What Does Peace Feel Like? It isn't what we think, at all.

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.

How Do We Escape the Traps of Memories?

Behind all of our habits and repetitive experiences, in life, is memory.  Memory is the persistence of an experience.

Memory is one of the four expressions of intelligence.  It works hand-in-hand with imagination.  Without memory, imagination evaporates without a trace.

Memory is our way of capturing our ideas, giving substance to foresight, voice to conscience, and getting good grades, in school.

So, we prize memory above all of our other expressions of intelligence.

Wrongly.

Two reasons:

Other expressions of intelligence are necessary for memory to work:

attention:  For memory to work, we must pay attention to it.

intention:  For memories to have any meaning, they must be flavored with an intention.

imagination:  A little twitch of our imagination calls up our memories.  (If a little twitch doesn't do it, a heavy effort of remember rarely works, have you noticed?)

All four are needed for any one of them to work.  None of them is superior to the others.

That's reason #1.

Here's reason #2:

Memory, without balance by the other three expressions of intelligence is a trap -- the loss of peace, the trap of stress,  or obsession, or compulsion, or bigotry, or willful ignorance -- or stupidity, the incapacity or refusal of intelligence.  We forget what peace feels like.

We have a little clue about how to overcome the persistent force of memory and very good reasons to do so.

The clue about how to overcome the persistent force (or alternately, the incompetence) of memory lies with the other three expressions of intelligence.  There's an oddity, about it.

This is the oddity:  As soon as all four expressions of intelligence come to balance with each other, all four become optimized -- and experience automatically loses its entrapping quality.  Said another way, the seeming substantiality memory evaporates, leaving mental space.

The trap of experience evaporates, and yet all four expressions of intelligence -- including memory -- are optimized.  Odd, don't you think?  No teacher ever taught you that, did they?

Well, here's the rub:  How do we balance our four expressions of intelligence -- attention, intention, memory, and imagination?

There are ways -- slow ways and fast ways.

So, how do we know we are trapped by the force of a memory?

We're just a little bit ... annoyed ... or obsessed ... or inconvenienced by conscience or foresight, or that song just won't stop running through our mind.  But mostly, we're just bothered.

The first step to overcoming for force of memory is to recognize that we've lost our peace.

Recognizing that takes just a bit of intelligence -- actually, a lot because we tend to get buried in the details of our daily experience.

Stay tuned.

Next expostulation in about two days!

2. Why do we seem to lose our peacefulness?

Why do we seem to lose our peacefulness?

Peace is our baseline condition -- but it doesn't seem that way, does it?

Instead, it seems we must either struggle for our peace or suffer lives of disturbance!

Why is that?

We exist in a vast realm of possibility that shows up as our unexpected lives.  We have a sense of how things are and of how they should be -- so often contradicted by our experience.

That contradiction by life of our values and expectations creates our sense of disturbance -- and yet we seem unable to resolve that contradiction, in ourselves.  Peace seems lost and inaccessible.

Instead, we experience a state of imbalance triggered by our attention to the unbalances of the world -- imbalances that change our sense of reality to a state of imbalance.

Our memories of experience color our sense of the present moment.  Our stored memories overpower our sense of the potential of our imagination and the power of our intention -- and there seems to be little we can do, other than struggle to make the world conform to our sense of rightness or suffer our failure to do so.

The imbalances of life unbalance our intelligence.

If we are to recover our sense of peace, we need a way to recover our own balance -- and struggle is not the way.  Struggle is a state of imbalance.  We've already seen that.

There's another way.  It's the way of releasing, recovering our balance despite the imbalances of the world.  Releasing is a state of less effort.  It's a kind of grooming that removes the aftereffects of life, leaving us in our natural state of intelligence -- the sense of peace that surpasses worldly understanding.

It's a way of less effort, not more effort.

How do we do that?

Stay tuned.

Perception Requires Opposition

In order to perceive something, there must be some attractive or repellent force to provide "push-against".

We synchronize with anything that does not resist -- or that we do not resist.

Perfect synchronization is identity -- and therefore, no perception of "other".

Quadra-Genesis

Somatics is a kind of second-birth -- a self-renewal process that refreshes our integrity in a number of ways -- applied to pain relief and freedom to move freely.

Sins of the Older, Sins of the Young

If we're old enough to sin, 

we're old enough to be responsible, for it.

If we're young enough to sin,

we're young enough to be responsible, for it.

Punishment, as an act of cruelty (rather than discipline as an act of restitution or correction), is a sin.

Using the Middle-Way Memory Matrix

In the Middle Way Memory Matrix, the words tend to show up at varying levels of vividness or intensity.

Equalize them by adjusting your pauses between steps.

Rest at an expression long enough for its meaning to consolidate -- or it is eveident that nothing is forthcoming.

To do so links them.

Linking them places them into mutual relationship, which leads to integration.

It also leads to self-insight and spontaneous self-releases and self-corrections.

EQUALITY =:= communion
IN-EQUALITY =:= agency*yielding

"Cropping" our words (adjusting timing) teaches observing, starting and stopping the fixation of attention:intention.