peace is not a product

real peace (the experiential aspect of self-aware awareness) is not the product of anything. it need not be sought through achievements. it has no prerequisites attached to it. true peace is a natural state accessible to one and all regardless of circumstances. it is the unconditional, ever-present quality of consciousness resting within itself.

the perceived lack of peace, on the other hand, does come as a result of conditions. although peace is always present and accessible, it becomes obscured by mind-noise. when the mind and its stories loudly take over, the undercurrent of peace is overlooked and forgotten. all attention becomes diverted away from the infinitely fulfilling and nurturing experience of pure consciousness. distracting and often meaningless thought structures take center stage, are invested with overdue importance, and with the reference point of self-aware awareness receding from experiential memory, the experience of existential confusion and suffering sets in.

the human experience can become extremely complex and fraught with stress, yet even at its most challenging and chaotic moments the simplicity of peace has not gone anywhere. it is where it always is and always will be: here, now. the experienced absence of peace is only an illusion created by the inability - or often the unwillingness - to perceive it as the basic underlying quality of existence.

although the undercurrent of peace is profoundly simple and subtle (and therefore easy to miss), it is nevertheless extremely powerful. it is much more powerful than any product of mind since it endures absolutely everything and remains unchanged and perfectly unblemished throughout it all. it cannot be touched or altered in any way; it always, perfectly, indestructibly, is.

it is precisely this quality of permanent presence and accessibility that simultaneously allows us to take the experience of peace for granted and makes it the most powerful force in our lives. it is sadly ironic that our greatest asset is the one we most readily devalue, forget, and lose touch with.

can't think your way out of it

real peace isn't felt until direct, unequivocal contact is made with the reality of one's essence. when that happens, the racetrack experience of life - where there's always somewhere to get to, where everything is just a means to an end and has no value of itself and a constant, dominating tension keeps one raggedly plunging ahead - gives way to a much more settled existence.

in the natural state of being, each moment is the culmination of experience and need not be compared to the past nor assessed with regard to the future. each thing is complete in itself. everything is the reason for everything, is self-fulfilling. no excuse is needed for happiness; nothing need be brought back from the past nor attained in the future.

past and future have no inherent reality and exist solely as waking dreams conjured up by the mind. the present isn't a brief flicker of experience sliding toward us from the vast expanse of the future and getting chopped up and departmentalized into the enormous filing cabinet of the past - the present is the entirety of experience.

one of the most pervasive and damaging illusions that hold sway over the human race is that the present moment is all but insignificant compared to the vast, opposing reaches of the past and future. at best, current paradigms see the present as a means to an end. there's always some destination to be arrived at, and the present should be sacrificed for the promise of the future. even the past - which at the time was not good enough, not honored - often becomes romanticized in hindsight and given more value than what we have now.

what a ridiculous and clearly insane way of dealing with experience. this timeline theory, with a long line stretching back to represent the past and a long line stretching forward to represent the future - and only a tiny dot to designate the present - is a devastatingly unempowering illusion to subscribe to because it reduces the source of all power to insignificance. to the mind, the linear theory of time seems - and thus, is - real. but the mind deals only in apparent realities and has no way of directly apprehending truth. the timeline experience is an illusion that arises when the mind erroneously becomes the locus of identity.

the belief in reality as linear time is analogous to the belief in the world as flat. judge only by what your senses tell you and it's natural to think the world just goes on in a straight line and suddenly drops off. look only to the content of the mind for an explanation of reality and, naturally, the succession of past-present-future seems real. gain a broader context (that is, step off the planet or step outside the mind) and both "realities" are seen to be perspective-dependent viewpoints with only relative validity.

humanity has always invented stories as a way of coming to terms with how and why things happen, but we have never had the humility to admit that at the time. instead, we elevate our stories to the status of realities - and quite vehemently. only when looking back at past generations have we been willing to say things like, "well, during that period humans were ignorant. they didn't have the knowledge or technology we have now so they invented a god for the rain, a god for the sea, and a god for the sun to help them understand why natural phenomena took place."

we can't see (or are not willing to) that the method of using anthropomorphic gods to explain things has simply given way to the so-called "scientific method," and both are just stories we tell ourselves - presented in a fashion digestible for the times - to escape from the fact that the mind has no way of knowing what's going on. understood correctly and put to its rightful use, the mind is not the be-all end-all of identity and experience, but a subsidiary instrument with limited purpose and application: a bridge between our unmanifest reality and the temporary play of forms it projects much like a dream.

so far, there has been a failure on the part of humanity as a whole to acknowledge this. we're hellbent on proving that reality can be encompassed by the mind. there has been a failure to embrace the "no mind" element of our selves; the truest part, the root, of what we are. because it cannot be grasped or seen or fixed in ink on a page, it seems a terrifying possibility to consider. so we keep sustaining the belief that someday we'll bring reality to the mind: "we haven't quite gotten it yet, but we're getting closer. we know we were wrong then, but now we're really on to something."

too timid to look outside the boundaries of mind, too timid even to admit these boundaries exist and stepping outside them is a possibility, humanity remains locked within the limited confines of mind-apprehended reality. the paradox is that our inability to step outside the mind is rooted in fear and keeps us living in fear. similarly, past generations were afraid to go sailing off into the horizon for fear of falling off the planet. for a long time this kept them from discovering the earth is round and no falling off is possible. once this was discovered, however, the fear of falling off simply evaporated because it was seen to be based on illusion, and further exploration became possible. (this may be an oversimplification of history but serves for analogy's sake.)

our basic fear as humans is that of nonexistence. it's what makes us afraid to step outside the mind; we believe we'll fall off into oblivion. we want to know reality, but we want it to fit within the familiar confines of the mind - to have our cake and eat it too. we want to transcend our suffering while holding on to the source of it. this hesitancy to give up our familiar positionalities keeps us locked in place. the mind can't touch what we are because it is contained within what we are. ultimate truth cannot be rendered into a format intelligible to the mind. it is experienced directly at all times because it is reality, but in order to sense this, focus has to be taken off the mind.

you can't think your way into truth; using thought as a way of apprehending reality is what keeps you mired in illusion. you can't think yourself out of illusion; more of what got you there in the first place isn't going to get you out of it. thinking is just not part of the solution. you have to break the hold thought has over you and feel your way into your basic truth. to do this you need no method, no technique, no collection of thoughts. these are the things keeping you separated from what you already are.

finally, thought is not even the problem. it's investing our thoughts with the sense that they're something more than just thoughts. it's thinking that somewhere within these thoughts we're going to find something that somehow will pop out of the realm of thought and give us something permanent. a thought will just lead to another thought, which will just lead to another thought. in a similar way, objects acquired in dreams cannot cross the threshold into waking experience and attain the status of material reality.

but the truth of what you are, which is indefinably good and once realized brings an end to mind-made suffering, is always here regardless of what goes on within the mind. as such, the possibility of realizing it is ever present. just take the focus off the mind and feel what else is here.

peace on our terms?

we'll never find perfection or peace by running away from confusion and chaos. though it may seem counterintuitive, peace is to be found right here in the very midst of all the confusion and conflict.

running away from what we perceive as bad is exactly why we never come into contact with peace. in running, we’re preventing ourselves from experiencing the absolute perfection that every moment, every experience has to offer.

if we can’t accept every experience that comes our way openly, we should consider the possibility that we're asking for peace on our terms, that we might only be willing to accept the parts of life that we like most.

this selectiveness is an obstacle to opening fully to reality and allowing the experience of unconditional peace to blossom within us.

there's no solution

we spend so much time, so much energy looking and looking and looking for the solution in the mind. our frantic search will continue as long as we look in the mind for a solution.

when it comes to truth there is in fact no solution, because solutions can only exist in the mind. where there is no problem, there is no solution. problems can only exist in the mind.

peace is besides the mind, something completely outside of it. peace isn't broken and in need of fixing - it's alywas there, no matter how strongly we choose to focus on what's going on inside the mind.

step into the mind-realm and you're in the arena of problems and solutions. that's fine, it's how our world operates. it's useful for a lot of things.

but to experience peace, truth, being, we have to stop keeping our attention fixed on the mind, raise our vision and see what's beyond its walls, what's all around it. it's so obvious!