It is obvious right now to anyone not living with their head in the sand that we are currently experiencing an escalation in all levels of our human experience. Each day, somewhere in the world, there is another earthquake, flood, mining disaster, political expose, financial crisis, public revelation of some form of unethical behavior, and massing civil unrest. Whole countries are splitting at the seams and resorting to violent retribution.
If we examine our immediate environment closely we shall witness the evidence of this shake-up right within our midst. What is happening upon the macrocosm of the world’s stage is also manifesting as the content of the conversation upon everyone’s tongues. Conflict and chaos in one form or another is now on the rise. Great change is afoot.
It is crucial right now to therefore to pay homage to an experience which appears to be taking a back seat while all of this unfolds: Peacefulness. Right now there is nothing more important than our daily remembering that the experience of peacefulness is a personally accomplished responsibility – not a right handed to us by any political, economic, social, or religious organization. The experience of peacefulness is always first encountered as a personally felt state, and only once personally felt, is it then radiated as a collective experience. Authentically felt-peace emanates only from within.
One of the greatest deceptions we play upon ourselves, individually and collectively, is our putting forward the notion that, ‘we need to make peace’. Have you noticed that nothing we have done throughout our entire documented human history in an attempt to ‘make peace’ has ever worked? This is because the very idea that ‘peace is something that can be made’, whether by war, discussion, debate, agreement, or signing of treatise, is deceptive and therefore misleading.
Any country or organization who claims to have accomplished peace through such means has in time demonstrated that all that was accomplished was ‘temporarily enforced control’, resulting only in people living for a time in quiet desperation and subdued states of passive aggressiveness, before discontentedly rising up again.
This is because peace cannot be ‘made’ – not in The Middle East, South Africa, Indonesia, or anywhere. Peace already exists within the experiential fabric of Creation. The felt-vibration we humans experience as peacefulness was created long before we showed up and will exist long after we have been replaced by another dominant species. The vibration of peace is everywhere. Peace is available even in the midst of war-torn countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan, and any other region currently enveloped in human conflict.
The removal of conflicted humans from any environment immediately reveals an obvious radiance of felt-peacefulness. Just because conflicted human behavior obscures this resonance does not mean it no longer exists.
We only continually enter behaviors and conversations intended to ‘try to make peace’ because we do not realize what authentic peace is. Because of our current states of physical, mental, and emotional turmoil, we do not realize authentic peacefulness as an experience we only ever feel personally. Instead we assume it to be some arrangement we make happen collectively, by agreement. This is not true. Peacefulness is ours to personally feel in any moment we choose, because it is a resonance that envelopes us wherever we are. However, it is up to us to choose to feel it.
Right now, in this moment, anyone reading this piece of writing may feel peaceful – if it is chosen. It is not an experience that someone has to organize for us through debate, discussion, or agreement. No other group has to be subdued or relocated for us to be able to feel peaceful. Such notions are ongoing detractions from the authentic realization of peacefulness. We do not have to make peace with anyone - we have to become aware of it as a feeling within our own heart, and then choose to occupy this awareness, no matter what.
We even express the obviousness of this truth within our language. We do not say, “I think peace” or “I do peace”. We say, “I feel peace”. And because no one – no peer, politician, priest, profiteer, parent, or partner has the capacity to feel anything on our behalf – no one is therefore responsible for our feeling, or not feeling, peaceful. Peacefulness is a felt-experience already given freely to every human. However it is our responsibility to choose to enter and contain this felt-awareness.
This of course is where it always becomes sticky. Peace is uncompromising. Either we choose to feel it – or we choose to feel something else. We cannot feel peaceful AND simultaneously entertain the feeling of being right and having our own way. We cannot feel peaceful AND simultaneously feel vengeful. We cannot feel peaceful AND simultaneously feel justified in having ‘the last say’. We cannot feel peaceful AND in any way behave hurtfully toward another human being or living creature. We cannot feel peaceful AND simultaneously enforce our will upon others. We cannot feel peaceful AND simultaneously have our religion be the only right way to commune with whatever God is for us. We cannot feel peaceful AND simultaneously take a side in any conflict.
Peacefulness also requires willing release. The price of feeling peaceful NOW - in this moment - is always determined by our willingness to integrate wounds perpetrated in the past. This is because anything happening within our life experience right now that inhibits us from entering the felt-awareness of peacefulness always has to do with something that happened in the past.
Right now, in this moment, if we choose it, we are welcome to feel peaceful.
The real question we are to ask ourselves is: “Do we really seek peace?” This may appear as an obvious question with an equally obvious answer – but it is not. Most of us may immediately answer that we do choose peacefulness, but when push comes to shove, we also feel justified in choosing to feel right, feel avenged, or feel in control - instead of feeling peaceful.
The reality is that no one stands between us and the feeling of peacefulness. We can experience this feeling right now. Peacefulness is a felt-resonance already created by whatever God is for us, not something that will one day be made by us humans. However, do we get up each day and choose to feel the peacefulness that is already created for us, or are we still mistakenly waiting for someone to ‘make peace happen on our behalf’?
Peacefulness only exists in the world when we choose to feel it right now within our own experience while we move through the world. There is no other way to encounter it authentically.
If we are not feeling peaceful right now, it is because we are not choosing to feel it. It is this simple. If we join the current flow of the masses and our personal experience deteriorates into escalating conflict, it is likely we are indignantly choosing to be right or to take a side in some ongoing human drama, rather than to feel peaceful. Remember the expression is, “Peace be with you”, not “Peace be with them”.
Remember also that being peaceful is not and never will be an experience realized as an organized group activity. It is always a choice made through embracing a mature level of personal responsibility. We cannot realize peace by voting it in, by enforcing it, by earning more money to afford it, or by taking sides to impose our version of the truth. We only receive a felt-awareness of it as a direct experience by consciously choosing to feel it and to live from within this felt-resonance as best we can throughout each day. If we do not personally choose to feel it, it does not enter our experience. Only when we choose it as “a feeling we consciously carry within our own heart” does it then radiate outwardly and impact the quality of our thinking and our doing.
Right now, as the masses of the world stumble unconsciously into escalating conflict and chaos, there is nothing more important that maintaining a personal awareness of what peacefulness really is. No one will pay us for being peaceful. No one will pat us on the back or write about our peacefulness in any journal. No one will give us The Peace Prize and hold a press conference about it. Authentic peacefulness will not become a news item in a world that still mistakenly believes ‘peace is something that has to be made’.
Peacefulness is a quiet, calm, chosen, felt-condition, resonating within the individual heart.
When we are able to awaken and enter each day remembering to choose to feel peaceful – even if only for parts of our day – then we are serving humanity by maintaining the clear light of sanity in the world when the masses are completely losing sight of it.
You are welcome to walk this day in peacefulness. Peacefulness is a gift of God’s Will to all, not the outcome of any human declaration. Its felt-resonance is a personal choice of the heart, not a political right accomplished through any organization.
Peace is available as an experience within you and me, right now. It is ours to choose. It always will be experienced only by choice.
If we examine our immediate environment closely we shall witness the evidence of this shake-up right within our midst. What is happening upon the macrocosm of the world’s stage is also manifesting as the content of the conversation upon everyone’s tongues. Conflict and chaos in one form or another is now on the rise. Great change is afoot.
It is crucial right now to therefore to pay homage to an experience which appears to be taking a back seat while all of this unfolds: Peacefulness. Right now there is nothing more important than our daily remembering that the experience of peacefulness is a personally accomplished responsibility – not a right handed to us by any political, economic, social, or religious organization. The experience of peacefulness is always first encountered as a personally felt state, and only once personally felt, is it then radiated as a collective experience. Authentically felt-peace emanates only from within.
One of the greatest deceptions we play upon ourselves, individually and collectively, is our putting forward the notion that, ‘we need to make peace’. Have you noticed that nothing we have done throughout our entire documented human history in an attempt to ‘make peace’ has ever worked? This is because the very idea that ‘peace is something that can be made’, whether by war, discussion, debate, agreement, or signing of treatise, is deceptive and therefore misleading.
Any country or organization who claims to have accomplished peace through such means has in time demonstrated that all that was accomplished was ‘temporarily enforced control’, resulting only in people living for a time in quiet desperation and subdued states of passive aggressiveness, before discontentedly rising up again.
This is because peace cannot be ‘made’ – not in The Middle East, South Africa, Indonesia, or anywhere. Peace already exists within the experiential fabric of Creation. The felt-vibration we humans experience as peacefulness was created long before we showed up and will exist long after we have been replaced by another dominant species. The vibration of peace is everywhere. Peace is available even in the midst of war-torn countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan, and any other region currently enveloped in human conflict.
The removal of conflicted humans from any environment immediately reveals an obvious radiance of felt-peacefulness. Just because conflicted human behavior obscures this resonance does not mean it no longer exists.
We only continually enter behaviors and conversations intended to ‘try to make peace’ because we do not realize what authentic peace is. Because of our current states of physical, mental, and emotional turmoil, we do not realize authentic peacefulness as an experience we only ever feel personally. Instead we assume it to be some arrangement we make happen collectively, by agreement. This is not true. Peacefulness is ours to personally feel in any moment we choose, because it is a resonance that envelopes us wherever we are. However, it is up to us to choose to feel it.
Right now, in this moment, anyone reading this piece of writing may feel peaceful – if it is chosen. It is not an experience that someone has to organize for us through debate, discussion, or agreement. No other group has to be subdued or relocated for us to be able to feel peaceful. Such notions are ongoing detractions from the authentic realization of peacefulness. We do not have to make peace with anyone - we have to become aware of it as a feeling within our own heart, and then choose to occupy this awareness, no matter what.
We even express the obviousness of this truth within our language. We do not say, “I think peace” or “I do peace”. We say, “I feel peace”. And because no one – no peer, politician, priest, profiteer, parent, or partner has the capacity to feel anything on our behalf – no one is therefore responsible for our feeling, or not feeling, peaceful. Peacefulness is a felt-experience already given freely to every human. However it is our responsibility to choose to enter and contain this felt-awareness.
This of course is where it always becomes sticky. Peace is uncompromising. Either we choose to feel it – or we choose to feel something else. We cannot feel peaceful AND simultaneously entertain the feeling of being right and having our own way. We cannot feel peaceful AND simultaneously feel vengeful. We cannot feel peaceful AND simultaneously feel justified in having ‘the last say’. We cannot feel peaceful AND in any way behave hurtfully toward another human being or living creature. We cannot feel peaceful AND simultaneously enforce our will upon others. We cannot feel peaceful AND simultaneously have our religion be the only right way to commune with whatever God is for us. We cannot feel peaceful AND simultaneously take a side in any conflict.
Peacefulness also requires willing release. The price of feeling peaceful NOW - in this moment - is always determined by our willingness to integrate wounds perpetrated in the past. This is because anything happening within our life experience right now that inhibits us from entering the felt-awareness of peacefulness always has to do with something that happened in the past.
Right now, in this moment, if we choose it, we are welcome to feel peaceful.
The real question we are to ask ourselves is: “Do we really seek peace?” This may appear as an obvious question with an equally obvious answer – but it is not. Most of us may immediately answer that we do choose peacefulness, but when push comes to shove, we also feel justified in choosing to feel right, feel avenged, or feel in control - instead of feeling peaceful.
The reality is that no one stands between us and the feeling of peacefulness. We can experience this feeling right now. Peacefulness is a felt-resonance already created by whatever God is for us, not something that will one day be made by us humans. However, do we get up each day and choose to feel the peacefulness that is already created for us, or are we still mistakenly waiting for someone to ‘make peace happen on our behalf’?
Peacefulness only exists in the world when we choose to feel it right now within our own experience while we move through the world. There is no other way to encounter it authentically.
If we are not feeling peaceful right now, it is because we are not choosing to feel it. It is this simple. If we join the current flow of the masses and our personal experience deteriorates into escalating conflict, it is likely we are indignantly choosing to be right or to take a side in some ongoing human drama, rather than to feel peaceful. Remember the expression is, “Peace be with you”, not “Peace be with them”.
Remember also that being peaceful is not and never will be an experience realized as an organized group activity. It is always a choice made through embracing a mature level of personal responsibility. We cannot realize peace by voting it in, by enforcing it, by earning more money to afford it, or by taking sides to impose our version of the truth. We only receive a felt-awareness of it as a direct experience by consciously choosing to feel it and to live from within this felt-resonance as best we can throughout each day. If we do not personally choose to feel it, it does not enter our experience. Only when we choose it as “a feeling we consciously carry within our own heart” does it then radiate outwardly and impact the quality of our thinking and our doing.
Right now, as the masses of the world stumble unconsciously into escalating conflict and chaos, there is nothing more important that maintaining a personal awareness of what peacefulness really is. No one will pay us for being peaceful. No one will pat us on the back or write about our peacefulness in any journal. No one will give us The Peace Prize and hold a press conference about it. Authentic peacefulness will not become a news item in a world that still mistakenly believes ‘peace is something that has to be made’.
Peacefulness is a quiet, calm, chosen, felt-condition, resonating within the individual heart.
When we are able to awaken and enter each day remembering to choose to feel peaceful – even if only for parts of our day – then we are serving humanity by maintaining the clear light of sanity in the world when the masses are completely losing sight of it.
You are welcome to walk this day in peacefulness. Peacefulness is a gift of God’s Will to all, not the outcome of any human declaration. Its felt-resonance is a personal choice of the heart, not a political right accomplished through any organization.
Peace is available as an experience within you and me, right now. It is ours to choose. It always will be experienced only by choice.
Article By: Michael Brown
