The reason that we don't have peace is because of the way in which our present minds view the experiences we have with others and within ourselves. Our present nature takes everything personally. In fact, most of us don't know how to do anything other than to take something personally.
We are created to be able to see that we live in a personal world even as we live in what could be called an impersonal world. The objective world of forces, of energies, of laws, is impersonal. Understood properly, these infinite eternal laws belong to a greater person. It could be said that they belong to who you truly are.
And it isn't until a person discovers who they truly are within this greater impersonal person that it becomes possible for that person to start having a relationship with others (and with life) that allows them to see both worlds and their activities at once. In the observation -- the ability to be a witness of the other world, the impersonal world -- you realize what just happened, what it means, and all the things connected with what you have to do when things don't go right.
Here's an example of what I'm talking about. There are great, beautiful, intelligent, cooperative, collaborative forces. These great forces are often understood by our present mind as being opposites to one another. Have you ever felt a black hole forming in you? It starts with one little thought: "I'm not getting any younger" or "How come she looks so good? Aren't we the same age?" or "I never amounted to what I wanted to be" or "I'm still the same person that teacher thought I would be"... a black hole from one little thought. While much of this can be generated by a mind unconscious to its activity, merely seeking stimulation within itself, oftentimes thoughts and feelings appear in us as a result of a certain unseen stimulation connected to a broader set of forces. As powers pass through us, parallels (similarities) to them appear within ourselves.
When this black hole starts, we begin to feel a great contraction. Life seems to be shrinking, possibilities diminishing. On the other hand, there can be moments when life is expanding: "Wow. Look at all the marvelous things that are happening in my life. There are opportunities galore. My heart is singing! All is joie, joie everywhere." And what we don't understand is that neither the expansive life nor the contracting life is our life.
We are instruments, and we reflect these great polarized forces. Everything expands and contracts, pulsates. This is a principle, a cardinal rule in the universe, and it applies to all things and their relationship with all things. You don't know that you expand and contract on a moment to moment, day to day, year to year, cycle to cycle, life to life basis. All you know is that you resist the contraction, and you try to ride the expansion. And the more you try to ride the expansion, the more painful is the contraction phase that must follow. There is no escaping the inevitability of fulfillment and emptiness, of expansion and contraction, of the pulsation -- on and off -- of life itself.
When a man or woman lives (as you presently do) completely unaware of these great movements of expansion and contraction that are taking place in you, then every movement that moves through you is taken as something personal. It's identified with and resisted when you start feeling lost and going nowhere, and it's taken as personal when you start to think you're really succeeding and you're going to achieve everything that you've dreamed of. And you can't understand that both experiences are merely your mind draping these archetypal energies with conditions that you are familiar with and are thereby deriving a sense of your contentment or dissatisfaction through their movement.
Even the solstices and the equinoxes represent contraction and expansion phases beginning and ending. You can look everywhere and see with all things that everything is doing that. Only human beings are asleep to the fact that it is very natural to withdraw. It's very natural to feel nothing, to go through emptiness, to go through no direction at all... just as it's very natural to go through being filled with all the required energies that make possible whatever it is you're trying to achieve. But when you take the energies that you're able to achieve things through as being your energies, then you suffer all the greater when -- through the natural course of things -- they change their direction and begin to contract. It's the same with health. You can't find any example in human life where, depending on character and quality of essence, an individual is not the direct expression of these opposing forces that work together for a greatness and a goodness that cannot be conceived of by the individual identified with either movement.
Learn to see these things. Learn to want to know more about the moment you're in instead of letting your conditioned mind tell you what the moment you're in means.
