Between what you perceive outside and what you feel inside there is an openness in which all experience takes place. It is vast, empty, luminous and silent, and you are aware of it now.
Be present, open and aware without letting your mind go outwards towards the world or inwards towards thoughts, feelings or sensations of the body. Remain in that placeless place between your outer experience and your inner experience.
Not seeking any experience and not resisting any experience: just the natural state of openness before the mind focuses on any particular experience in the world, the body or your thoughts or feelings.
Ask yourself: What is the natural condition of the mind prior to the arising of any thought, feeling, sensation or perception? Do not allow this question to initiate a line of thinking. Do not try to formulate the answer in words. Use the question to take you to the natural condition of the mind.
Go there experientially, not intellectually. Feel the vastness, the emptiness, the luminosity, the silence. It is a bit like ceasing to be particularly interested in the objects or people in a room and, as a result, suddenly becoming aware of the space, the openness, the emptiness, the transparency.
In fact, you were always aware of the space. But you overlooked it in favour of the people and the objects within it. It is the same: you are always aware of the essence of your self, this present, open awareness. But you overlook it due to your fascination with thoughts, feelings, sensations, perceptions and so on.
If anything is required at all, it is just the slightest shift or softening of attention. The relaxing of attention. Allow yourself to sink more and more deeply into this silent presence. It is like sinking into the depths of the ocean, and as you do so, you gradually leave the turbulence of the waves on the surface behind. You sink into the silent depths of being and, as you do so, leave the turbulence of your thoughts and feelings behind.
Feel yourself as this aware emptiness in which the entirety of your experience is taking place, seeking nothing, wanting nothing, resisting nothing, knowing nothing, understanding nothing.
The recording Living in Peace, Living as Peace is an invitation to become intimate with the presence that lies beneath the changing circumstances of your lives, a presence that is already whole, already complete and already at peace, and that no circumstance, however demanding, has ever truly disturbed: the same open, silent space in which every one of those circumstances takes place.
