Where to Find Lasting Peace

Every single phenomenal experience you have is a passing wave in the ocean of awareness.

Each moment is fresh and fleeting, a spontaneous happening that will never be relived again.

If you seek peace in phenomena, you’ll never find it - impermanence is their very nature, and the same wave never arises twice from the ocean. To cling on to phenomenal experience in the hope of lasting peace is the root of our suffering and will only lead to a tumultuous life governed by fear, sorrow, and anxiety. So instead of clinging on to fleeting experiences, live them fully without attachment. Let go of what was, for your resistance to the present is born out of a desire to relive the past. Embrace every moment with arms wide open no matter the difficulty of your external circumstances.

All phenomenal experiences appear within a constant background: a rainbow appears in the ever-present blue sky; a movie plays on the ever-present screen; music emerges from the ever-present backdrop of silence. Similarly, the perceptions of your experience appear within the ever-present luminosity of awareness. However, unlike the sky, screen, or absence of noise, this background of awareness cannot be perceived as an object because it is the reality which perceives all objects. Even though you cannot “see” awareness in the same way you can “see” a thought or feeling, you know fully well that it is real because being aware is the most intimate aspect of your entire experience.

Let’s take a step back for a second and suspend all of our assumptions about the nature of awareness so we can logically step through this train of thought. You know from your direct experience that awareness is that which perceives all - every thought, feeling, emotion, bodily sensation, worldly object, and more appear within it - and you have never experienced a perception in the absence of awareness. You might argue that you feel as if your awareness exists in your head behind your eyes, and that it looks out through windows to see a world of physical objects. And fair enough, it really does feel that way. But if you pay close attention, you will notice that the perception of existing behind the eyes appears within awareness. And if that appears within awareness, then awareness cannot be that. So if no object of perception resides outside of awareness, then awareness must necessarily be devoid of objective qualities like shape, size, and colour; otherwise, there must be something else to perceive awareness as an object. And if awareness is formless, then it is unchanging, timeless, and imperturbable. Amidst the storm of thoughts, feelings, emotions, and other phenomenal experiences, awareness remains untouched by the chaos.

If this is true, then peace is always here; it is not a transient experience, but rather the very foundation upon which our phenomenal experience is built upon. So when the going gets wild, feel through experience to rediscover the transparent background that has always been here; that unchanging stillness that you know so intimately but have overlooked all this time. Penetrate the chaotic waves on the surface to rest as the depths of the ocean, the birthplace and graveyard of all phenomenal experiences, for the ocean itself is never perturbed by its own movement.

It’s okay for your attention to float back up to the surface and be enamoured by experience - after all, you’ve been practising this habit for a lifetime. When you notice yourself falling back into old patterns, simply feel through the object once more into the depth of this moment and relax. As you rest more and more as your natural state of open awareness, you slowly erode your habitual pattern of identifying with the content of your experience to discover the freedom that is always here.

This is the peace you’ve been looking for all this time, only you’ve been seeking what you already carry in your pocket; all you have to do is stop and see that it’s already here.