Peace

I see two ways to find peace in this world:

The first is to close your eyes to the world as it is. This gives you peace since there is less to think about, and this reduces anxiety about things that are happening, have happened and might happen in the future. Some call this "blissful ignorance" and you can think of this bliss as a kind of peace.

The other way is to expose yourself to everything, editing nothing out. I remember travelling to the desert and seeing, for the first time, the night sky unobscured by clouds and the haze caused by city lights. The billions of starts in the Milky Way were visible and it was at first frightening, but after a while when I realized that it was the naked universe and that it would stand for aeons and I would not, it gave me a kind of peaceful feeling. Now extend that to life. See life in all its beauty and ugliness. See your past and present and imagined future in an instant and it can give you a similar feeling. Your life becomes a meditation and the line between beauty and ungliness begin to blur and finally disappear.

Anything in-between these two ways I think will only cause the unhappiness that comes from attachment. They are perhaps the only two ways to become detached and just let the world, the universe simply be. Of course the only one that is honest and involves no trickery is the last. Have I reached that? Can I reach that is a more pertinent question. No, of course not. Then I ask myself how do I know these two states exist? I don't. Perhaps it's just a hope.