Peace in the World

When the world is understood, a certain peace becomes obvious.

Peace does not lie conditioned on any situation, not on the world as such, not even on the subject who experiences it. A peace that is subject to certain things happening in the world is condemned to death.

An individual who opens their eyes to the immanent richness of being alive begins to realize that the stage on which all the things of the world take place is so immaterial that all the things of the world lose their importance.

Acceptance of the world rests on one premise: Even if I decide not to accept it, the world does not stop being what it is.

What does it take for there to be peace in the world? Only one thing: that there be peace in the one who experiences the world.

And where can peace be, if not in the individual who experiences peace?

It is because we do not accept the world that we find ourselves waging wars aimed at finding peace. Could the peace I do not see within me be in those utopian dreams of perfect brotherhood and a humanity made whole? The unreality where I go looking for my reality is more colorful than the reality I am living. And yet the reality my presence in the world perceives is the only thing I can really experience. Could I ever experience unreality? No, but I can experience non-acceptance.

Non-acceptance of the world rests on one premise: I can change it.

The feeling of wanting to change the world is the natural expression of a discontent that rejects, at the root, the intensity that lies beneath opening oneself to the truth of life. The voice of that feeling says: "No, I am not ready yet to allow myself to be myself in a world that is also itself. I don't want to take on what cannot be changed, because everything that cannot be changed would rest on my back as my responsibility. I could not bear the tons of guilt for all my past actions piled up."

And so the feeling of wanting to change the world radiates an organic tension, as if the individual's body already had to carry the weight of its past. Under this contraction, the individual becomes vulnerable to those blindly savage animals called ideologies. And under the distant promise of peace that each ideology names, the being arms itself with a clumsily barbaric shield called expectation.

Expectation sometimes takes the emblematic shape of a black cannon, aiming aimlessly at some distant target on the horizon. Each expectation has a different color from the next, but each is magnetized with the same polarity as every other. So each expectation electrically confronts every other expectation the individual finds in front of them.

The self-repelling nature of that barbaric shield, expectation, fires off intolerance. Intolerance leads to war, and war brings us sooner or later face to face with how real those ideologies that define and condition peace actually are. When, to the eye of the one who lives it, each war reveals the falseness of the ideologies that chase peace, a real hope of peace is born from the ashes.

Seeing plainly the falseness of the world is the only flame that needs to be lit to change the world. Honesty with oneself is the transparency the individual needs in order to forgive and open up to acceptance. The fire that blazes the moment a being lets the universe work according to its exact nature burns away every belief that may dwell in the world. The feeling of wanting to change the world shudders and flees, lashed by the inevitable, inescapable knowledge of the transcendence of sitting in meditation to give thanks for life.

The world will experience peace the moment the individuals who make it up experience it within themselves.

An individual will experience peace the moment they decide to see through the feeling of changing the world and go deep into the relentlessness of the immediate, true reality of their own being. Then they will understand the illusoriness of everything that happens in the world. And so the expectation that peace depends on certain conditions on the world's stage dies, buried beneath the obviousness that the stage of the world, which is already happening, cannot be changed. It is already happening.

So the universe runs the individual over, making them forget their temporary identity as an individual separate from the universe, and leaves them free of mental impurities, organic tensions and noisy sensations. When the being relaxes and allows itself to be, it remembers that space of presence which, because it allows everything, embraces everything. There comes the ancestral knowledge that the human being is a wild animal, unstoppable and untamable, thrown into a world perceived as blindly savage, and that this, however much the organic sensations may want to avoid it, honors the perfect, inviolable equation that traces the beauty of the universe.

Beauty: that is what the world tastes like when the world is understood.

Because when the world is understood, a certain peace becomes obvious.