I continue in my experience of peace.
When my mind is deeply quiet, as it is this morning, a different “me” is present.
The chief thing I notice is that I feel … what’s the word? Substantial. And I haven’t felt quite this way before. Not as solid.
Remember, perhaps, that this is an adult child who was yelled at so close to his face when he was 7 that his personality shattered into a million pieces. I spent the next fifty years putting Humpty together again.
I learned a lot. I’ll probably be ready to do what I’m supposed to do when I’m supposed to do it as a result of this ongoing growth experience and a few spiritual experiences thrown in.
I just got this moment that I’ve had to put myself back together again. Hmmm…. How useful is that for the work I’m doing. There are no accidents.
Eight years after that, my heart opened and, at last, I know what love is. At 65 for heavens’ sake!
My mind flashes on a cartoon I’ve tucked away:
Just kidding! Benjamin Button might be more like it. (1)
***
The chief symptom of the dissociation I was in was a lack of self-confidence, a lack of a feeling that I was standing firmly on solid ground, that I could relax. (2)
That was all prelude to this.
Now I feel as if my legs are rocks and my stance is stable. This is me feeling myself to be substantial. As I’ll return to later, this is a paradox. Being no one, going nowhere – feeling substantial? But I get ahead of myself.
Around a year ago, I achieved the state of standing firmly on solid ground. I noticed I was there while in the shower. It was so different an experience that it struck me.
Not rocking back and forth or fidgetting. Not leaning against something. Not outright avoiding standing solid. Instead, standing solid, like a tank. It was all new to me at the time.
When I look back in life, I see that I had no experience of myself as substantial. There was nobody home, no one inhabiting this body. Now I’ve arrived in my body. There is somebody home.
The consciousness state called “peace” renders one solid, I see. I knew this from the last time I spent time in peace and Michael and I discussed it.
He used the very term “granite” on an Hour with an Angel radio show that I used with myself, to describe how it feels to be in peace. (3) When I used that term in my writings a few days earlier, I thought it very strange to describe peace as being like standing on granite.
I have to add that that experience gives way once one stops identifying with the body or remembers to stop, as in my case. I stopped identifying with the body in the course of my out-of-body experience in 1977: I got that “I am not my body!” at a realized level. And the fear of death vanished. (4)
When I recalled to do it again here (because I forgot), I again felt solid … but also gentle. More paradoxes.
But back to the present.
And speaking of “present,” this me that is here right now, when I’m in the divine state of peace? I would call it “present.” At this moment, my ledgers of who owes me and whom I owe are zeroed out. I have obligations but I feel none of them right now.
I am just here, content to be the Invisible Man. Nothing going on. As I said earlier, no one going nowhere.
I’m going to go out on a skinny branch and say that this state keeps worry at bay. But I know I can override it and choose worry over peace. We always have the final choice. Why I’d want to I don’t know.
Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that I might have chosen worry over peace some time ago.
Not so much now. This current experience has won me over. The youthful hothead who loved a good fight. The troll under the bridge who won every argument … and now lives alone (karma is a bitch) … is finding foundational peace….
This experience of peace is not as dramatic as the last one was, (5) but it’s proving more persistent and more ongoingly foundational.
Footnotes
(1) In the movie, Benjamin Button grew younger with age.
(2) Add to that a father who’d constantly remind me “you can’t trust anyone” and solid ground further eluded me. That became my grand motif. See “The Grand Motif,” October 13, 2019, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2019/10/13/the-grand-motif/
(3) In the earlier experience of peace:
“… I found myself sinking into a deep, deep sense of peace, way down deep. I ended up in a place that was absolutely solid. It was as if I were standing on a slab of granite.
Later again, in An Hour with an Angel, Michael also described peace as being like stone and I remarked that that was my experience as well. I would have expected downy softness.
The solidity of the ground under my feet probably reflected my own inner stability, which seems to be a gift of true peace when it becomes permanent.
This peace passed understanding in the sense that the mind was so still I’d have to describe it as inactive, archived, taken offline. There was no such act as understanding going on because the mind was decommissioned.
Of course the experience passed, as all do short of Ascension. (“The Peace that Passeth Understanding,” July 18, 2017, at http://goldenageofgaia.com/2017/07/18/the-peace-that-passeth-understanding/.) They don’t necessarily disappear entirely. I can still access the love I felt in the heart opening and this peace is proving lasting if at a milder degree.
Archangel Michael: So, when you think of things that you should do, are supposed to do, might do, and it doesn’t ignite that fire of excitement, and that granite of peace, then you are being given an important piece of information, which is ‘look elsewhere.’ Is that clear?” (“Transcript ~ Archangel Michael: You Have Chosen to Be the New Paradigm of Love, May 31, 2018,” June 7, 2018 at http://goldenageofgaia.com/2018/06/07/transcript-archangel-michael-you-have-chosen-to-be-the-new-paradigm-of-love-may-31-2018/.) [My emphasis.]
(4) See “The Disappearance of the Fear of Death,” November 14, 2023, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2023/11/14/349489/
(5) See “The Peace That Passeth Understanding,” ibid.