Inner peace is always in the background. This can be a problem because the mind is trained to focus on the foreground (what is “out there”). So we are constantly scanning the scene “out there” for danger, trouble, what is out of place, what could bring us pleasure. And how we can avoid pain. We are not trained to look within.

As long as we continually focus on what is “Out There,” we will never find or keep inner peace. But if we retreat into that silent space within, from that vantage point we can watch the passing parade. We can still be a part of it but we are primarily an observer.

This doesn’t mean we become zombies, with no feelings. We cannot opt for only the good feelings and not feel the bad ones. We will still feel sorrow, pain, and happiness. But we also realize how transitory all these emotions are. They depend on our moods, our thoughts at the time, how much sleep we got the night before, etc.
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Continuous inner peace is possible, as the Buddha pointed out in his Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path. But we must be devoted to understanding how to achieve it. It doesn’t come on its own and it takes vigilance to maintain it.

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Many people who have been “brought to their knees” by suffering have found the spiritual path. It is almost a prerequisite. If we were all happy and contented with how things are going in the world and in our lives, we would not need to turn to a higher power to find answers for our struggles.

This is especially true for children who have found the world of the Spirit as a solution to their problems. This was so for me. I needed to make sense of the illness and deaths in my family. I needed to understand the cruelty I saw around me. At 5 years old, I threw myself at the mercy of my Higher Power (I used to call God, but now call Source Energy of the Universe). And, through my deep sadness came consolation from the powerful world beyond.

If these misfortunes had not been in my life, I would have been happily and thoughtlessly playing with my toys and dreaming of ice cream. Instead, I began an dialog with Higher Consciousness and found a deep solace that has stayed with me my entire life. I built inner resources that remained in the background of any turbulence.
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Eckart Tolle once remarked that if we didn’t have all kinds of drugs, alcohol, and tranquilizers, more people would hit bottom and be forced to seek the spiritual path as the only permanent way to peace. But because we are switching off our misery with all kinds of substances, we are not completing the organic journey towards enlightenment. We are creating a false Nirvana and have not found the natural pathways within ourselves.

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The Buddha is saying that anything apart from the underlying Source Energy of the Universe is impermanent, comes and goes, and can be destroyed in a second. This means that anything that appears to be solid matter, made of many distinct atoms and molecules can be gone in an instant.

Houses burn down, tsunamis kill thousands in an instant, cities can vanish in an earthquake. They are all made of separate parts and can all be destroyed. But the underlying principle that manifests in all these various forms can never be destroyed. It never goes away. It is never born. It never dies. It is forever, eternal, and indestructible.

When Buddha says, “Strive with earnestness,” he is referring to how easy it is to be swept up into believing that all this impermanent stuff is real and worth our time and energy. We get diverted onto the path of amassing more and more and lamenting our losses. We are driven by constant fear that it all will disappear and that it is all meaningless.
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It takes work and sincere passion (earnestness) to keep from being caught up in the whirlwind of the material world. It takes work to set ourselves apart from this form of mass hypnosis and create that contact with Eternal Source Energy. But Buddha didn’t say, “Be miserable while you strive with earnestness.” Misery does not fit into this kind of work. It is light, free, peaceful, and happy work.

People on a spiritual path want to have a lot of free time to meditate, contemplate, worship, and go within in other ways. Therefore, my spiritual pursuits have determined how I’ve interacted with people in social settings. It’s not that I don’t love a good party, it’s just that superficial interactions are too much on the surface to stir any continuing interest in me. Spiritual people like to dive in deep to the Heart of the Universe.

I can participate in small talk, but eventually desire much more. I want to understand the Soul of the person I am interacting with. If I find that they are a young soul, or perhaps have not examined any of life’s important questions, I will participate with kindness send them on their way with love. But they will never be part of my life. It is tedious for me to be with people on a shallow and superficial level, whether it is in a party atmosphere or a casual encounter.

One of the reasons for this is that on my path, I have not bought into the values that so many people in my society ascribe to. The large, expensive weddings, gaudy extravaganzas and pointless displays, mass entertainments are not pleasurable. The whole medical-industrial complex, the premises it is based on, and attention-seeking social media culture mean very little to me and I avoid them.
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It is an indwelling life of great peace and freedom. But to live it, it is important to set up boundaries and not be dragged into the whirlwind of activity that characterizes so many people’s daily lives. So I have become a hermit. A happy, voluntary, and completely satisfied hermit. And that is how my spiritual pursuits have shaped my life.

I am an old soul who came into this world already knowing certain things. I felt, even as a young child, that I was an observer. I was watching the absurdity and beauty of human behavior from a detached point of view, as if seeing it all over again. Certain areas of knowledge and experience were available to me that were beyond my years, based on other lifetimes.

Old souls are beings who have incarnated many times, through many lifetimes on this and other planets. Young souls have not incarnated as much, for a number of reasons. Even people who are not spiritually intuitive can detect a young soul. No matter what their chronological age, they seem like an empty room, with the breeze floating through. Whereas an old soul, no matter if he or she is only a baby, gives the impression of having seen it all, having experienced it all, and knowing it all too.
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Many different stages of incarnation distinguish old and young souls, for each person is a unique individual. Each has karma, each soul has a journey. Some of us have a lot of karma to balance out. Some of us are at the end of what the physical experience can contribute to our soul’s growth and expansion.

Every day we think and rethink the same thoughts, most of which are based on fear and its attendant stress. No wonder so many people feel exhausted. According to Michigan State University’s Stress Less with Mindfulness program, a person has 80,000 thoughts a day. 90% of these thoughts are the same ones we have had before, and 80 percent of these are negative.

If you’re tired physically, it’s hard to think clearly but being plagued by the same negative thoughts is even more depleting. And so it becomes a vicious circle. Our negative thoughts, if they create anything at all and are not just a rehashing of old stuff, create more fear. They are extremely draining in this way. How can we wake up fresh in the morning to face a new day when the same miserable thoughts start automatically repeating themselves?

These thoughts deplete the body by producing chemicals and hormones that weaken the physiology. Worrisome thoughts about our survival, the state of the world, how people behaved towards us, how we behaved back, swirl around automatically unless we find a way to rise above them. This is where spiritual techniques come to the rescue.
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Getting in touch with our Soul rather than constantly being churned by the mind is the way out of all of this. It is refreshing to watch the thoughts and not be emotionally affected by their ups and downs. Peaceful contemplation or meditation is one of the many methods to control the tsunami of negativity and fear. As we experience ourselves as the Eternal Observer, we can weed out the thoughts that don’t support us and cultivate the ones that do. In this way we can change the ratio of negative to positive thought patterns.

The word “is” is too strong in the statement that “all life is suffering.” This may be a mistranslation. I prefer the statement: “All life contains suffering.” And I would go even further to say, “All human life contains suffering.”

Fish and ants do not show any signs of suffering in terms of emotional pain and introspective agony—especially if one of their own gets snagged by a predator. Nor do the hawks flying around in the cold rain for prey complain about the hostile conditions. The rabbit may scream when the hawk snatches it, but is is suffering or is it a survival mechanism to cause the hawk to drop it?

Only humans suffer the way the Buddha describes it. He learned about suffering when he left the artificial heaven of his father’s palace and saw that every household had someone in it who had died. He saw illness. He saw decrepit old age. These are things his father was trying to shield him from. But he saw clearly that no one escapes from this suffering.

So he set about to find a way to relieve this uniquely human condition. The human mind despairs, contemplates its mistakes, plots revenge, holds anger, feels interminable grief—unless. Unless we find the way out. He tells us that the source of all this suffering is our attachment and desire for something else than what we are now going through or what we now have. He tells us give up this desire for something else and face what is.
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Then he gives us the Noble Eightfold Path as a recipe for a clean, wholesome, spiritually connected life in the here and now. He is honest about the existence of suffering, unlike some religions that claim that our pain is only an illusion. And he is very practical about how to go about alleviating it for ourselves and others. But to say that “all life is suffering,” is incorrect and I doubt that he really said it that way.

​There hasn’t been a sincere voice within the New Age spiritual community to call itself on the carpet when it has gone astray. Maybe it’s because New Age people do not want to portray themselves as negative, sending forth negative vibes, paying attention to the negative, or attracting the negative in any way. So I do not hear any voices saying let’s examine how things have been going:

There’s been an overemphasis on manifesting goodies and material stuff coming from a skewed view of the Law of Attraction. Much of the New Age movement has become like the primitive religions of old. People desperately want a lot of things. They want a male child. They want to be healed. They want riches. This is all good. The problem comes when people use New Age Movement’s principles as another form of idolatry. These principles become automatic formulas to get what they want in their little day to day life, avoid unpleasant emotions, and not have to pay the price for their choices. In this sense, it has missed the mark of its founders’ intentions.
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The basis of the New Age Movement is that there is an underlying spiritual reality that infuses everything in the Universe. This life is one of many. We don’t have to act in desperation as if it is our first and last. Not believing and trusting this, people want to hack into life’s secrets by grabbing onto any belief system that calms their fears and also promises to bring them stuff they like. The New Age movement provides systems that show how our thoughts influence our health, those around us, and how peaceful and happy we are in our lives. It goes much deeper than merely manifesting a bunch of good stuff that we are keen on having at the time.

“. . .there is a vast realm of intelligence beyond thought. Thought is only a tiny aspect of that intelligence. . . . All things that truly matter—beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace—arise from beyond the mind.”

I love this statement because, as civilized beings, we depend so much on our rational minds. At least we think they are rational, until we make mistakes, forget things, and look at the history of the human race and its sanctioned insanities.

Yes, the mind is a great tool and it comes up with all kinds of solutions to practical problems. But the mind offers no comfort during a sleepless night or when we are delving into past mistakes and future fears. Yet we think we are all this mind. That these non-stop thoughts are who we are and what we are. They take us on a white-water raft ride, through swirling whirlpools and craggy rocks over the precipice of a cascade, into our doom.

But if we access the intelligence beyond this maelstrom of churning thoughts, we finally find a connection to deep serenity and peace. The mind can carry on all it wants, we are watching its antics but not getting swept away by them. But first we must put this part of our minds into its place, through accessing the present moment. If we are constantly swirling around with past and future thoughts, that field of peace is blocked to us.
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One of Eckart Tolle’s missions is to show the clear path out of this thing that we think is us. He offers many practices to clear the way. And then, all that brings joy and happiness are there for us, just as they have always been.

Gurus don’t transmit their power. But many people seek them out because they feel better in their presence. In India, when people sit in the presence of gurus to feel the peace of their vibrational fields, it is called “darshana.” It is a common practice and has been beneficial for thousands of years. Some gurus don’t even say a word, yet their emanations are healing, calming, and lead to that inner place of eternal peace.

But the “chela,” or student, must be ready to receive the blessing and grace of the guru. Many people are not ready for it and therefore will not feel it. It will be part of their spiritual entertainment and they will go from guru to guru looking for what they must first discover in themselves. They shop around and want to have special magical powers, as if the miracle of life on earth was not enough.

If you are ready, you will definitely feel the Soul-presence and even see the bright aura of your guru. This has nothing to do with amassing supernatural powers for yourself. It has to do with finding the ground of your being and the answer to your deepest questions.
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You will know when your guru appears. Your guru might not even be a person. It could be a horse, a dog, or any animal that can teach you something about the nature of life, love, and peace.