War and Peace

 

There will be War until you find Inner Peace which is your Essential Nature.

Peace is your essential nature. Therefore there is nothing to do to be at Peace. We arrive on this planet in tremendous Peace with an invitation to enjoy, play and have fun! Then our parents raise us to be adults and without knowing better, they condition us to be nearly constantly at war. This war takes place inside each one of us and we project this outside into the world. 

Peace is a deep contentment to be here and now at rest, with no desire to move to another place or to look for another, better experience. This can only be known when you rest at the source, your being. 

The vast majority of people are not even aware of their being. In ordinary life it hardly gets mentioned. You cannot recognise it as it is given no space. The organised religions keep us divided against ourselves, telling us we need to become good enough to get God’s blessing. Here I am, and out there is God or out there are the others. This duality has created a deep separation inside us. We believe ourselves to be the thoughts, memories and feelings that constantly create a chaos inside our mind. 

As we have all had a similar conditioning, we all have similar ideas and mind structures. The most deeply held structure is that I am a separate somebody who is doing his life. Of course all the other  somebodies are believing this same basic untruth. Each is also divided against himself, at war, trying to be happy by desperately looking for peace and love on the outside., 

But the Source of true peace, love and happiness is only to be found inside, and this Source is constant. Try coming back to the Source and you will always come to the same place. It’s you; it’s the Real You. When you deeply enquire with the question, ‘Who am I?’ you find out that you are just Beingness, just Pure Awareness. If you want to create an authentic Peace in your life then you need to find out who you are. 

While I believe myself to be a mind-body organism with ideas, judgements and desires, all of which are real and together are ‘me,’ then I will not meet my essential nature and I will not live my life from my being, in Peace. As all the others are living a similar untruth it is very easy for the war going on inside us to be projected outside and a state of war to occur between two people, two countries or two religious ideologies. 

There are many kinds of techniques we can use to help us bring our mind first under control and then to stillness. These traditional practices have been passed down for hundreds of years and help to bring the mind into a state of peace. This can support your life, it can make it more manageable and more enjoyable – but it is still duality. There is still somebody who is doing this meditation, somebody who is aware of the breathing.

Ramana Maharshi suggested something he called Self-enquiry: to enquire about the nature of the Self, about your essential nature. Self-enquiry, he said, was the most direct method to know the Self. How to do this? He suggested whatever you are doing, and it doesn’t matter what you are doing, you ask yourself, ‘Who is doing this?’ And the answer is ‘Me.’ then you ask yourself, ‘Who is me?’ There is no real answer to this question. You can find some intellectual answers, but they don’t help very much. But the effect of asking this question is that it brings your attention from the outside to the inside, to the Source. 

If you continue to do this your attention remains inside. In the beginning you can do this by sitting down with closed eyes and bringing all your attention to this practice. But after you’ve mastered this looking, or rather enquiring, as you pass through your day, no matter what you are doing externally, you can use it to bring your attention to the Source. The hypnosis, the attachment to the story outside, changes, and you stay for longer periods at the Source. It doesn’t really matter what you do on the outside because the whole effort is to come to the Source. This is how to create Peace within yourself and then naturally out in the world.

 

3 Responses

  1. “… the whole effort is to come to the Source. This is how to create Peace within yourself and then naturally out in the world.”
    Sounds so brilliant and easy: Self-enquiry is the key.

  2. In one recent self inquiry session my ego dissappeared for a while.

    I could see that I am completely alone and everything happens inside of me.
    It was a huge release because as my ego was’t there any more it’s need to protect and to look outside for how to behave disappeared.

    After the session this state disappeared pretty quickly. As “being related to as a separate human being” started again there seemingly was no way to remain aware of the truth.

  3. It is true that there is an underlying sense of struggle or even war if you like when I am in the ‘I am doing my life’ mode. I know this feeling since a long time and before I heard about ‘looking inside’ I blamed the outside for this feeling and wanted to change it. Getting to know myself a bit deeper now I come to understand little by little how this war in me actually works. Now I can understand the war in the outside on a different level. This doesn’t mean that there is a solution now but it teaches me not to be so quick and tight with my opinion about things, that there might be more than I can grasp. And when I observe the underlying beliefs that cause this war in me I can get a sense of the underlying motivations for the war in the world.

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