Not only is a life of perfect peace possible…
Peace is, in fact, the actual reality within which I live - it’s just hard to experience when I fail to see what’s in the way of my ability to experience it: the past and the future.
Finding peace is a bit like balancing a pencil on its tip - which appears to be impossible until I remove past and future as factors.
Remove past and future and a pencil balanced on its tip is a pencil balanced on its tip. Period.
Same for peace. This razor thin moment is always peaceful unless I trouble myself with stories of what has been and what is coming.
“Okay, that’s cute but I can’t remove the past and future. They’re real!”
Oh really? Where is the past? Where is the future? Besides your mind?
If past and future are real, please go into your past and paint real object red. Go into the future and shake hands with your real future self. You can’t? You can only do it in your imagination? Why? Because past and future are not real. Past and future are imagination happening NOW. They can only be engaged now and they only affect now.
So if I want to remove the effect of a past or a future on this moment, I can recognize them for what they are and let them go. And when I do, a pencil standing on its point is a pencil standing on its point. It wasn’t anything and it isn’t becoming anything, it just is. This is the true reality of both pencils and peace without my imagining a past and future onto it.
When there is no past and no future there is just what is. And what is is always peaceful. Perfect presence in the now never falters. Because it can’t. It doesn’t have the room.
Every now is perfect peace. And what IS is always now.
All “faltering” happens outside the now, when I let imagination run and then believe its stressful, imaginary stories of “before” and “after.” That’s the only way I ever lose peace.
And all that’s necessary to return to peace is to live fully in the here and now, where nothing ever was and nothing ever will be and everything just is.
And when I do, the result of that peace is total freedom to be, and in that freedom, total love for what is, without reservation.
Jesus called this “Eternal Life.” Lao Tsu called it “The Tao.” Buddhists call it “Non-attachment” or “Presence.” Yogis call it “Mindfulness.” Eckhart Tolle calls it “The Power of Now.” Byron Katie calls it “Reality.” They didn’t invent it. They’re all just pointing to the same state of being (which is not a state at all, but prior to “states”) that is independent of our stories, a reality we release into whenever we can live in and love what IS.
I’m in love for the first time
Don’t you know it’s gonna last
It’s a love that lasts forever
It’s a love that has no past
- The Beatles