On Peace

Years ago, while travelling in London and in urgent need, I stumbled into an underground toilet at the University of London. There I read some graffiti that has stayed with me ever since. Chiselled into the wood of the booth were the words “Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity”. This struck me forcibly at the time, and the sentiment still rings true. This journal entry is about trying to observe the processes related to peace within myself; its creation, maintenance and destruction.

Today, we are faced with overwhelming and terrifying issues: climate change, species extinction, rising sea levels, refugee tides of humanity, drought and falling food production. In response, we often feel a massive cognitive dissonance, and so disconnect from our feeling nature, or feel angry and helpless. From this state, we may feel the need to ‘fight for peace’. This contradictory intention is clearly self-defeating. No amount of struggle, either inner or outer, can create peace.

Peace comes from within; no external condition can create lasting peace. Peace is a sign of higher consciousness, that we are aligned with universal purpose or divine will. During a recent experience of conscious awakening, the first sign I received that I was changing was a profound sense of peace that would steal over me. My soul felt at rest. I kept saying to myself “there is nothing that needs to be done”. Everything that was, just felt right. This was in marked contrast to a seeping sense of anxiety that I’d been accustomed to waking with each morning. I had received a medical diagnosis of atrial fibrillation, a heart that would not keep pace with the energy demands of even my quite modest lifestyle. I’d had to abandon the music degree, which was meant to be the fulfilment of a lifetime dream. Now I couldn’t focus or maintain the concentration necessary to publicly perform. 

My sense of identity was lost and adrift, I no longer felt like the captain of my own soul. Life felt like an unresolved question in search of an answer. There was a sense of a gnawing lack; a missing purpose that was needing to be fulfilled. Each morning, my mind would keep touching this search for purpose and meaning. So, this quiet warmth, this sense that all was well that crept over me like a cat settling in front of a fire, was something completely new. I’d been a very goal driven person, focussed on outcomes and achievements, not on process or being. There was always somewhere to be arrived at, something to be achieved. Now, I was happy to just sit; notice the feeling of sun on my skin, sip at a cup of tea while marvelling at the unseen wind moving the branches of the trees.

Over the weeks, that extraordinary sense of conscious awakening faded, and I realized that I needed a practice to help me maintain this sense of inner peace. It wasn’t something that I could take for granted. I’d subsequently read in the writings of Paramahansa Yogananda that the experience of inner peace is one of the first signs of the presence of God inhabiting the soul, the “peace of God that passeth all understanding”. At that time, I’d professed a deep atheism, and maintained a hard-headed scientific rationalism. So, it was quite a struggle to accept that I was experiencing something divine. For a while, I played the ‘substitution game’, so instead of saying ‘God’, I’d say ‘the Presence’ or ‘the Higher Self’ or ‘awakened consciousness’. But that seemed in the end like intellectual cowardice, so I swallowed my intellectual pride, and started calling that sense of unitive one-ness ‘God’.

During that awakening experience, my breathing, of its own volition, became extremely long and slow, for hours at a time. I’d know about pranayama, the yogic technique of breathing. I found that slowing the breath and paying very close attention to its movement in and out, recreated this sense of inner peace. Subsequently, I learned the Self Realization Fellowship technique of using a mantra (Hong Sau) with the breath. This became an effective tool at establishing inner peace. As my mind quietened, my breath seemed to expand my being, my sense of self grew larger and more diffuse, and I would feel that joyful seeping sense of peace flooding my soul. In meditation, I find I can now establish a connection with the presence, with a feeling of love and a continuity of being that goes far beyond myself. It seems expansive, spacious and universal. Flowing from this is a sense of peace, a right-ness with the world. I can feel open-hearted, and compassion can flow from One-ness and fill the void of the world.

And then, as I open my eyes and go about navigating the ‘real world’, peace can leak away, inattentive moment by inattentive moment. So, I’ve been watching for the drips, the small punctures where peace drains silently into the dry sands of our everyday existence. I notice them aplenty. As I suspected, it’s the small things indeed. It’s the askance glance at my wife as she does something that’s triggered my irritability hundreds of times before. It’s the passing scowl at the motorist that speeds up to prevent me from merging peacefully into his lane. It’s the muttered profanity directed almost unconsciously at some-one who had inconvenienced me in some trivial small way. I think peace leaks away in these small acts of unkindness, un-thoughtfulness or small mindedness. In these small moments, my connection and union with the divine leaks into the dryness of isolated experience. 

My current practice is to attempt to notice these small trivial lapses and repair them by chanting ‘peace, peace, peace’, restoring the calm connectedness and maintaining my equanimity. I ask myself, what would it be like if I could maintain that state indefinitely? How much more courage would I have to truly comprehend and appreciate the ‘big issues’, if I could stay centred in my heart, and not lose it over the ‘small stuff’? If we could maintain our individual sense of peace through mindfulness, I think that feeling of peace might spread out like a ripple, accelerating the development of collective higher consciousness. Perhaps if we can align with our own universal nature and experience inner peace, then that common purpose may assist in healing Gaia and the planetary consciousness.