Peace Reconsidered

Peace Reconsidered

Rumi once asked his master, Shams:

"How did you finally find peace?"

Shams replied:

"I made a promise to calm myself, not the world around me. And a miracle happened, the world around me grew calm as well."

This points to one of the great misunderstandings of modern life.

We imagine that peace will arrive when circumstances improve. When other people behave differently, when our workload reduces, when the children settle down, and when the world finally becomes reasonable.

Life was never designed to conform to our preferences.

The Vedic perspective recognises that peace is not the result of controlling our environment. It is our natural state, obscured by the accumulated stresses stored in the physiology. As those stresses dissolve, the nervous system begins to function as it was designed to, and the peace that was always there begins to reveal itself.

In Vedic Meditation, the mind is allowed to follow its natural tendency toward greater charm, settling inward to a state of deep silence and profound rest.

As the body releases stress, we begin to function from a different state of consciousness. We remain engaged with the world, but we are no longer at the mercy of it.

The remarkable thing is that when we stop demanding that the world change, our experience of the world changes. We become less reactive, more adaptable, more creative, and more capable of meeting life's challenges.

The world may be just as dynamic as it was before, but because our awareness is established in a deeper level of order, life begins to feel more harmonious.

It is a movement inward, toward the silent source of all order, the natural settling of awareness into its own deepest state, a becoming established in the field from which life itself emerges. From that place, peace is no longer something we seek, but rather, it is simply our natural state.