Acceptance does not mean we stop taking action to improve the world, to increase peace, increase love, equality, wisdom and justice. One can still take action, just that emotional acceptance reduces your personal drama with people and brings inner peace.... which makes you happier, and even more effective to help others. This is what Buddha taught. Thich Nhat Hanh explains here:
"If you don’t have peace within yourself, it is very difficult to work for peace. [During the Vietnam war] our thinking was, the other person is not our enemy. Our enemies are misunderstanding, discrimination, violence, hatred, and anger. With that kind of insight, we conducted the peace movement.
If you are filled with anger, you create more suffering for yourself than for the other person. When you are inhabited by the energy of anger, you want to punish, you want to destroy. That is why those who are wise do not want to say anything or do anything while the anger is still in them.
So you try to bring peace into yourself first. When you are calm, when you are lucid, you will see that the other person is a victim of confusion, of hate, of violence transmitted by society, by parents, by friends, by the environment. When you are able to see that, your anger is no longer there...”
~Thich Nhat Hanh~
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