Make Awareness Your Home
The Place of Peace You Have Never Left
In times of unusual turbulence, the search for peace intensifies. You look to your circumstances, to events, to the resolution of conflicts that seem always just out of reach. Or you conclude, not unreasonably, that the state of the world makes a life of genuine peace simply unavailable, that to feel settled inside while so much is unsettled outside would be a form of denial.
There is another possibility. The peace you are seeking is already here, the very fact of your own being, present now as it has always been, untouched by every circumstance that has ever passed through it.
You are effortlessly aware.
There are thoughts, memories, feelings, sensations of your body and perceptions of the world, and you are aware of them all. Being aware is your most intimate, most immediate experience.
You are aware before you are aware of anything. A thought comes and goes, the feeling rises and falls, but the simple fact of being aware is already there, underneath it all. And you are not doing anything to be aware. Being aware is not an activity of your mind or body in the way that thinking, breathing and walking are activities. being aware is your natural, primary condition – simple, ordinary, intimate, familiar experience of just being aware.
Usually you overlook this. You are so absorbed in what you are aware of – the thoughts, images, sensations and perceptions – that the fact of being aware slips into the background. In meditation or prayer you simply relax the focus of your attention away from the content of experience and sink back into the simple experience of being aware.
Being aware underlies and pervades all experience, as a screen underlies and pervades a movie. The movie is always changing while the screen remains the same. In the same way, the content of experience is always changing while awareness itself remains the same. The experience of being aware is always the same experience, if we can even call it an experience.
Nothing affects awareness. Nothing that happens in experience changes or hurts it, just as nothing that happens in a movie affects the screen on which it plays. And this means you do not have to work at purifying awareness, developing it or stilling it. It is already such. It is already at peace. It is already unaffected by everything that passes through it.
When you derive your sense of yourself from the content of your experience, you feel that you are always changing. Your experience flows between happiness and sorrow, pleasure and pain. But when you take your sense of yourself from what is essential to you, from being aware itself, you are at peace. Nothing disturbs you. Nothing upsets you.
This is not to become impervious or insensitive to what is happening in your life or in the lives of those around you. Your sense of yourself simply rests in your being, and it is always peaceful there.
Be sensitive to any impulse to do something, to practise something, to find something, to understand something, especially any impulse to become enlightened. There is nothing wrong with these impulses, but they belong to your mind. They are the mind’s activities. They are the content of the movie. They pertain to the movie and not to the screen, to the mind and not to yourself. Awareness itself is at peace, fulfilled, needing nothing, wanting nothing, seeking nothing, resisting nothing.
The thought ‘I want to be enlightened’ never arises on behalf of awareness. It arises on behalf of a self that has taken its identity from the mind or the body.
You may already be familiar with relaxing the focus of your attention and returning to the feeling of being aware, visiting awareness from time to time. But don’t just visit awareness from time to time. Make awareness your home. Make it your identity, the place you stand in the face of experience, the place you live.
The activities of the mind – thinking, feeling, sensing, seeing, hearing – and the activities of the body – walking, talking, eating – these are what you do. They are not what you are. What you are is the simple fact of being, of being aware.
This is your home, the place where you stand. It is always here, and always at peace.
Living in Peace, Living as Peace is a guided meditation for those who sense that the peace they are looking for cannot be found ‘out there’ – and would like to discover where it actually is. Available here.
Thank you
Thank you ☀️