Discovering the Deep Peace and Love
Within Our Hearts
by Dr. Robert Ibrahim Jaffe, MD, DD

---

Most people’s existence is limited by their identification to the external reality that has been constructed around them through their teachers and socialization process. We are taught how to be, told who we are, and asked to conform to a system of being that destroys the love and peace that is the natural states of our hearts. This socialization process occurs in various ways through the beliefs and understandings that are prevalent in our different geographical, political and religious areas.

Each of these socializations causes us to lose connection to our deeper and true selves, and instead creates a false reality and identity in which we live and try constantly to uphold. Over time, these prisons begin to encroach upon us more and more, and we feel subdued, helpless and lost.

Of course, there are many people in society who are seeking power and control that are happy with this state of society. They are not going to ask you to break out of their prison, and in fact, it has been constructed to keep you as part of it. In many ways, we live like those in the movie The Matrix, who are living in a world that is not real, but have no consciousness that there is a world that is free and beautiful outside this world they know.

Ideally, we would like to live freely, and at the same time have the possibility to experience beauty and love while living. Most of us are seeking peace in our lives, lives where we can live happily and find time for the things that we want the most, such as love, laughter, health, happiness and family. The question really comes down to this: How can we break out of these prisons to find true peace and love in our lives? And is there a true nature to this reality?

Each country and society has created many prisons. So, too, have many religions movements. Anything that cuts off the heart or consciousness from seeking truth and love, or demands that one finds it in a certain way, creates subtle veils that stop us from experiencing the truth and expansion of our beings.

In order to find true peace and true love, we must find a universal approach to these possibilities that is larger and inclusive of all religions, creeds, castes and political ideologies. We must seek a universal understanding of truth and peace. I believe that these understandings exist and can be found in a divine understanding of our world.

If we release ourselves from our self-constructed prisons and move into this larger universal understanding and way, we will experience the true peace and love that we all want. Let us begin by understanding how to move out of prison, and what this prison truly is.

The prison that we live in is the prison that catches our hearts and minds. It is not an outer prison but an inner prison. This prison is composed of thoughts, beliefs and inner pictures that condition our inner reality. It is as if we watch these pictures unconsciously and believe that they are true, and so we choose to live our lives around them.

For example, if you carry a picture of yourself from when you were a child of being helpless, then even as you grow, you would feel helpless. This picture would no longer be accurate for you, but in a deep way would influence your reality. You might live from feelings of helplessness and would make decisions based on these feelings.

If you carried a picture that you were not beautiful, then this picture would affect how you perceive yourself. Even if, as the years went by, you became more and more beautiful, these early and destructive pictures would affect your reality.

By the same token, if you learned early on that peace in your household meant surrender to the ideologies of your parents, these pictures would cause you to create peace through living in this way, even if it didn’t work. For example, if one of your parents was an alcoholic and you learned that to have peace you needed to “shut up and do as you were told,” then peace would be related to shutting up and conforming to your parent’s ways, even if these way were based on erroneous ways of living, where your parent was drunk and abusive.

If you are brought up in a culture that believes something and you conform, then you become a prisoner of that culture. For example, the Germans during the 1940s were taught that listening to Hitler and conforming to his message of control and power was the right thing to do. Many surrendered to this message and ended up becoming part of an extremely destructive movement that led to many deaths around the world. Today, many of the German people must live with this stigma, even as they try so hard to step out of these old pictures that can still be found on TV and the movies.

To release ourselves from these prisons and find true peace, we must step out of the pictures and thoughts that hold us inside. There are basically only two methods that can take us out of prison. The first is related to the mind, and the second to the heart.

The mind can be transformed through meditation, where one learns methods that help one’s consciousness or inner witnessing to step out of these boxes, and enter a more ephemeral and translucent state. Meditation can be extremely helpful for many people to let go of the mind’s prisons and find peace of mind. Personally, however, after having meditated for over twenty years, I have found that the second method, the way of the heart, has been more profound for me and has taken me deeper in my experience of peace, love and compassion. It seemed like I had waited my whole life for this method when it was finally presented to me.

This way does not work directly with freeing the mind, but rather works with freeing the heart to experience love. When the heart experiences love and is freed from its prisons, the worlds that open up for people are so profound and full of so much beauty that there seems to be no reason to experience anything else. Many of the great masters have spoken of love as the greatest liberating force in the universe, and some have said that love is the universal path that can free all individuals from suffering and create peace in this world.

How do we experience love, and how can we free our selves as well as our countries from the prisons that they are unconsciously caught in? The answer lies in learning how to open and purify our hearts from all the diseases that they carry, such as greed, lust, arrogance and pride.

As we purify our hearts from these things, we become stronger inside and begin to live in a holy and beautiful way. Our hearts become luminant with divine light and become mirrors of a greater reality of love that is available to all of us at any moment of the day or night. The luminescence of love shines from us and heals everyone that we meet and touch, and helps every being that lives on the earth.

The way of love is a way of living that frees us from suffering from within. As we feel better and learn the beauty of love, we have no need to hurt others or to imprison others. How many of you have fallen in love and felt the beauty of love so deeply that all you wanted was peace and kindness for all people? How many found a spring in your step and joy in your heart that was so profound that your whole life seemed to be filled with colors and textures that weren’t there the moment before falling in love?

In fact, these textures were always there, but had become hidden through our socialization process. Love freed us from these. If our political leaders and world leaders found a life in love, imagine what the world would be like. Borders would come down. War would stop, much disease would disappear, and health and well-being would become the norm of our world. Each country would go out of the way to help other countries, and in time we would recognize ourselves as one people, inhabiting one world together.

How do we find this love? How do we free ourselves from our prisons, and what is the experience of love? The answer to this for me has come through my understanding of the Sufi path. The Sufis taught that to find love, one must remember God and purify the heart.

Remembering God means to begin to spend time not just worshipping God or exalting God, but rather moving more deeply towards the Divine. The Divine was known to be the source of all love, so that as we move closer to the divine or closer to the knowledge and light of God, we simultaneously expand the amount of love carried in our hearts.

They also teach that because the Divine is love, then the love that is God’s love would also purify the heart of everything other than love; so that if you carry pain, remembering the Divine would gradually wash the pain away. If your heart were filled with anger or hate, the love and the Divine would wash away these qualities in your heart. As your heart became polished like a bright shiny mirror, it would reflect the beauty of the divine light. So rather than pain, the heart would be filled with love. Rather than anger, compassion and kindness would be found within the heart. By remembering the Divine though remembering the sacred names of God, we can slowly and persistently clean everything from our hearts until they become pure mirrors of the divine realties. This should be our goal in life.

As a physician, I have had the opportunity to watch many people die, perhaps over two hundred in the past twenty years. Each of these taught me many things about life, but it was the death of my own wife one year ago that was the most profound.

Through having purified her heart and walked more closely to God, she was prepared for death and ready to meet it. Rather than fight it or be afraid of it, she was ready. She opened her heart as the time came closer, and many people came to visit her. Each of the people who visited her was shocked by the amount of love and peace that she gave to them as they were touched by her presence.

Her remembrance of God became so deep that when the time came for her crossing, she was radiant and full of the most holy light that I had experienced. As she passed, it seemed that angels and light surrounded her and I knew that she had left and gone to the most beautiful world of love and peace. She truly died realized in God. I hope that all people have this experience of love and peace before they die, and that all people come to experience the secrets and beauty of love while they are alive!

The Jaffe Institute has been designed to help people discover the beauty and peace of living in Divine Love each moment. It is an institute that has been created to help bring people into closer proximity to the divine so that they may drink from its source of love.

The Jaffe Institute teaches people how to release the pictures and beliefs that imprison their minds and hearts so that they become free to experience true peace and love. It also teaches people how to heal in this way and apply this healing to individuals, corporations and relationships.

This drinking and experiencing of love, and the wisdom that comes from this love, is then applied to healing, relationship, education and corporate and political environments to help each person experience the greatest possibility for love and fulfillment in their lives. The Institute has drawn much of its teachings from the Sufi way and applies this teachings in an open and comprehensive way to all those who are ready to go beyond the prisons of their minds and hearts.

The mind is imprisoned when it becomes narrow-minded, judgmental and limited in itself, when it lives for itself and not for the good of all mankind. The heart becomes imprisoned when it has forgotten the beauty of love and has become lonely and separate and in pain. Is it any accident that heart disease is one of the number one causes of death in our world? Why is this? This is because the hearts have been forgotten in this fast paced world that we live in today. If each heart could experience a taste of love for just a few minutes each day, most of the diseases present in both the world and the society would simply disappear.

What is love really? It is in reality the light of God that enters the heart. It is the immediate witnessing, feeling, and tasting of this light. It is often so profound because we have been starved for so long that, when it comes, we are astounded by it. We then attach it to something such as the face of our beloved, or to a person, place or things. But if one were to look deep and to go inside their feelings of love, they would see that love flows to them from their hearts, and that the source of the heart’s love would be found in its connection to the Divine. Love is a quality or attribute of the Divine.

In the same way, peace is also an attribute of the Divine. It is one of the facets of the divine face. It is interesting that “peace” in Hebrew is Shalom and in Arabic is Salaam. Wouldn’t it be beautiful if these two brothers could find the unity in their worlds so that they could come together in peace in the world?

What is peace really? Peace is the never-ending flow of gentleness and goodness that flows from the Divine to our hearts. When we feel it, we feel safe and full of happiness. We know in our hearts that everything will be OK.

By learning to live within the presence of the divine love and discovering the divine peace in our hearts, we can find answers to every question that has come to us. We can find love in more abundance than we ever dreamed possible, and we can help everyone that we meet.

As a doctor and healer who has helped tens of thousands of people, I know that it is the return to this love and the presence of this peace which is the fundamental energy that creates the climate for true healing to occur. Having worked with many corporations, I have found that it is the same qualities that change our work place from one of stress and dysfunction to a garden of beauty where the employees are happy and fulfilled and thus more creative than any could possibly imagine.

I invite you to step on this path of love by opening your hearts and purifying them of everything other than the divine. Begin to remember the divine names and release everything until the witnessing and feelings of your hearts become complete and full of the divine presence.

My wish is that in the next 10-20 years all people in the world realize that we are one people who truly have one heart. That when we help each other, we make this heart strong and all the people in the world become happy and full of love. When we hurt this heart, we hurt all the hearts in the world.

I would like us to teach this way to know love in our schools and churches and synagogues so that all people could learn the depth of love and the truth about its nature. From this I hope that all people will fall in love. First with God then themselves and then all of their brothers and sisters throughout the world.

In Sufism we say, “May all Praise go to the One.” May God bless and bring peace to all the hearts of all people throughout the world.

For the past twenty years, Robert Ibrahim Jaffe, MD, and John Wadude Laird, MD, have been on the forefront of body/mind medicine and journeying through love towards God. They have assembled one of the nation's premier staffs of professional healers and teachers, and the result is an improved Jaffe Institute, a new three-year program where you can heal, grow, reach career aspirations, and find your home among like-minded individuals with an open heart and a passion for life. To contact the Jaffe Institute, please call toll free: 800/238-3060 or visit the website www.jaffeinstitute.org.

---

Next Article

Return to This Month's Index

Go to the Home Page