Another Swing at Inner Peace

I have said that inner peace is a physical phenomenon. Start with the physical sensations inside your body and hold your focus there because that's literally what inner peace is (see The Pain-Body label for more articles). And that's good advice.

But we can also look at it another way. As our good friend Eckhart Tolle puts it in A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose (Oprah's Book Club, Selection 61),"Being at peace and being who you are, that is, being yourself, are one." (p. 114-115)

What we are trying to get to is feeling like ourselves again, uncluttered by ego and pain-body and any kind of background unhappiness that is common to most of us."

A recent experience brought this home to me in a personal way. I received word that an old girlfriend of mine got married, and when I found out about it I could sense that it had ignited my pain-body.

The Anatomy of Success

Something really great was about to happen. Success at last!

It doesn't matter what it was. It could have been a new job, or a publisher agreed to print something I'd written, or I was about to move to the next level with someone special, or I was about to receive a patent on a new invention, or I was about to surpass the 1,000,000-visitor-barrier on my blog. Fill in the blank with anything you please.

At that moment, on the verge, on the eve, something inside told me I wasn't ready for this; I wasn't prepared. I had been well along the path of enlightenment for nearly three years, enjoying the awakening process, eyes opening. But the process wasn't complete. Thus, outward success felt premature.

And that's the important point, how it felt. It always comes down to how we feel these things in the physical body.It felt unstable. I felt myself leaning forward, into the future, into the following day when this indicium of success was scheduled to take place.

There's a name for this feeling. We call it hope. Its opposite is fear. We think of hope as positive and fear as negative, but they're actually flip sides of the same coin.

The Visualization of Success

What is Visualization?

Visualization is the process by and through which everything comes into being in our lives, both good and bad. Visualization is in our nature; it's simply a quality that all human beings possess. We are doing it all the time.

Therefore, we need not worry about the mechanics of visualization. They operate automatically. The more salient concern is the service to which this wonderful, creative faculty that we possess is put. On this question there are two options. We can either use this tool in service to our own egos or in service to The Good (see The Philosophy of Success for a discussion of this assumption).

Eckhart Tolle for Christians

Christianity--and probably most religions--can be broken down into two component parts. On the one side you have its mythos. This is the broad story on which it's based.

For Christianity, that's the story of redemption: how Jesus, before the world began was the Son of God, how He was born into the world, how He lead a blameless life and yet He was put to death, and how He rose again and ascended to heaven, and how one day He will return to judge the living and the dead. That's the mythos of Christianity.