A central concept explored in The Peace of Spirit are the interrelated ideas spiritual transmission and human transformation. Divine transmission causes a process of human transformation to occur. Transmission can occur between the spiritual and material world, across time, and between people. The receiver gains Self-Realization to take part in the mission of working in this world, in service to brother and sister, for the cause of peace.

The Peace of Spirit tells the history of modern nonviolence, spanning from Swami Vivekananda’s first message to the west in Chicago on September 11, 1893, through the development and proliferation of nonviolent thought and action: Gandhi’s work in South Africa and India, Dr. King’s adoption of Gandhian principles for civil rights in the United States, the broadening of Dr. King’s work through the influence of Thich Nhat Hanh, and the ongoing work and calls for peace of the Dalai Lama. The ways in which the method of nonviolent resistance developed into, as Dr. King stated “the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for justice and human dignity” are documented.

Historians often demarcate time with major world events. In this way, the so-called “short” twentieth-century is often begins with the outbreak of World War I, in 1914, and ends with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. During this time, the world descended into the insanity of two world worlds, the use of nuclear weapons on civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and countless nuclear tests, the codification of white supremacy and patriarchal domination as the primary means of political control, and the systematic destruction of the natural world. The edifice of the military-industrial complex reached nearly every corner of the globe. This is the story in which we live, with the focus on the war and destruction of oppressive governments and soulless corporations - those who have chosen to live through the darkness of the heart.

The Peace of Spirit proposes that the twentieth-century was a time of peace, not war. Instead of a “short” twentieth-century of war, let us remember a “long” century of peace.