YOU TELL ME YOU WANT PEACE

You tell me you want peace. Peace in your life, peace in your mind, peace in your heart. You tell me you don’t want to feel this tight knot of resistance in your belly when things don’t go your way, when life becomes stormy, when you feel you’re falling apart. You tell me you want an end to suffering. An end to the thoughts that torment you, an end to the emotions that swirl around in the shadows of unrest.

You tell me you want peace. But can’t you see, my friend, peace is already here ... it’s just that you’re too busy waging war. You’re waging war every time you come to a conclusion about the experience you’re having, every time you decide that what you feel is wrong, every time you decide that what you think is right, every time you believe yourself to be lucky because something good has happened or you believe yourself to be unlucky because something bad has happened. The mind loves coming to a conclusion, it loves being certain of what it thinks it knows as its experience. Coming to a conclusion about your experience means that mind has some solid ground to stand on. Mind takes up a standpoint, a position that gives a sense of certainty, a sense of security, a sense of safety, a sense of being in control of the uncontrollable.

On this seemingly solid ground, self-righteousness has taken hold. And self-righteousness contains the seed of opposition in it … because whenever you come to a conclusion about your experience, the pendulum will inevitably swing and you will come to another conclusion, seemingly opposite to the one you came to before. As you swing from one conclusion to another, you wage war. Locked into the argument with life, you unconsciously attempt to gain control, to know the unknowable. Coming to a conclusion is a knee-jerk reaction, the default position of a mind that has taken ownership of who you really are.

My friend, this is the invitation of peace … to reign in the habitual pull of coming to a conclusion, to hold this desire like riding a wild horse. Not tightly, but gently ... to reign it in and stay present in the tender open space of nonresistance to your experience. It’s a place of “not knowing”, not coming to any conclusion about yourself or about life. As you become sensitive to the tendency of the mind’s default position, you may be able to choose to pause, to reign in it, to stand gently but firmly on the razor’s edge of the unknown and simply bear the unbearability of having no position to fall back on.

This is the wisdom of surrender. And surrender is the way to freedom ... freedom from the war raging in your mind when you don’t like what is happening, freedom from the attempt to fight or escape the reality of the human experience, freedom from the tight knot in your belly.

The more you bow down to life as it appears now and now and now, as the bare fact of your experience, the more you will fall into a state of such okay-ness, such tenderness, such beauty, such richness and depth that you will stop looking for peace and realize that peace is already here. It is here in you ... as the open presence that is always here, come what may.

This is the wisdom of surrender.

This is the way of peace.