Peace

ZIKR LESSON. 9.11.07.

PEACE.

WE ARE ALWAYS PEACE. TO GET RID OF THE IDEA THAT WE ARE NOT PEACE IS ALL THAT IS REQUIRED.
Ramana Maharshi.

How do we achieve Peace?
Peace, like freedom, is a quality of the soul. And like all real spiritual qualities, it is given.
Most of us strive for peace thinking it can be attained. Outwardly we seek peace through the resolution of conflict. Inwardly we seek peace through inner work or spiritual practice. Resolving our inner conflicts we hope to find peace as the warring factions of our psyche come into balance. Through meditation we aspire to go beyond the activity of the mind to reach a deeper stillness. We might achieve some sense of peace through struggle and effort. But peace that is given has a different quality because it comes without effort. This peace is not a resolution of conflict, either outer or inner. It does not belong to the dimension of struggle, but to the dimension of the soul.
Lewellyn Vaughan- Lee.

If true peace is Divine and is bestowed then we only need to open ourselves to the Divine Presence.

If one's sight were keen, one would also see, by sitting in the solitary woods or by sitting in caves in the mountains, that they all have their prayer and their at-one-ment with God. Why do the great ones, the souls who do not find rest and peace in the midst of the world, go to the wilderness? It is in order to breathe the breath of peace and calm that comes to them in the heart of the wilderness.
H.I.K

Murshid is also saying that nature is at-one-ment with the Divine and therefore is the receptacle of Peace.


We have a tendency to discuss things but it should never become a hobby. No one attains peace by fighting.
H.I.K.

Because our culture has lost an understanding of the ways of grace, we identify peace with the resolution of struggle. But real peace cannot be born from conflict because it comes from a dimension of oneness.
L V-L.

Both are saying that struggle or confrontation is not the gateway to peace. Peace comes from a higher surrender. Knowing that there is an underlying unity behind all diversity one tries to pick out the similarities beyond the conflicts to weave the thread of wisdom’s oneness.

If there is no conflict to be resolved, no opposing parties to be brought into agreement, what is the nature of Peace?


What is the highest aim of the Sufi? The Sufi's highest aim is to probe the depth of life, that he or she might penetrate that veil which keeps one ignorant of one's life's secret. This attainment the Sufi considers his or her greatest happiness; this seeking is the Sufi's seeking for God; in this realization the Sufi realizes truth; and in this truth one finds the peace which is the yearning of every soul.
H.I.K

Murshid says that the true human being is one who penetrates the veil of duality to arrive at the secret of unity. The truth is the reconciliation of all opposites into the Divine Wholeness. This would mean moving beyond the conflict without struggling to necessarily resolve it on the surface, yet harmonizing it at a deeper level.

Just as real stillness is not the absence of activity but a quality of being, peace is not the absence of conflict but an inner energy that can flow into life. One can feel the inner peace of the soul in the presence of a spiritual master.
Peace is a quality of pure being, hidden within us. The peace that Christ left with his disciples, the peace "not as the world giveth", is in all of us.
L V-L.

The saints and sages spread their peace not only in the place where they sit, but even in the neighborhood where they dwell; the town or the country where they live is at peace, in accordance with the power of the vibrations they send out from their soul.
H.I.K.


We may enter this state of peace when we discover the core of our being as the Divine Self. This has been done by the Masters and Saints. And because life is vibration and peace is the energy of life therefore it spreads once it is discovered in man. Therefore this peace is given and yet not by the world…it is of heavenly origin and is made to rest in man by the gift of the Divine Spirit.

Peace is not a knowledge, peace is not a power, peace is not a happiness, but peace is all these; and, besides, peace is productive of happiness, peace inspires one with knowledge of the seen and unseen, and in peace is to be found the divine Presence. It is not the excited one who conquers in this continual battle of life;it is the peaceful one who tolerates all, who forgives all, who understands all, who assimilates all things.
H.I.K

Through the grace of the teacher we are given access to the peace of our own soul.
L V-L.

The Teacher is meant to realign us with our true Divine Nature and that is why the peace of the Soul is the gift of the teacher.


The limitation in our understanding of peace comes from our identification with one plane of reality. Human beings are multi-dimensional yet our collective consciousness has focused our attention on the plane of duality.
In the realm of opposites there will always be conflict, just as there will always be the primal opposition of light and dark.
L V-L.

Islam is the herald of the age of unity. That is why the synonym of Islam is Peace as it is Surrender. This peace is the result of the surrender of man’s habitual divisiveness and sense of duality.


The secret behind the whole manifestation is vibration, vibration which may be termed movement. It is the differences of vibration which, when divided by lines, form planes of existence, each plane being different in the rhythm of these vibrations. When we take life as a whole we can draw one line, the beginning and the end, or spirit and matter, or God and man. And we shall find that the rhythm which begins the line is free and without disturbance, and the rhythm which is felt at the end of this line is gross and disturbing. And these two rhythms may be named the life of sensation and the life of peace.
H.I.K

Murshid describes this complex idea with great simplicity. God is peace and man is disturbance as long as he remains separated from the point of his origin. Spirit is One and matter is diversification. When the diversification of matter moves towards the Spiritual Oneness its vibrations attain stillness. Peace is a state of being not an absence of activity. It is the same sea that is in motion on the surface and still in its depths. It is the same Reality that is Oneness and Peace and Harmony at the Divine peak and discord, diversity, and disturbance at the level of nasut. When Adam fell from Grace, he did not make a linear fall, but a fall in his understanding, in his consciousness. In his desire to see himself as the other who exists eternally with God, he made the fatal error of recognizing the duality which was a fault in perception. This is what evicted him from the state of eden into the world of conflict and hate. To recover the lost eden man only has to shift the perspective once again back to the right one.


These are two opposite things. The life of sensation gives a momentary joy; the life which is the first aspect of life gives peace and culminates in the everlasting peace. The joy, however great, is rising and falling; it must have its reaction. Besides, it depends upon sensation; and what does sensation depend upon? Sensation depends upon the outer life; there must be something besides you to cause the sensation. But peace is independently felt within oneself; it is not dependent upon the outer sensation. It is something that belongs to one, something that is one's own self.

If one were to ask someone who lives continually in a kind of excitement of worldly pleasures, whom Providence has granted all pleasures imaginable, if that person were asked, 'What do you wish besides all this that you experience?', he will say, 'To be left alone.' When madness comes, when he is out of balance, he will crave for sensation, but when that passion has gone, what he is longing for in reality is peace. Therefore there is no pleasure in the world, however great, no experience, however interesting, that can give one that satisfaction which peace alone can give. A sovereign may be happy sitting on the throne with his crown, with many attendants before him, but he is only satisfied when he is alone by himself. All else seems to him nothing; it has no value; the most precious thing for him is that moment when he is by himself.

God too seeks to be alone with Himself amongst all the multiplicity of creation…but He wants to do that through the help of our consciousness. This is the meaning and purpose of our life. God knows aloneness through His aloneness, but in creation He wants to experience His wahdat through the kathrat.

. Delicious dishes, sweet fragrance, music, all other pleasures of line and color, beauty in all its aspects, which seem to answer one's life's demands, fail in the end when compared with that satisfaction which a soul experiences in itself, which it feels its own property, its own belonging; something that one need not seek outside oneself, that one can find within oneself, and something which is incomparably greater and more valuable than anything else in the world; something which cannot be bought nor sold, something which cannot be robbed by anyone, and something which is more sacred and holy than religion or prayer. For all prayer and devotion is to attain to this peace.


The one who lacks peace, with all his possessions, the property of this earth or quality of mind, is poor even with both. He has not got that wealth which may be called divine and without which man's life is useless. For true life is in peace, a life which will not be robbed by death. The secret of mysticism, the mystery of philosophy, all is to be attained after the attainment of peace. You cannot refuse to recognize the divine in a person who is a person of peace. It is not the talkative, it is not the argumentative one, who proves to be wise. He may have intellect, worldly wisdom, and yet may not have pure intelligence, which is real wisdom. True wisdom is to be found in the peaceful, for peacefulness is the sign of wisdom. It is the peaceful one who is observant; it is peace that gives him the power to observe keenly. It is the peaceful one, therefore, who can conceive, for peace helps him to conceive. It is the peaceful who can contemplate; one who has no peace cannot contemplate properly. Therefore all things pertaining to spiritual progress in life depend upon peace.

And now the question is, what makes one lack peace? The answer is, love of sensation. A person who is always seeking to experience life in movement, in activity, in whatever form, wants more and more of that experience. In the end he becomes dependent upon the life which is outside, and so he loses in the end his peace, the peace which is his real self. When a person says about someone, 'That person has lost his soul', the soul is not lost; the soul has lost its peace. Absorption in the outer life, every moment of the day and night, thinking and worrying and working and fighting, struggling along, in the end robs one of one's soul.

One might ask if it is not our necessity in life that keeps us absorbed in the outer life and does not give us a moment to experience peace. To attain peace, what one has to do is to seek that rhythm which is in the depth of our being. It is just like the sea:the surface of the sea is ever-moving; the depth of the sea is still. And so it is with our life. If our life is thrown into the sea of activity, it is on the surface; we still live in the profound depths, in that peace. But the thing is to become conscious of that peace which can be found within ourselves.

It is this which can bring us the answer to all our problems. If not, when we want to solve one problem, there is another difficult problem coming. There is no end to our problems; there is no end to the difficulties of the outer life. And if we get excited over them, we shall never be able to solve them. Some think, 'We might wait; perhaps the conditions will become better; we shall see then what to do.' But when will the conditions become better? They will become still worse! Whether the conditions become better or worse, the first thing is to seek the kingdom of God within ourselves, in which there is our peace. As soon as we have found that, we have found our support, we have found our self. And in spite of all the activity and movement on the surface we shall be able to keep that peace undisturbed if only we hold it fast by becoming conscious of it.
H.I.K

We long for peace yet peace eludes us. Seeking peace through the eyes of duality, we constellate conflict. Seeking peace through the eye of oneness, we awaken to harmony.
The energy of life often appears to come from the interplay of opposites. The initiate is one who sees this play of opposites within oneself and knows that they are part of a greater oneness. Having tasted this truth, he begins to see His oneness within all of life. The opposites remain but they no longer remain in conflict. When we see life through the eyes of oneness, a different picture emerges, in which most opposites are two sides of the same coin.

The old paradigm taught us seeking peace through the resolution of conflicts by the triumph of one over the other; that is through opposites. The paradigm waiting to be born is to seek peace through the presence of oneness. This involves stepping out of the security of our polarized vision into the oneness that is all around us. This oneness will bring us the real energy of peace, a peace that belongs to God, to our own divine nature.

How can we open ourselves to the energy of oneness to bring peace to the world?
One must know that life contains a harmony that is part of its deepest nature. You see this in the petals of a flower, in the flow of water, in the geese flying together in one direction. We should allow life to teach us how always not to constellate conflict, pitching one against the other. Life can reveal to us the harmony of opposites as the night flowing into day and winter into summer. We would be required to change our attitude to life, give up the need to control and dominate, and then be shown the harmony of life.
Our life is ordinarily defined by the battles we fight, in work, in relationships, with the environment. The warrior archetype has dominated the age of duality from which we are meant to emerge. We look for a beneficial and peaceful God because our life in the world seems so antagonistic. The energy of life is inherently self-sustaining and renewing, but it is the attitude of man that has blocked himself to the flow. We need to be mindful of the changes happening all around us, what life s showing us and how it s evolving. Harmony is waiting to be born, but we remain focused on discord. True peace does not belong to power-dynamics. In the ordinary consciousness the idea of world peace is a balance of power. The structure of world culture is based on power dynamics. This needs adversaries. Islam seeks to change this world structure by weaning humanity from its dependence on the adversarial role. Islam removed the differences of caste, creed and colour and personal prejudices by establishing the sovereignty of the Divine. In all respects man is to find recourse to Allah and His Messenger for guidance in conducting his affairs. Allah is found in core of one’s being, within the innermost consciousness and His Messenger is the Spirit of Guidance that has emerged from the core. Islam seeks to re-educate and re-orientate man towards his true Being. Piety is the sole measure of man’s greatness and that is his freedom from the taint of corruption of multiplicity.
For how is piety defined..as righteousness, truthfulness, sincerity, loving the neighbour as oneself. Man is by nature driven by the impulse of self-preservation. Whatever we do, we do for our own benefit and perpetuation. Even though man maybe misguided at times but even behind the ill-designs that he forges is the desire to benefit himself. When man realizes the truth of existence and knows the other as his own self, then piety would be his natural conduct. How could he hope to destroy, damage or hate himself? This resolves relational conflicts. But a higher realization of seeing himself and all selves as the Self resolve even conceptional conflicts.

Peace can only be born from a place beyond opposites. This is where peace is always present. This is part of our divine nature. The light Verse from Surah 24 of the Quran says, "Allah is the Light of the Heavens and the earth. The parable of His Light is as if there were a niche, and within it a lamp. The lamp enclosed in Glass. The Glass as it were a brilliant star. Lit from a blessed tree. An Olive neither of the east nor of the west. Whose oil is well nigh luminous. Though fire scarce touched it. Light upon Light. Allah doth guide whom He will to His Light..

The Light of the Olive tree neither of the east or the west is within us. It is the light of our divine nature, which is the air we breathe. Our breath is His breath. Through the breath soul and body unite, heaven and earth are brought together. His light is the light of Heaven and earth…behind the appearance of duality is the light of oneness. The light which burns from the olive, can show us a different way to live.

The same light verse continues: Lit is such a Light in houses, which Allah hath permitted to be raised to honour, for the celebration in them of His name. In them is He glorified, in the mornings and in the evenings. By men whom nether trade nor sale can divert from the remembrance of Allah, nor from regular prayer.

The Light that is given is the light of His remembrance, the simple awareness of Divine Presence. In this Light He is constantly remembered even in the midst of daily activities. The light that can guide us is our awakening to His continual presence. The light that is beyond opposites s not gained through conflict but through prayer and remembrance. Those who love and remember Him have access to the light that the world needs today. Our forgetfulness denies us access to this light. The world can be saved only by those "whom neither trade nor sale can divert from the Remembrance of Allah."