May the peace and blessings of the holy ones pour forth into the worlds,
Rest upon the Work* and the workers,
Protecting, purifying, energizing, and strengthening them.

There is a peace with passeth understanding;
It abides in the hearts of the eternal.
There is a power which maketh all things new;
It lives and moves in those who know the self as ONE.

* This prayer was originally given by Master DK to energize the United Nations at its inception.

Master DK’s Tibetan Buddhist training is in everything he wrote. Veiled unless one is a seasoned Buddhist practitioner, his teaching comes across as Christ-centered. Yet in his teaching that the Christ is the world teacher and humanity is its own savior. The latter to be accomplished through the efforts of each individual in right relations, selflessness, and meditation.

This mantra or invocation is an example of the layered and veiled quality of the Master’s teaching. The above is a beautiful prayer, easily said and appreciated across faiths and in varied situations. As an invocation, it calls the energy, peace, and blessings of the holy ones (in the varied shapes and forms envisioned by the faithful) into the world. The invocation invokes protection, purification, the energizing of benefit, and the strengthening of heart, mind, body, community, and resolve.

The invocation goes on to describe the highest state of Peace. It is one that surpasses understanding, concepts, words, or descriptions. Because this state of Peace is beyond words, we are pointed toward those who can bring it forward – those who know and are this quality of peace – those whose hearts abide in the eternal. What does that mean? This describes a person or being in whom the sense of self, and therefore of self-dividedness=separateness, is eradicated. Thus the heart is always abides in the state of equanimity – a peace with surpasses all understanding.

Equally, the power of always catalyzing newness – which by its nature brings the experience of protection, purification, energizing, and strengthening – is not sourced from but IS the very state of Being of those who know the self as ONE. Who knows that? Those who have realized the non-separateness of ALLness. Hence, these two descriptions are describing one state of Being: a truly enlightened state.

This morning, the mantra poured forth in its Buddhist symbolism.

• The holy ones are the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, the dakinis, and the gurus.
• They emanate the peace and blessings, caring for the world “like a mother for her child.”
• The work is that of the Path to Enlightenment – bodhichitta (namaste, renouncing all that creates suffering for others and self, the commitment to the Perfections of human beingness, and the ongoing repositioning of other as more important and more valued than self, thus the undoing of selfishness and separateness).
• The workers are all people dedicated to such a Path by all its names, ways of faith, or presentation.
• Protecting – green emanations of buddha karma
• Purifying – white emanations of purification and pacification
• Energizing – yellow emanations of abundant energy
• Strengthening – red emanations of strength and vivification.

The Peace which passeth understanding is, on one level, blue – the peace of space. It also points to Dzogchen as surpassing all understanding, conceptions, thus all duality is completely ceased. Dzogchen is the realization of the “highest, complete, perfect, enlightened state”** in the common moment of now, therefore enlightenment is not something other than now and nowhere other than here.

The Power that maketh all things new is the power of Awareness itself. In pure Awareness, all is fresh, ever present, scintillating. Yet, the newness is not new compared to old but new as in always fresh, always raw, always fertile, presenting. It seems that this is a way to describe Voidness – sunyata – as the infinite potency of Awareness itself and mahamudra which the Awareness of that potency.

Thus, once again, the two are not two but one. The peace which surpasses understanding and the Power that maketh all things new are not two separate qualities or states. These words are like the shimmer of moonlight on water. The moon is not in the water, but we can appreciate the shimmer nonetheless. Similarly, the state being described is unwordable but we can appreciate the words, the prayer, and the invocation nonetheless.

Because most of humanity is not living this state of Being, the compassionate Master DK gave us this mantra.

* This is the beginning of the mantra given by Master DK after WWII as energetic support for the new idea of a United Nations.

** From the Prajnaparamita (Heart Sutra)