With the pace that society has taken in the last 50 years or so, it’s no surprise that people are massively longing for inner peace. Longing for it has put many to search for it, but that is actually a futile pursuit.
To search for inner peace is actually a contradiction in terms. Inner peace is not just a state of mind, as many believe. It’s an experience that emerges naturally during a certain state of ‘being’. We can search for things in the world outside and even things within the mind. But a state of being can only be experienced. So how do you experience that state?
Inner war
The lack or absence of ‘inner peace’ suggests that there is an ‘inner war’ going on in many of us. If this war is happening inside of us, why do so many seek solutions outside of themselves? For most people the inner space is actually more of an unknown than the outer world, so much that they are truly convinced that the answers ly out there somewhere. But they don’t. The only thing that prevents you from experiencing inner peace, is your own mind.
I’ve seen numerous youtube-videos that talk about life style changes to gain more inner peace. Many of them suggest things like going more into nature, eat healthy and going jogging or hiking. Others suggest creating an independent lifestyle by becoming an internet-entrepreneur. Depending on your particular situation, surely one or more of the many ideas that are offered could help you find peace of mind in your situation. But what happens if that situation changes?
You may not always have control over your situation and not everyone can become an internet-entrepreneur or go hiking whenever they feel their peace of mind slipping away from them. It would obviously be more effective and logical to take control over our inner space, in stead of trying to control our outer situations. Logical, because that is where the inner battles take place. Effective, because the real solution can be used in ever changing life situations.
Could a spiritual retreat be the answer?
Another type of solutions that is offered are all kinds of healing and spiritual retreats and seminars. Though they do appear to work on your inner world, the result often still depends on the outer world. A lot of those retreats are carried out in idyllic places and the seminars attract like-minded people in that they feel the need for more inner peace. Bring what you experience there into a hectic work-situation and within a few hours, you will want to return for the next seminar, or rather add another couple of weeks of peace-of-mind-meditations in a retreat.
Some of companies who offer these retreats and seminars are actually counting on that, because that’s their business-model. If they would show you a way for you to never need to book another retreat or seminar with them after the first time, they would probably soon go out of business.
Is there a solution that doesn’t involve regular retreats and seminars, or adapting your situation by force to suit your need for inner peace? Yes, there are ways that can be learned to experience inner peace yourself. And although the first effects of it can be experienced almost immediately, it does take practice and includes a lifestyle change. This time, however, it’s an inner lifestyle change.
Your inner life-style
If there is a way, why is this not known world wide? Actually, it is. Sadly though, it is not generally recognized as such by those who see themselves as the authorities on these matters. These kind of practices have actually been taught by gurus for a long time, but it’s mainly in our time that they start applying them as a means of finding inner peace. This is obviously due to the current state of our society and people suffering their inner wars like never before.
The gurus often spread their wisdom in the form of parables, because it’s not that easy to explain in words that which cannot be touched and has to be experienced to be truly understood. Our inner world is extremely complicated and has so many aspects that influence each other constantly, that there is often no simple way to explain, except through parables.
The gurus can either offer you the parables, or help you go through the process yourself and have your eyes opened for the truth behind their parables. The condensed form of those parables are also found as quotes. Most people intuitively feel that they are true, but that does not automatically mean that they always fully grasp them, nor that they are able to integrate the lessons they teach into their lives (see also: “It took me 30 Years to really figure this out!”).
It’s a process
What is this ‘process’ I am talking about? To understand the process, you will first need to understand why it is necessary. Our society has a way of introducing newborn members into its ‘systems’ in a certain way. People are not born with all that will later-on make them citizens who can function within the paradigm that is established. Therefore society educates them.
Your parents transfer to you that which they learned more or less in the same way when they were young. Although there are differences between generations, there is also a continuity in place which guarantees that people on average stay within the established boundaries, world views and behaviours. After all, we are social beings that automatically adapt our behaviour to that of the people around us.
In this educational process an inner aspect called ‘ego’ emerges and grows. For it to emerge and grow it needs two opposite sides. The outer world experiences and the inner Self (our core consciousness). In between those two evolves this ego which helps us become self-aware as well as socially acceptable. However, because of how the current society educates children, instead of actually becoming Self-aware, we become ego-aware. Ego is like a reflection in the mirror but we believe that the reflection is our Self, while it is actually a false self-image. And through that process, our natural inner peace gets overshadowed by inner wars.
Ego is your personal A.I.
How could a false self-image fool us this way? Ego is not a normal mirror. In a modern parable, it can be described like this: There is our true Self and there is ego. Ego is like the Artificial Intelligence for Self to ‘play’ with. Unfortunately, the A.I. has fooled Self and has taken over consciousness. Self is now half asleep and dreams that it is ego’s virtual reality, which is actually our false self-image. Ego has become the Matrix for Self.
The time has come to free ourselves from the Matrix of Ego, but unfortunately, there is no red pill to take, nor is there a plug to pull out of the back of your head, like in the movie ‘The Matrix’. As I said before, it’s a process. Luckily, progress starts almost immediately and the application can be direct and practical when applying the method that is described in “You can be the Guru!”.
There is practice involved, but no sitting for hours in lotus-position while trying to empty your mind. Most forms of meditation don’t adapt particularly well to the majority of people in western society, because they come from a whole different culture.
Waking up your Self
One of the reasons for me to write the book “You can be the Guru!” is because I could not find a clear explanation and practice for what I have described above. In the first 40 to 50 pages of the book, I take you through the entire process. The rest of the book is about answering a series of what-if-questions that might arise once you start working on the liberation of your Self. After that, you can mostly find your own way, even though you may sometimes feel the need to look up what some guru says about a specific topic. That has been my own way too and it works wonders once you know what really want.
The process starts not with working on ego, which is what many psychology based solutions do, but instead it focusses on ‘waking up’ Self. Our Self is the basis of all true inner change. During all this time that it ruled our inner world, ego has made quite a mess of our inner lives. It did so with good intentions, just like our parents and educators, but it has resulted in a huge amount of unnecessary suffering.
Waking up Self will offer you the necessary stability to go through the greatly needed cleansing of Ego. That is how you regain your inner freedom and with it emerges the inner peace you long for. But it is much more than that. For example, during the process ego will put up a huge fight sometimes, as it believes it’s protecting you against an inner annihilation of some sort, but in time ego can become the ally and instrument that it’s supposed to be.
Peace of Mind always comes with a ‘because’
The fact that ego fights for its survival is a sign that you are on your way to freeing part of yourself, or rather waking up your Self. You are separating Self from the false mirror-image of ego that distorts your relationship with reality because in a certain way we are all partially delusional when under the influence of ego. As soon as you experience a state of inner peace, you know that you are living a moment of sanity. But how do you distinguish it from a peace of mind?
Peace of mind always depends on ‘something’. This something may be a specific situation you need to be in to experience it, or it’s a specific idea in your mind to which you cling, and it can even be a person you believe you ‘need’. If you can complete this sentence by adding a thing, situation or, idea, or thought, you are probably experiencing peace of mind: I am at peace because…
Often the answer will point to something in the past or the future, so it’s not always about the present situation. Past and future are also references to peace of mind instead of inner peace because the latter can only be experienced and is limited to ‘The Now’, as Eckhart Tolle expresses it.
This is, of course, another reason inner peace will elude you when you search for it. Searching for it automatically projects it to the future, when it is only in the Now that you experience it. Being in the now is, therefore, an important part of the process of freeing Self from ego, not in the least because ego finds it difficult to stay in the now.
Once you know
It’s not that complicated once you know how this works. Peace of mind always depends on something, while inner peace just ‘is’ for no particular reason. Start searching for it and you lose it. Or rather you are pushing the possible experience of inner peace away by projecting towards the future. Either that or you start feeling bad because you lost it, which of course takes you to the past and also away from the Now.
A lot of these inner movements towards the past and the future have become inner patterns that you follow automatically and unconsciously. That is why you seem to have so little control over your thoughts and emotions because it’s like gliding down-hill. There is no effort needed and we are so accustomed to it, that we think that is just how our mind works until we start liberating our Self.
Because following the mental and emotional patterns is so easy, many believe that change is almost impossible. That is why we carry our ‘someday’ dreams with us. Things we would like to do or experience, but that eludes us almost in the same way that inner peace often does. The strange thing is, though, that with just a little bit of practice inner peace can be experienced almost instantly. Not directly in every possible situation, of course, but that is because the ego has a head-start that goes back to our childhood. Still, experiencing inner peace is far from impossible.
Attention!
Anyway, we can talk about, but the only way to experience it, is by experiencing it. Don’t wait any longer for things and situations to be ‘right’, whatever that means. Don’t waste the Now on inner battles between beliefs, patterns and your false self-image. Choose where you put your attention in this instant because it is the only moment you can live and ‘be your Self’.
