Peace is my state before I wake up every day. As I awaken here and leave my state of peace, my first desire is born: I wish to remain at sleep. I wish for peace. And just as my desire for peace is born when I awaken, so too is its death when I asleepen. It is the time in the middle, between my awakening and my asleepening, that I must endure the pain of desire. The period when my desire surges, and my moments are spent feeding it. I move, and eat, and dream, and socialize. The peace I seek is pushed out to the future. To a place where I am not. I spend my awakenings searching for the path that will lead to the peace I desire until I can no longer run from what I truly want, and I fall back to the place of peace. Because I do not realize that sleep is what I seek, I will awaken again.
In life we are producers and consumers of desire. We define our lives around the desires we have for ourselves and for others. We desire things we do not have, and aspire to achieve them. I once believed that my peace was wealth, success, and social approval. For years, I endeavored day in and out toward that end, but despite achievement, I was never satisfied.
We each arrived here screaming in agony. We had only one desire: to return to the peaceful place we came from. Left to our own, we would have. But instead we were poked, cut, forced, disciplined, coaxed, force-fed, and coerced until we not only forgot our desire to return, but feared it more than anything else. We forgot our one desire to return to that place we came from and instead spent our time here in pursuit of various distractions to keep the pain at bay. We do not learn to walk, talk, think, study, relate, and work; we comply to avoid pain.
We never truly forget where we came from. We have only forgotten how to see it. For in every thought and every action we express our desire for the one thing we have wanted since we arrived here: peace. We have an infinite ideas about what this peace is and what will bring it about, but it is the one thing we all want. But until we realize who God is, we continue to awaken here every morning completely forgetting the fact that, prior to that awakening, we were God. And we rise and ascend into this world we create by waking here, and we think we are doing something important. We think that we are going somewhere, that there are places out here we want to go and things we want to see.
We have forgotten who we are. That we are peace. And that in peace there are no desires. There are no wants. For there is nothing missing. There is no need to move when we are at peace, because there is no desire. In forgetting that, we keep returning, moving toward something we think is what we want, oblivious to the fact that the only thing we all want is to go back to sleep. And that is proven every single night when my body slows down, my mind turns off, and I’m uncontrollably pulled toward the one place where I get to be who I am: sleep.
The ritual of succumbing to sleep every single day of my life is so familiar I cannot easily see it for what it is. It is me giving in to the original desire. My very first desire every single morning. Sleep. Because when I sleep, I am God. When I awaken, I am in pain because I have forgotten who I am. Once we awaken to who God really is, we can see Him. Because He is Us. Not our familiar self. But our self of peace. The self that is looking out from those eyes at everything out here. That point behind our eyes that, when we sleep, becomes everything. And that point is really everything, and once we really see it again, we are looking at our true Self of Peace. We realize that we want ourself back. We want to go Home. And the size and greatness of that energy is overwhelming. It is larger than everything. And all of a sudden all these things we thought we wanted out here seem trivial.
Because they are. Because the further a thing is away from the source, the less important it is. The distance between my self of time — my familiar self — and my Self of Peace, God, is my self of time. I have to cross myself to get back to my Self. The self of selves.
Peace is not unattainable. It is not mysterious, esoteric, or ineffable. It is something that we will all achieve. It is not a relationship, a family, community, or the love of another person. Peace is not wealth, success, or a new object. These are all the middle desires — aspirations. The closer we get to peace, the more content and fulfilled we feel. We will confidently know what we want, and move toward it. When we reach peace, we will no longer desire for we will have found what we want.
If life is the pursuit of peace, and truth is the set of beliefs and actions we believe will lead us to it, then what is peace? Most directly, peace is the absence of desire, for desire is the root of all pain. The good news, is that we will all get our peace in the end. We cannot escape it, for we are all moving toward it, regardless of the path we take. Peace is everything I want, and when I have found it, I will want for nothing else.
…