I recently had a dream. Actually, I had two dreams. In the first dream, I was painting a picture. It was a picture of a great, wooden wagon wheel floating in the universe. The center of the wheel, the hub, was an intense white light, with the wooden spokes radiating outward from it to the wooden rim bound by iron. Each spoke had a name burned into it, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, etc..

The wooden rim was the earth, the world we live in, with all of the people of the world. While the people could travel around the world, they could not move any farther away from the center. The iron tire symbolized the limits of our world. The only direction the people could go, other than going around in circles on earth, was to turn inward and go to the center, the hub which supports the entire world. The center from which the world originated. The center which we all came from.

The hub of this wheel, the intense white light, is God. The source of our existence. The spokes of the wheel, representing the multitude of religions which exist in our world, are our pathways to God. They all originated from the same source. They all originated from God. They are all pathways leading to the same destination.

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In the second dream, it was made known to me that the true revelation, in the sense of “an enlightening or astonishing disclosure” [Merriam-Webster], is yet to come. I dreamed that God gave to each of the founders of the world’s religions, a puzzle piece. When we finally realize that God placed compassion and love at the core of those religions and come to, as H.H. the Dalai Lama envisions, a “true kinship of faiths”, then we can bring the pieces of the puzzle together, and we will have the key to unlock the chains that prevent us from living in a world free from suffering caused by humankind. We will have the key to peace on earth.

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Those were the dreams I had. Perhaps it will take the apocalypse described in the Book of Revelations to bring about this realization. I recently read an article in Mother Jones that had to do with the support of evangelical Christians for President Trump. It seems as though they are hopeful he will get us into a war with Iran or hopefully, to their way of thinking, the apocalypse, and this will bring about the “End Times”. They are not worried about nuclear war or the end of the world – they are ready for it.

I personally do not have much faith in the idea that any war will bring about everlasting peace on earth. It suggests that the way to peace is by the extermination of those who do not think like US. But where does it end? No two of us are alike.  Once those with different ideas about religion are eliminated, what is the next difference to justify extermination? War simply programs us to fear and mistrust others. It has been my experience that war brings about division, hatred, ignorance and fear, to name a few things. We need to move beyond fear and hatred if we truly desire peace. What we need for eternal peace is compassion and love. Unity and acceptance. We need to celebrate our similarities and learn to see ourselves in others.