May all be free from suffering and the causes of suffering.
May all embrace happiness and the causes of happiness.
May all abide in peace, free from self grasping
May all attain the union of wisdom and compassion.

What does this mean to me?

Who doesn’t want a little more peace in their life? Imagine someone came up to you and said, “here’s a recipe for peace”. What would be in that recipe? Would it be “listen to more opera” or “get more sleep” or maybe even “watch the news more”? That last one’s a joke, of course.

My local friendly AI tells me that peace is, among other things, “a state of tranquility and quiet.” That’s a good hint. Peace is a state of mind. So how does this peace arise in the mind? What are the causes and conditions?

The truth is, the mind is always at peace, like a clear storm-free sky. Hard to believe, right? Emotions, thoughts, desires are all like clouds in that clear blue sky. Peace isn’t imported from outside, it’s inherent. It’s always there. We don’t have to go anywhere special to abide in peace. We can abide in peace by freeing our minds of two pretty big, dark clouds: wrong views and afflicted emotions.

How would I explain this to someone else?

If you had to clean a mahogany floor that had decades of grit and dirt and stains ground into it, what’s the first thing you’d do? We may think the first step should be to get cleaning supplies. But there’s a step before that. The very first thing we have to do is realize that under all that dirt and grime, there is a clean wooden floor. If not, why bother cleaning? We have this realization without thinking about it. We know very well there’s a clean wooden floor there. All we’re doing is uncovering it.

In the same way, the mind is peaceful. The mind is not our turbulent thoughts or our afflicted emotions. When we work with the mind, we call our cleaning stuff prayers, meditation, aspirations, perseverance, and many other names. This prayer tells us that when we are “free from self-grasping”, we abide in peace.

What’s this self-grasping stuff? Can you really grasp yourself so tightly that you have no peace? We sure can. It’s things both big and small.

There are countless ways to grasp onto the self. Perhaps the self-grasping that causes the most suffering, is the distorted concept of “me” and “mine”. This is the biggest departure from peace. It gives us the strong desire to change reality.

This happens all the time at work. I get a lot of emails throughout the day. Sooner or later the thought comes, “I wish they’d stop emailing me!” The truth is that clients are emailing the company I work for. They could care less who responds, as long as it’s from the company I work for. At work, the email deluge isn’t happening to me, it’s just happening.

Clinging to the mistaken concepts of “me” and “mine”, we want to change reality. A more helpful thought would be, “How can I best respond so that clients don’t have to email again?” or “How can I document my files so that people have less causes to email the company?”

Self-grasping is the idea that when reality is not to our liking, we must take drastic, definitive action to change reality. This leads to a great deal of suffering. And of course, peace and suffering cannot coexist. It is the stormy conditions of the mind that need to be changed, not reality.

How would I use this in my daily life?

In my day to day life, I try to abide in peace. But honestly, it’s hard work. As soon as reality becomes inconvenient, I have the nearly irresistible urge to change it. I work with this by breathing and mentally taking a few steps back. I ask myself the question, “How much do I want to suffer?”

As we walk the path, how do we abide in more peace, with less self-grasping? A good start is working with the mind. If I want to suffer lots, I can continue on my futile path to trying to change reality. If I want to suffer less, I can work with changing conditions in my mind. As Pema Chodron puts it, “sounds easy, is not”.

The mind in its natural state is free from self-grasping. The more we learn to recognize the mind free of the stains of wrong views and afflicted emotions, the more we can resonate with our true state through prayers, meditation, or perhaps even smelling a flower. The more often we resonate with the mind’s natural state, the closer we come to abiding in peace, free from self-grasping.

What are your thoughts?