Peace isn’t for “Me”

“Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open?”

Rumi

Why can we not live in peace?

Because it is not us who long for peace, but something within us that can never experience it.

Who? That which imagines itself distinct, detached from the whole, forever incomplete.

That which thinks it matters more as an individual, a family, a group, a religion, a race, a country, a species, a planet — than as existence itself.

That which imagines its traditions, its beliefs, its conditioning — all the accumulated concepts that make up its identity — are more meaningful than what we are intrinsically and unconditionally, prior to any of that.

The one who places separation over unity, form over essence, appearances over depth, mind over heart.

That one will never know peace. It’s beyond its capacity. And, that’s actually perfectly fine. It’s a ghost anyway. It was never real. Its entire life was imagined.

By contrast, what lies beneath that imagined character — the Essence — is already at peace. It doesn’t need to become anything — only, if it pleases, to realize its truth by dropping the false. 

How ridiculous for a few leaves on the same branch to fight one another in the name of differences — as if a common root had never existed, as if the same sap weren’t flowing through them all.

How can we neglect this fabulous opportunity — to experience ourselves as everything, the infinite, Love itself — in favor of such a narrow, anxious, violent, second-hand idea of ourselves?

IMF - La Cathedrale Verte, Lausanne 27 July 2025

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The False Self