Peace

            When Liz here stumbled onto truth, it was while seeking peace. She was an anxious person, and it was not love or happiness she felt she was missing, but inner peace.

Before I continue, let me define peace. Peace is an absence of conflict. Without conflict, what is present is wholeness and never-ending stillness. Notice peace is not defined as something new arising, but by the absence of something. Conflict therefore blocks the awareness of the presence of peace. Another way to say this is ego, which is the experience of conflict, blocks the peace inherently here.

What Liz thought were her first mystical experiences, mind-blowing love and oneness and joy, occurred when she was twenty years old and had just started A Course in Miracles. Eventually, these and their aftermath, a kind of honeymoon, passed. Ego was upset about this, it threw a temper tantrum, it wanted those experiences back. But as Liz moved past this over the years, it is interesting that her goal continued to be inner peace, not those emotions felt intensely for a short while. For some time, ego still thought with longing of those experiences and hoped they would come again someday, but even this faded in time. It faded because peace came to stay in conscious awareness and there is no lack in peace.

However, those experiences did come again, when consciousnesses shifted here. (See Liz's memoir.) What was experienced as The Enlightened Mind coming to stay was experienced here in 2011. The Shift began then and culminated in The Break seven years later. I’ve come to see it was like the tree (ego) had been chopped down but the stump and roots of the tree remained until that moment. Since then, those roots have been rising to the surface, revealing all that ego was underneath. That The Golden Light of Love came blazing into consciousness here at The Break as ego began to fully surface is telling. Especially as the unshakable peace that had come to stay was suddenly buried beneath fear, although it was sensed and understood to be all around. It was not missing but hidden by the process of ego rising fully to conscious awareness.

Suddenly, in the absence of peace, thoughts of love and joy were back. But the mystical experiences that came this time around were not truly valued although they were being pushed once again. Something greater than what (ego) was pushing them could see through them. They were physically demanding experiences. They were overblown and unsustainable. While enjoyable in the moment, they ultimately induced anxiety. Fortunately, just as they had over thirty years before, intense experiences of love and joy eventually passed.

Of course, it was a long time before it was understood here what was occurring in this baffling resurgence of ego. But in the process of coming to see that it was ego’s roots being pulled out and therefore fully exposed, those powerful mystical experiences were recognized to be merely the effects on the body of truth rising to conscious awareness. They were really nothing in themselves and the sense that they were, and that they were valuable in themselves, was ego bloating up physical experiences into something significant in themselves.

Seven years have passed since The Break and enough of ego’s roots have moved out of the way that peace has come back to conscious awareness, familiar and certainly welcome. Peace is a quiet thing, inducing gentle light-heartedness. This could be called happiness, certainly, but could it be called love? Perhaps. But what these experiences have revealed is the blazing, intense experiences of love and joy are emotions, not peace. Mystical love is simply the flipside of fear. These are on the same coin, like good and bad and right and wrong share the same mindset and neither side truly transcends the other. And this is why ego valued mystical love and joy but blocked peace.

The body is limited in what it can feel. There’s personal love, which is really attachment and necessary for the human species; and mystical love, which is an experience of oneness with all that ego bloats into something more than it is; and the quiet, gentle “good” feelings that come with peace that could be called love. It is confusing because they are simply degrees of the same feelings. Only the experiencer knows the context. This is why when we hear of them we end up with expectations that are not met or are exceeded: “I expected it to feel…but it felt…”

While peace does induce “good” feelings in the body, it transcends emotions. Trust the still, the quiet, and the gentle. It is here, and lasting, untouched by the passing experiences, good or bad, love or peace, occurring in its midst.

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