Ashland Culture of Peace Commission.  Link to Full Article

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Ultimately, the emergence of a Culture of Peace comes from the inside out of individuals and collectives within the human family, not in any sort of top-down structure such as that which has governed the world for many generations. A Culture of Peace becomes possible as an outward manifestation of inward peace rippling into action. Simultaneously, when a Culture of Peace predominates, individuals are supported in coming to the naturalness of inner peace.

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“Peace is our essential nature and a dynamic, transformative, evolutionary process.”  ~Pathways To Peace

 

The entirety of success for any movement towards a true Culture of Peace rests on contributing members of the community knowing, through direct experience, that the nature of Peace is primary to our existence. That Peace is the very ground of our Being, and that anything which arises as non-peace is merely an overlay of conditioned patterns upon the unconditional love at the core of who we are, be it anything from a fleeting conflictual thought to the catastrophe of world war.

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Therefore, coming to inner peace is a matter of dis-covering
the radiant Light of the Peace which is within us.

Spreading world peace is a matter of that same Light of inner peace

being increasingly accessible, far and wide.

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This way of Knowing Peace, could be called a Yoga of the Culture of Peace, with yoga meaning to unite the individual intelligence, which is the experience of each one of us as a unique traveler in this world, with the Universal Intelligence which is the Source of Peace, such that we are One with Peace.

 

As we are rooted within that unity with the Source of inner Peace,

we are inextricably unified as one with another,  

as one with the natural world, as one with the entire cosmos

which sustains the possibility of universal peace. 

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This wisdom - of inner peace as the essential foundation of world peace - is planted deeply within the hearts of those at the center of Pathways To Peace and Project Evolve. The outward efforts depicted in the forthcoming theoretical models for nurturing a Culture of Peace arise from this inward foundation. Indeed, one of our great delights in establishing a visionary partnership has been to discover that for years we had worked within our own spheres to develop conceptual frameworks and visual graphics, only to immediately recognize that they fit together, like a hand and glove, as seen below. This has affirmed to us that there is a higher intelligence of the Universal Heart at the wheel here, forging this collaborative offering in the service of humanity's dream for world peace. 

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Together, these visionary wheels can shape the "how" and the "what" of a Yoga of the Culture of Peace. Project Evolve provides a networking engine for bringing peace-consciousness leaders from interdependent spheres of society into collaboration with one another, to syngergize the domains of the Peace Wheel into living, breathing Pathways To Peace within communities.