Do I really have to say this?
Yes.
Why? Because it might not be what you think. Peace is neither a state of mind or a product of mind, not even an emotion. It's beyond perception of any state or object -- and not some kind of objective to be reached when conditions are right. It's relief from concern about conditions.
The usual approach to securing peace involves creating preferred conditions. That approach starts in a state of conflict with experience and puts that state of conflict into action. Even if preferred conditions are achieved, we then have to monitor them to maintain them.
That's why people have such trouble achieving peace.
Some people equate peace with a kind unmoved stillness -- or perhaps the relief we feel after conflict ends.
Peace is just ease in the midst of conditions.
Peace is the absence of compulsive involvement with the content of experience -- either to delve into it or to resist it. It's compatible with all experience because it is nothing, in itself. It's the baseline of all experience before experience occurs, the baseline to which it returns and before the next thought or experience has occurred, and easy freedom during experience.
Peace is freedom to change -- or to stay the same. Peace is free to be energetic -- or quiet.
Peace is a formless intuition.
It can't be imagined, remembered or intellectualized. Peace cannot be "understood". It can be intuited, only.
Peace has no description. It needs no description to validate itself; it's self-validating.
Peace is a space without center or discernable boundaries. Some people describe that lack of center or boundaries, as "vast".
While that's understandable to someone who has already intuited peace, "vast" implies size and entices us to explore "vastness".
Can't be done. The very act generates a form of tension -- the sense of an explorer moving into involvement with the content of experience -- a sense of self with a location who is pressing attention in some direction.
Peace cannot be remembered or efforted toward. Try it.
Peace surfaces when remembering and effort stop.
Peace might be said to be a kind of faith that everything is "going okay without my involvement" -- but without that thought. It's NOT faith in a person or a belief. That kind of faith is already a state of distress hanging on to an imagined source of help.
Peace shows up in the moment of release from entrapment by memories, or imaginings, or any kind of experience that can be identified by name or form -- freedom from complication by mind.
Said another way, peace is natural rest and spontaneous right action -- the very experience of being so much "in the zone" that we forget we're in the zone.
It simply involves getting out of our own way so we can enjoy our natural state.
Ring any bells?
Stay tuned.
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