The Golden Thread

The Experience of Being That Runs Unbroken Through Your Life

Your being is the one thing in your experience that never changes. Before you know your name, before you know anything about yourself at all, you know that you are. This simple, ordinary, intimate fact of being is the golden thread running through every moment of your life, connecting every experience into one. And it has two tastes: peace on the inside, love on the outside.

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What is the most essential thing you know about yourself? The very first thing you know is: I am.

Before you know anything else about yourself, you know that you are.

Before you know your name, before you know that you are a man or a woman, before you know even that you are a person, before you know that you are reading this or sitting in a chair at home, before you know that you are a mother or a father or a husband or a wife or a partner or a friend, you simply know that you are. Nothing special, just the ordinary, intimate, familiar experience of being.

Your thoughts, your feelings, the sensations of your body, your experience of the world, your memories: everything else you experience comes after this experience of being. And the experience of being is the only stable element of your experience. Thoughts, images, feelings, memories, sensations and perceptions arise, exist briefly and vanish. Only the experience of being remains.

Being is like the invisible golden thread that runs through your life. Every thought, feeling, sensation, perception and memory is like an individual bead on a necklace, and your being is the golden thread that runs through all the beads, through all the experiences, connecting them. Without the golden thread of being there would only be innumerable disparate experiences, like countless beads without a thread. What is it that converts numerous beads into one necklace? It is the thread on which they are strung.

What makes you feel that you are always the same person, that you have had one life rather than numerous experiences? What is the one thing that runs unbroken through your life? The experience of being, the awareness of being. You don’t derive your conviction of being the same person from your thoughts, which are always changing, or from your feelings or relationships. You derive it from this golden thread of being that runs through your life.

It is from being that you derive your sense of yourself, and your being is prior to all experience. It is present throughout every experience and remains after every experience has disappeared. It is the constant factor in all changing experience.

The purpose of all the great religious and spiritual traditions is to take you, one way or another, more or less directly, to your being, and to recognise, to taste, its nature. All that is necessary is to take one small step back from the content of experience to the simple experience of being.

Being has two qualities, if they can be called qualities: one in relation to your inner experience and one in relation to your outer experience. On the inside, being is experienced as peace. It is not affected by the content of experience. Being stands in the same relationship to experience as a screen to the film that plays on it, intimately one with it yet unaffected by it. Peace is the taste of being in relation to your inner experience.

In relation to your outer experience, being is experienced as love. By ‘love’, I don’t mean an emotion. I mean the fact that being is shared, that there is one being that appears as many things or many people. This recognition of shared being is the experience you know as love.

Peace on the inside, love on the outside. These are the two tastes of being, the two ways that being shines in your human experience.

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Peace on the inside, love on the outside – what changes within us changes how we meet the world. If you would like to explore that recognition directly, Living in Peace, Living as Peace is an invitation to discover, and return to, the peace that is already here.

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