Wonderful landscapes continue to bring delight to my senses here in Switzerland. Mountains, lakes, forests, rivers, green fields, but also gardens full of tall, bright flowers, traditional farm houses, and small groups of meandering cows catch the eye and please it.

When I contemplate why that is, what it means to see and feel beauty and connection, I often consider whether the lack of violent conflict this country has experienced in the modern era allows the resonance of natural peace in myself and in the Nature around me to be expressed in a stronger way.

Peace – if we don’t know it within ourselves, how should we know how it can manifest among hostile communities and countries in the world? Do we know it with our families, with our co-workers, or with our neighbors? How do we experience it, recognize it ,and share it? I have wanted to understand this for a long time.

Switzerland is known for its government being neutral. According to constitutional law, they will not take up arms in a conflict between two nations at war. The Swiss themselves often mention this, and often they add a few comments to share that they are aware of awkward compromises their governments were responsible for in the past while still calling themselves ‘neutral’. But, I also note a pride concerning the attitude of neutrality that permeates the Swiss mindset. For many Swiss people, perhaps the majority, it is common sense to think that interfering when two are having a problem is not so smart, and that peaceful solutions are possible

Peace. As an American, that is a word that feels outdated, a hippie ideal. But no, I know that millions of Americans are dedicated to this cause. To support it, I suggest that benefits arise from this characteristic of neutrality, such as being able to live together on this planet. I sense it here in Appenzellerland, in the quality of my life, and in the quality of the people I meet here daily. What does it mean to be neutral?

There is a deeper meaning to neutrality for the individual. It doesn’t mean just not taking sides. It doesn’t mean always being calm with a Buddha-like smile on our faces. It’s not a state of stoic non-feeling. Neutrality is clear-minded awareness that a variety of perspectives exist. When we are not clinging to our private world of inner arguments and justifications, likes and dislikes, friends and enemies, and deeply interested in human beings before opinions fog over our intuitive power, we are capable of naturally entering an energetic state of neutrality, which is not stagnation or mere passivity. We don’t mix things up. Neutrality allows things to stay organic, to grow, to calm down, to heal, and to become powerful.

It is there in a car, that big ‘N’. Almost every car I have driven in Japan and Europe have been stick-shift. Here, we consciously shift into the other gears, but we don’t manage it without tapping into that neutrality for at least a moment. Cars without a stick-shift seem to skip neutral, and almost all cars I drove in the USA are automatic. An article about cars in Google even tells me that ‘Neutral’ is a dangerous gear in automatic cars. You lose control. But I like to linger a bit in Neutral when I drive my stick-shift car here in Europe. It feels good not to be in gear all the time.

Isn’t it about time to give space for ‘neutrality’? Not primarily in the political sense, but in the physical, psychological, and energetic sense. A tree has branches. We identify the tree by its leaves and flowers, and by the shape of its branches. But what is really giving that wonderful tree life? What is the source of beauty here? Light, water, and oxygen enter the tree through the leaves and bark, but the movement and transformation of those elements into energy has to connect to the roots somehow. For this, it goes over the middle, the stem, the trunk, the gut, and the heart. This is the unseen neutral zone, where nothing is easily visible or palpable to our senses, but where actually everything has to move through to get authentic movement and power. We human beings function like this, animals too.

We humans can get in touch with these inner movements. We can observe, support, and enhance them. However, in our history, though we Euro-Americans claim to be individualists, we often give over our observational and intuitive powers to rash actions, explanations, and the advice of the experts. In the complexity of it all, we can lose faith that we are capable of sensing deeply what is going on inside us. Decisions become very difficult. We sit on one branch of our tree and lose a sense of connection to all the others on our individual tree, and then to our collective forest.

The internal dilemma becomes the external dilemma. It happens everywhere. Many of us Americans may be facing a dilemma, a sense of stagnation. We so much want to know, to go, to lead, to get somewhere that is really wonderful. It’s frustrating these days.

In the article I referred to about auto transmission, it says, “Use Neutral when your car is stuck.” I like this sentence. When things are not moving smoothly, to come back to neutral, to inhale, to stop forcing things into one gear or another, to observe things, to loosen up. Where are things moving on their own?

This neutrality is not giving up. We learn trust, and trust is a wonderful thing to feel. It lifts our spirits. We regenerate and are ready to approach great difficulties with courage and creativity. And those virtues are not cultivated by an exhausted or ‘driven’ thinking mind. They arise from connection to our whole being, to our roots as energetic living beings, very much a part of all other living beings. At the core, love lives. And from here, I, an American, want to see the world, from here I want to work with and for others, from here I want to enjoy my life.

I hope to get better at accessing neutrality, not judging, not forcing, not tampering where I don’t need to, and hopefully I can share the resulting vitality and optimism I feel with my family, my beloved Americans, and with the world.