Cultivating Inner Peace: Exploring the Psychology, Wisdom and Poetry of Gandhi, Thoreau, the Buddha, and Others

by Paul R. Fleischman

The way to inner peace is illuminated in this accessible guide to tending one's inner landscape. The lives of outstanding figures such as the Buddha, Walt Whitman, and Gandhi are used to connect the ideal of inner peace with how real people cultivate peace in their everyday lives. Peacefulness as dynamic, selective, and egoless is shown through the constructive act of choosing different ways of life, such as having a smaller family or a more modest career. A message of hope and inspiration permeates this pragmatic approach and is exemplified by the author's own practice of meditation.

Genres: Spirituality, Nonfiction, Buddhism, Philosophy

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Paul R.Fleischman’s legacy book, "Wonder: When and Why the World Appears Radiant" expresses Dr. Fleischman’s knowledge as a psychiatrist, scientist, meditator, poet, lover of literature, and world traveler. Each chapter builds on the next and takes the reader deeper and deeper into the understanding of human life’s connection to all life. Readers of the book say that the writing is powerful and the concepts build on themselves like a suspense novel. Wonder makes an impression that commands full attention. The book makes a significant contribution by bridging the two domains of scientific and religious cosmology, and it does so with inspiration and elegance. It connects the dots of biology, physics, and spirituality and helps to crystallize thoughts, and to generate new thoughts and insights. Paul R. Fleischman is also the author of, "Cultivating Inner Peace: Exploring the Psychology,Wisdom and Poetry of Gandhi, Thoreau, the Buddha, and Others," "Karma and Chaos," "You Can Never Speak Up Too Often for the Love of All Things," "The Healing Spirit: Explorations in Religion and Psychotherapy," "Spiritual Aspects of Psychiatric Practice," "Vipassana Meditation: Healing the Healer and the Experience of Impermanence," and "The Buddha Taught Nonviolence, Not Pacifism."

Reviews

[Rwildfon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Paul R. Fleischman has been a Vipassana meditator for over 30 years. His prose is beautiful. He has taken on the work of explaining this kind of mindfullness and how to get there. Not an easy thing to do.

Lovely work.

[Jule · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book while doing service at Dhamma Dvara, a Vipassana Center in Germany. It is such an inspiring read! I enjoyed every page of it. Fleischman introduces the main principles that are the coordinates for a life full of inner peace. And then chapter by chapter, he describes each principle and presents people who are impersonations of these coordinates. He draws from examples of their day-to-day life, poetry, writings etc.

This book is a must if you seek great inspiration, ideas and examples on how to create for yourself a life full of inner peace. I extracted a long list of other works that i want to read some time soon. Last but not least, Fleischman is a Vipassana meditator. If you are one, too, you may find it interesting to read about his personal experience.

[Jess · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rereading again in 2013
Reread it in 2012
Finished it the first time late in 2010

[James Davies · Rating 2 out of 5]

I hover between giving this two or three stars. I think I have to drop lower rather than higher, here, however, mainly for how unpolished this book felt. I really wanted to like this book. Like Fleischman, I too practise Vipassana meditation, and I also greatly admire some of the people he examines in the book. The idea of the book is wonderful, to provide a detailed study of peace and of those who have dedicated their lives to seeking it out. I was glad that he provided such a diverse array of subjects, showing the multiplicity of ways that peace can be realised and achieved in a human life. I appreciate Fleischman's emphasis that peace is something that must be worked towards (and worked towards continuously with all of one's effort), as well as the attempt to define various core elements and aspects of the search.

However, I cannot stomach Fleischman's writing. Attempting to avoid something scholarly or analytical, he unfortunately swings much too hard in the opposite direction, adopting a poetic style that feels severely unrefined, and thoroughly contrived. Like a freshman English student, Fleischman piles adjective upon adjective, thinking it will add richness to his prose. Instead, the effect is a total muddying. Reading this book feels like joining a highway at low speed, and just as I start to gain some momentum, I come across roadworks and have to slow down again. Exiting them, I increase my speed, only to find another blockage, a new detour, again having to slow down. I wasn't able to achieve any sustained sense of flow through reading the entire three hundred pages of this book, except through the passages of quotations from other more practised writers. I am not sure Fleischman understands that good poets and writers know how to practise restraint, with much of their language remaining deceptively ordinary. In contrast, his language feels awkward and inaccessible.

To reiterate, there are some genuinely valuable ideas here, and I have learned something from this book. Above all, I probably most appreciated Fleischman's sense of courage - it felt that he was making a great claim for the necessity of peace, so valuable in a time when arguing for such a necessity is "seen as naïve by cynics". One must remember that it is all too easy to be smug and to be cynical, but so difficult to be earnest in our era of sarcasm: earnestly wishing and striving towards a life of honesty, peace, uprightness and compassion. These are commonly sneered at by the crowd as a form of weakness, but many of the strongest people I have ever met are those who have set the cultivation of these attitudes and dispositions as their central goal.
So please don't take this review as a rejection of the content (although I do balk somewhat at the facile humanism that Fleischman invokes throughout), but mainly a plea that in future, the publishers have somewhat higher standards and better copy editors. This book could have been genuinely fantastic, with a little more restraint.

N.B. Perhaps this is more evidence for my theory that nearly no good books have ever been published by an author who signs the front cover with their academic credentials (e.g. Paul R. Fleischman, M.D.) - does any good writer need extra credentials beyond the quality of their work?

[Ronja Mattila · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was serving my 3rd 10-day Vipassana course and saw this as the thickest book on a tiny bookshelf. I don’t want to read that, I felt. But I kept walking past it and felt a strange pull to it. I picked it up, read a random page telling something about Gandhi and thought, well I’ll give it a try.

Turned out to be the best Dhamma book I have read. Something so special, intimate and personal was speaking to me whole way through. Like my whole life was being prepared for this. And it opened an entire new door of perception for me, in a similar way Stephen Harrod Buhner’s ”Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm” did. This book was written for me. Incredible.

[Anne McKeirnan · Rating 5 out of 5]

My morning spiritual read. This book had a lot of deep thought and beauty in it. I highly recommend it.

[Elaine · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book's sub-title explains it all. It draws from the wisdom and poetry of so many people from all over the world and from all time-periods to inspire the reader to live more simply and find more beauty in life. This book wasn't only a great read, it will be a continual re-read for the rest of my life. Scott and Helen Nearing are my new heroes, Simple Gifts the song I hope to sing to my children someday, and Monet a painter I'd like to re-discover. The first time I read it I got what I needed out of it, but felt he went on about Tagore far longer than was necessary, but the second time I read this? Tagore is now another of my new heroes. His life was truly heroic in every way! This book changed my life. I plan now on reading the books Scott and Helen Nearing wrote, the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore, and the translations of ancient texts into English while maintaining their soul and feeling by Juan Mascaro. I'm inspired by these and many more lives of people just like us, human beings who sought the beauty and amazement of life, and truly lived it.

[Alonso Martinez · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a jewel of a book, which should always be close at hand as an inspiration on how to live fully by seeking peace within. Although Paul Fleischman is a vipassana medidator, and describes how that tecnique has helped him reach inner peace, the wonderful passages relating to such diverse personalities from different cultural backgrounds show that peace can be achieved by those willing to live a simple and fruitful life close to nature and be compassionate with themselves and others.

[Jessica Zu · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book that I would return to again and again. When I am reading this book, I feel like Buddha is talking to me in person using a language that I could understand. Instead of telling me what I should do, it is teaching me how I should face and solve my own problems in my specific social context, using my own strength. It reveals a world of inner peace that everyone could cultivate by him/herself.

[Swaroop · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very peaceful read. Every page in this book has a very peaceful vibration to it. This is one of those books that will stay on my kindle forever and will get back to this book a lot of times. The book manages to make you feel inner peace while letting you experience the the insignificant nature of our thoughts and body since all of that is impermanent in nature.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although I didn't always agree with the author, I found his insights into some of the world's great thinkers fascinating and insightful.

[Raghu]

Enjoyed reading this book.

[Jeremy Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fantastic read.