Find Freedom from the Fear of Yourself

No one can hope to know the joy of true personal freedom without knowing the truth of spiritual peace. Freedom and peace are as kite and wind; the former remains grounded without the latter. This is to say that before we will feel ourselves being lifted above the conflict and illusions of this world, peace must become conscious within us. Peace is the foundation, freedom the form built upon it. We must never forget this relationship. To do so is to spend our lives searching for freedom through our relationship with worldly forms -- an act that effectively builds prisons we then struggle to escape!

The next natural step in our study is to see that if our peace is built upon worldly forms, then it will be, at best, a temporary peace. Things, people, places, conditions -- these are worldly forms, and they are what most of us pursue to help erase the ache of having no peace in our hearts. If we wish to take the next step in our spiritual development, then we must be willing to acknowledge that the pursuit of these forms, even their possession, has never brought us anything but a fleeting sense of fulfillment.

Now, one of the strange features about this present nature of ours is that even on "good" days -- when we manage to achieve what we desire and feel a sense of satisfaction -- this conditional peace often turns against us; triumph becomes a kind of torment as we end up fearing we will lose the thing just gained. Poof goes our peace! There is no profit in it, and its promises are equally empty.

We have another nature, one whose life and whose peace are the same character. This order of Self, and the Now that is the backdrop of its being, are as the branch is to the life-giving vine.

In order to know peace and its promise, we must release ourselves from this sleeping self that is always struggling to put pieces of peace together in the vain hope they will stay united! The more of these "pieces of peace" we juggle, the more anxious we become, all the while hoping that life won’t break up what we would assemble. Even though this approach has proven itself fruitless, still we cling to the hope that next time things will be different. What we must see is that our lives cannot change until we do -- from the inside out.

To succeed in our quest, we need a new and higher understanding of our own being. For this peace that we seek resides within us; it is not to be found anywhere else. We must discover and enter into our own still being.