Dear Diary,
I dedicate today’s entry to one of my faithful diary readers, currently facing certain emotional challenges, so I’ll try to focus on those challenges in as simple language as possible. As if a little Q&A hour with one small “but” – but nobody asked me anything :-)
Probably the greatest life deception is that we were convinced that in order to discover a sense of peace, one must search for it somewhere outside. And outside we typically search for peace through everything that helps us forget – by changing the environment, changing the people surrounding us, or simply pouring various brews into ourselves, purchased from that department of the shopping center that on weekdays doesn’t work after eight in the evening, and on Sundays outright mocks a person and their natural needs. So roughly speaking – we simply buy peace with our hard-earned money. We buy it dearly, in the form of a changed environment or brews.
The lie lies in the fact that peace is not somewhere outside. Peace is our own foundation. The backdrop and space in which all our anxiety is born, our thoughts, even we ourselves with all our expectations, desires, history and need to be very, very cool. And when all of that disappears for a second, our attention begins to calmly drift through boundless emptiness and establish “Ah… Peace has finally returned.” Returned? So it had gone somewhere? Disappeared? Got lost? No, it was always within you, it was always your foundation. You simply left with your attention toward everything that is born in your own peace.
Here, having leaped one paragraph up, we encounter life’s greatest absurdity – with the fact that we work hard so we can buy what we’ve always had, what we came into this world with and what alone we’ll leave it with. “Oh that government, they’ll put a tax on air next,” we grumble, not realizing that we already pay enormous “taxes” for what rightfully belongs to us free of charge.
Restoring “lost” peace is rather quick and simple. And costs nothing. Old Osho recommended “returning” to the state in which we spent our first nine months of existence, hanging upside down and listening to the monotonous bubbling of liquids. But I think, after several decades have passed, it would be rather difficult to remember how exactly we felt there and in what psychological state we hung, so as to just take and remember everything. So it’s enough to remember the last occasion when we felt peace, wholeness, relaxation and… simply begin feeling the same thing. To notice that although instead of an ocean before your eyes there’s a wallpapered room wall, instead of a palm tree a leaning floor lamp, and instead of a chaise under your rear a stool, that feeling is still accessible and achievable to you, when tension leaves even the smallest muscle, when all worries begin to seem distant and trivial, when attention begins to wander through boundless peace, and a light Buddha smile illuminates the face. You just need to want it, you just need to make a little effort and grasp what is already yours.
So have a peaceful and blissful Sunday :-)
