What is Peace?
Peace is not an experience. It is a lack of confusion regarding what you are experiencing. In that clarity, there is contentment and the joy of liberation from the suffering of confusion.
The human experience is filled with moments of positivity and beauty interchanging with moments of negativity and pain. This human experience is characterized by the body, its associated physical senses and sensations, along with the mind’s thoughts and moods.
When some embark on the journey to discover peace, they search for it in the world of human experience. The hope is that the experience of this body can be made permanently happy and positive, forever forsaking the negative.
Such a perspective is dependent upon your experience being a certain way; and since experiences themselves are transient, so is the happiness and pleasure they bring.
You are not your experiences and the conviction of this truth born of direct perception will take the pressure off avoiding negative experiences and clinging to positive ones. You become less fixated on your experiences, enjoying what comes and no longer lamenting letting go of what goes.
But where does peace fit in? Peace is not an experience but the way you regard experiences. It is not a thought or a mindset but rather the place of eternal awareness from which you live.
By the place, I mean your Self. When you no longer mistake yourself to be your body or mind, where does that leave you? It is the opportunity to become aware of your own existence without the context of human form.
In that clear awareness, you are at ease and at peace. Or rather, you recognize yourself as ease and peace itself. There are endless ways to release our confusion in order to re-discover clarity, and I like to recommend meditation and self-enquiry.
We are a lot less like individual beings and more like a spaceless and timeless dimension that is endlessly conscious of itself.
Trippy but true. :P
Namast, sangha.
