Practicing the Presence of Peace
The next time something dark or disturbing tries to steal into you to destroy your peace, do not consent to be drawn into its seemingly important considerations.
Be Peace
Instead of sinking into this yawning abyss, rather than running after something to resolve that rift, better to remember this truth: the peace you long for also longs for you. Then, whatever you must do, find your way to it! Here’s an excellent place to start.
Come awake to the backdrop of stillness within you, and while being aware within it, watch your thoughts and feelings trying to drag you into the noisy world of their worry and fear. If you go silent before them, they have no choice but to enter the silence with you. This is how we turn the table on these thieves of peace. They cannot live with you in the light of higher self-awareness. In this mansion, there is room for only one.
You can work on this exercise anytime you remember it. Try it now. Look past the familiar forms around you, including those reactions in you about them. Don’t think about the moment unfolding before you. See it; Be the whole of life in the perfect present moment. This Now is where the spirit of peace resides. Drop the minutiae, the too-familiar sense of self-found in sorting through the particular. Place your attention in the awareness of your thoughts instead of losing yourself within them and what they tell you is happening.
As you make these interior efforts, you will no doubt hear your thoughts tell you that what you ask is impossible, that you can’t hope to succeed at separating the darkness from the light.
The thought self does not know its own captive state. Its darkened nature can only imagine freedom—never know it. But our true nature is created to know the very movements of heaven within itself, which is why we need to discover what is working within us that has us so anchored in time and space. Perhaps the analogy that follows, a simple situation common to us all, will help us better see into our present situation and show us how to escape its hold.
Have you ever sat in your living room with sunlight streaming through a window and seen, suspended in the light, all of those thousands of dust particles? If it helps, imagine this scene now. Before you, all around you, is this light. Within it, suspended, are countless tiny particles of dust. Now, with this image in mind, what is it that we look at?
Our attention is drawn to the dancing particles. In contrast, the light that makes these particles visible to our eye remains invisible in and of itself. Here is the reason for this: we don’t see the light that makes it possible for us to see the particles because our present nature only knows itself in relationships based upon “particularity.” It is only conscious of individual forms instead of their relationship to the whole. The inherent limitations of this level of self have become our lamentations. But it need not remain this way.
Within each of us, in our hearts and our minds, there lives a special kind of light. In truth, it is everywhere. We can look at our thoughts as particles suspended in a silent, illuminated space. But, instead of seeing the beautiful stillness, we grab onto each thought that passes through it. Why would we do this? We are now close to the discovery of a great truth.
It is not the real you, not the real “I” in us, that latches onto these thoughts. It is the thief of peace! This is our divided nature. This thieving nature that steals our peace is part and parcel of our blindness to the fact that real peace doesn’t come in parts.
The stillness we long for can never be found in any temporary sense of self that comes from being identified with the movement of one of these suspended parts.
One reason why negative states sneak in so easily to steal our peace is that we have been conditioned to believe in their right to punish us. Here is proof of this dark conspiracy:
We can be seated at a lovely quiet table in a restaurant, have enough money to buy a fine meal for ourselves, have nice clean clothes, be by ourselves or with friends. For all of our good fortune, we will get upset because the waiter didn’t bring our toast buttered on the right side! As silly as this may sound, it’s true: Negative states such as these, born of nothing other than conflict-filled, comparative thinking, steal into us to squander our peace one hundred times a day.
We do not have to yield ourselves to such meaningless states, nor live the life of the sorry self that revels in them. We have within us an extraordinary part of ourselves within which we may be at peace regardless of what goes on around us.
This yet-to-be realized state of ourselves might be called conscious self-awareness. Through its power, instead of being pulled down into painful identification with the passing shadows of life, we can discover life in peace far above the reach of any fear.
Allow your heart to remind you what the mind so easily forgets: there is a peace. There is a shelter. There is a timeless place in each of us that no darkness can shatter or dispel. Make it your one intention to spend your time there.
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About the Author
Guy Finley is an internationally renowned spiritual teacher and bestselling self-help author. He is the Founder and Director of Life of Learning Foundation, a nonprofit center for spiritual self-study located in Merlin, Oregon. He is the best-selling author of The Secret of Letting Go and 45 other books and audio programs that sold over 2 million copies in 30 languages. Guy holds regular in-person classes at Life of Learning Foundation, including two free talks each week: live-streamed www.guyfinley.org/online. These classes are open to all. For more information about Guy Finley and Life of Learning Foundation, visit www.guyfinley.org
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