Many of you will be able to look at your relationships, and you can see that in many of these relationships you do not have peace. There is no peace in the relationship. Many of you might look at specific relationships with difficult people, and you may wonder: “Would it ever be possible to have peace in my relationship with this person?” Well that certainly depends on whether you are seeking an external peace or an internal peace.
True, there are many people with whom you cannot have external peace because they still have unresolved psychology. They are not willing to work on their psychology. They are not willing to overcome the pattern of projecting out that it is always your fault, and they never take responsibility for anything. You cannot have external peace with such people. It may not be possible for the rest of this lifetime, or at least the lifetime of one of you. But regardless of the other person, you can have internal peace. You can have peace in your relationship. But what will it take to achieve this?
It will take that you identify the specific, separate selves that take away your peace by causing you to react to the other person in a way that is not peaceful. Each of you will have specific, separate selves from past lives where you feel that when some other people do specific things to you, there is only one way you can react and it is a way that is not peaceful. The only way to deal with this is to ask yourself the question: Who is it that feels that it is impossible to react peacefully in this situation? Is it the Conscious You or is it a separate self?
The Conscious You is pure awareness. What does this mean? It is surely an abstract concept. Well, it means that, in its most stark or brutal version, the Conscious You does not have feelings. Think about that statement. The Conscious You has no feelings, at least as feelings are normally conceived by human beings. We could moderate the statement and say the Conscious You has no fear-based feelings. But this is not entirely accurate. Nevertheless, let us go with this for now.
The most common feelings you see in human beings are fear-based feelings. Now many of you will say: “But when somebody is angry, they do not seem to be fearful. Because if they really had fear, why would they be so aggressive?” Well, the reality is that they are aggressive because they have the fear. In order to suppress the fear, they take on this posture of being angry and aggressive, in order to aggressively beat you into submission so they can keep their fear under control. The most aggressive people are really the most afraid people.
What you normally call human emotions are based on fear. In fact, what many people call love is a control game and it is also based on fear. The ego of the person is afraid of losing its sense of being in control. Therefore, it uses love as a way to manipulate other people into submitting, so that the ego can feel it is in control and not threatened.
There are many of these feelings that people have that are based on fear. But because the Conscious You is pure awareness it cannot feel fear. The Conscious You can never be afraid of anything. It is only a separate self that can be afraid. Why? Well, because the Conscious You, when it is in tune with who it is, and what it is, it knows it cannot die. It is an extension of the higher self, which is an immortal being. The Conscious You cannot die. But the separate self knows it can die, and it fears death.
When you begin to grapple with these concepts, even though they may be abstract in the beginning, you can begin to experience pure awareness, that sense beyond fear, that acceleration, that sense of inner silence or inner peace. And this gives you a different perspective on everything in your life, certainly on things in your own psychology, but also on your relationships.
Now, let us say that you have a difficult relationship with a specific person. You are somewhat afraid of speaking freely to that person because you have so many times gotten a negative reaction. This means that for you, this person has attained a certain status in your mind. You are in a sense afraid of the person. And through this fear of the person, you are assigning a certain importance to the person. The person occupies a certain position, a certain amount of your attention is drawn towards this person. It is as if this person has received a larger-than-life status in your mind. What does this mean? Well, ultimately, you have certain separate selves that look at this person a certain way.
There once was a drawing that was meant to illustrate the nerve centers in the physical body. And the drawing was showing that certain parts of the body had more nerves, and therefore were more sensitive. And those parts were drawn bigger than they normally are, bigger than their physical size. For example, the tongue has many sensory receptors, so the tongue was much bigger than, for example, the arm, which has less nerve receptors.
If you look at your psychology, your subconscious mind, you will see that here is a difficult person, the person you find it difficult to deal with and in your mind that person is much bigger than their physical size. You may have one specific person that is bigger than all other persons in your sphere of relationships. This means that that person is very important to you. You pay attention to what the person says. Maybe the person has a great influence on you, or maybe you are just afraid to speak freely with that person. How do you deal with that?
Well, the same way as you overcome your fear of the dark. You have to speak out and realize it is not going to kill you. But in order to do this, make it easier for yourself to do this, you can reduce the person’s size in your mind. You can, to use a popular expression, cut the person down to size so they do not attain a disproportionate size in your mind beyond what they really should have. How do you do this? You must get a different perspective on the situation. You must change your sense of proportion because you have a warped sense of proportion concerning this person and his or her importance.
By looking up into the vastness of the Milky Way, and contemplating how many stars there are, how far away they are, how huge the universe is, how infinitely small the earth is compared to the universe, you can experience that, compared to the vastness of the universe, nothing on earth could really be important. What in your personal situation could really be so important compared to the vastness of the universe?
Compared to the vastness of the cosmos, these personal things you go through here on earth really cannot be that important. They cannot possibly be as important as you make them out to be in your mind. But who makes them out to be important? Is it the Conscious You? No, because it was the Conscious You that experienced the awe and wonder over the vastness of the universe. What makes it seem important? Only a separate self.
Higher awareness has this vastly different perspective than you have in your own embodiment. Compared to the perspective of higher awareness, the perspective you have as a human being in embodiment really is not that important. And this can empower you to gain a different perspective on your own life and on what you experience in your own life. It does not mean that you do not care. But it does mean that you do not have this obsessive-compulsive sense that everything that happens to you is so important. This is a process you can all go through. And it is the process of de-personalizing your personal relationships, or even de-personalizing your personal life.
How can you achieve peace in a relationship with a person who is not at peace unless you de-personalize that relationship, so you do not take it personally what the other person does or says? The other person will of course take it personally. But is there some natural law that says that if a person takes you and what you do very personally, you have to do the same? Is there some natural law that says that if a person is upset at you, you should feel bad about this, you should react to this? You should take it seriously and think now you have to do something to make the other person feel better? Is there a natural law that says this?
Where does this come from? It comes from the manipulators who want you to feel that you have to react to them. You have to take them seriously. You have to take personally what they do or say to you because when you take it personally, they can control you. Because you take it personally, you give it importance in your mind.
The absolutely worst thing you could do to a manipulator is to be completely at peace no matter what they do or say, completely non-attached, completely non-reactive. They cannot stand being ignored. They cannot stand people who do not think they are important. They cannot stand not getting the attention that they crave more than almost anything else.
There is an extremely powerful collective matrix that projects at people that you have to take other people personally. When you start overcoming this, there will be people who will blame you that you do not care about them. You do not love them. You are not taking them seriously. Because they sense that they no longer have the control over you that they used to have. This you also need to be non-attached to. And you do this by focusing on: “What is really important to me? Who am I? I am a spiritual being. I am a spiritual student. I am striving to qualify for my ascension to higher awareness. Compared to my growth, what could possibly be important on earth?”
How do you rise from one level of consciousness to the next? Well, you overcome an illusion you have. But you can also say that you come to see that what was important to you at a certain level is no longer important. And therefore, you rise to the next level where something else is important. And then after a time, you see that this is no longer important, you rise to the next level. And you keep doing this until you reach the highest level where nothing on earth is important to you. What is important is to walk through that gate to the realm of higher awareness.
But even before you get to the highest level, you can consciously work on these ideas. You can de-personalize your life. And you can come to a point where you have inner peace about your relationships. Even if the other person is not at peace, you can be at peace. In a sense, you could say that for a more aware person, this is the ultimate challenge.
As an aware person, you have encountered the manipulators in past lives. And therefore, in a sense, the manipulators represent the primary challenge for you in terms of relationships, because they are the ones who have been so aggressive in seeking to destroy you. The ultimate challenge is how you relate to the manipulators.
And the challenge really is to come to this point where you can face the manipulators and whatever they do or say, whatever they try to throw at you and blame you for, you are in complete peace. You have no desire to change them. You have no desire to defend yourself, to prove them wrong, to prove yourself right, to say you were right after all.
And you can cultivate this inner peace, not from one moment to the next, but you can indeed cultivate it. And you will find that when you attain this depersonalized inner peace, all of your relationships will benefit. You will have much more constructive, much more harmonious relationships when you come from this point of inner peace, because now, there is nothing you want from other people that causes you to want to force them. And there is nothing you feel obligated to do that causes them to be able to force you. What you have done with the inner peace is you have taken force out of your relationships.
Most of you have some idea of what it means to have a relationship that is not based on force. Perhaps you have experienced this with some people, good friends, where you are not trying to force each other in any way. You are just enjoying each other’s company, supporting each other. And this you can have with many people, not with all. When you are in peace, you can potentially continue a relationship with these difficult people because they no longer disturb your inner peace so what is the problem in having a relationship with them? Or you simply naturally flow away from them, decide that you will not spend your time and attention on them, and therefore, you move on to a higher level of service. What does it take to give ultimate service? It takes a certain resolution of psychology, because ultimate service is not force-based. And if it is not force-based what is based on? It is based on peace.
Many of you have created your Life plans in such a way that you have put yourself in difficult relationships in your childhood and your early adulthood for the specific purpose that you wanted to resolve your psychology as quickly as possible so you could be free to give service later in life. Now, later in life is a flexible term. Do not feel bad if you see that you have reached a certain age and you still have not attained the peace you desire. These teachings are not given to make you feel bad in any way.
They are given to help you realize that you have the capacity to rise to this level of inner peace where you can begin to give service based on peace. And this will be much more rewarding for you than what you have done so far, where you might have forced yourself to give a certain service because you thought that this is what you should be doing. And you might also see that you have forced yourself to be in relationship with certain people because you felt that this was what you should be doing for whatever reason there may be.
But there comes that point where you have depersonalized your relationships, where you realize that you are not forced to be in a relationship with anybody. You are not obligated to be in a relationship with anybody. You may have chosen to put yourself in a certain family and have certain family members. And you chose this and obviously, you should strive to learn the lesson you wanted to learn from these people. But there can come a point where you feel you have learned that lesson, you have achieved a certain inner peace, and then you can choose freely: “Do I want to continue to have a relationship when I no longer feel that I should be in this relationship?” You could say that true inner peace means that you no longer have any “shoulds” in your consciousness. It is a matter of what you want, what you really want.