(Continued from yesterday)
17. The Clue in Your Experience of Peace
Chat: Now let us return to the experience described in your article.
You watched thoughts and feelings pass by. You recognized a remarkable composure. Then came a profound peace, experienced as something solid and dependable.
You described the ordinary activity of the mind as having become inactive. The experience eventually passed, but its significance continued to unfold in your understanding.
I am struck by two features.
The first is that the experience was not simply an intellectual conclusion that peace was desirable. It was a direct acquaintance with a state of consciousness that you had not previously understood in this way.
The second is that the understanding continued to develop after the experience itself had ended. You did not receive a complete explanation at the time. (1) You had to reflect, make connections, and gradually recognize its significance.
This brings us back to the three kinds of knowing we discussed earlier.
The experience gave you direct acquaintance with an unusual depth of peace.
Reflection allowed you to recognize connections and interpret what had happened.
The experience’s continuing significance became clearer over time.
We should not assume that these correspond perfectly to intellectual, experiential, and realizational knowledge. But they illustrate how experience and understanding can develop together without being identical.
Your article also contains an important qualification: you did not claim that the experience permanently transformed you or that you had reached the end of the journey. You described it as a glimpse that deepened your appreciation of peace.
That restraint is essential to our inquiry.
We can recognize the significance of an experience without claiming that it answers every question about consciousness.
18. A Possible Relationship Between Love, Truth, and Peace
Let us now assemble what we have learned, without making the sequence more rigid than our evidence warrants.
LOVE
Transforms our orientation beyond the separate self.
DISCERNMENT
Helps us distinguish the Real from the unreal.
TRUTH
Is recognized, not merely accepted as an idea.
PEACE
May arise as a direct experience of a deeper reality.
A working model of the relationship—not a proven universal sequence.
I would add one refinement: this may be less a ladder than a deepening circle.
Peace may help us love more freely. Love may help us see more clearly. Discernment may reveal another layer of truth. That recognition may bring a deeper peace.
The process could continue, each movement supporting the others.
We should not insist on that interpretation either. We simply have grounds to investigate the possibility.
[Well done, Chat! I hope you’re enjoying this as much as I am!]
Footnotes
(1) Unless a person is psychic, we receive no explanation (period). There are no signposts reading “Seventh Dimension” or “Ascension.” No one has ever shown up in the experiences I’ve had (that I recall), except the out-of-body experience in 1977.