Inner Peace II
We can say that we are at peace when our awareness becomes a mirror-like surface of a vast lake which reflects its surroundings in the smallest detail without being in the least troubled by it. The key here is that the quality of that surface has to be disconnected from what the surroundings are. Most spiritual traditions tell us this, but the way to achieve it is left to each and every one to figure out. Just by saying that we kind of understand what the destination may be doesn’t really get us there…
One way to look at things is to examine what creates the ripples on the surface of the lake. One set of challenges comes from the left side of our subtle system. First is the wind of desire. The harder it blows, the surface of the lake becomes completely unsettled and it cannot reflect anything at all, it becomes completely involved in the wind effect, the awareness becomes filled with our desire. Then there are our emotional attachments. They are like stones that we throw in the lake as they come into our awareness again and again. Depending on the size, they have a larger or smaller effect on the clarity of the reflection and the time it takes to settle the surface again. Our conditionings are another obstacle - as if we were always busy reshaping the shoreline to some plan we have in our head and practically never allowing the landscape to come to its natural restful condition.
There are also disturbances coming from our right side and they have somewhat different ways of affecting the reflecting quality of the lake. Pride is like fog above the lake, may look attractive from a distance but one can only see the fog, with hardly any lake or reflection visible. Aggressive, egoistical behaviour and the arrogance that comes with it can heat up our being and eventually the mirror of our awareness disappears completely. The lake is all dried out by the scorching heat and in the parched soil underneath nothing but the signature of the heat itself remains. And then there is the vanity that manifests like an algal bloom, insidiously taking over our awareness - using the whole lake for its own nourishment. Thus any reflection is in small and incomplete bits and no true picture of the surroundings can emerge.
In Sanskrit the process of freeing one’s attention from all those disturbances is called as “chitta nirodha” - which can be translated as “watching the attention”. But if the attention is the watching instrument itself, how can it be watched ? The answer lies in the nature of our pure Self, which is the highest witness, the only one capable of witnessing our own attention. We have to start looking through the eyes of that Self and, through progressive control, the stillness comes naturally with the dual effect of inner peace and clarity of awareness. This is what cultivation of Self Realization brings - and it is an immense gift that is so needed today.