There is a vast difference between being "happy" and finding a genuine inner peace that "passes all understanding" to quote the book. Happiness is often confused for inner peace. The two are not the same. One can be having a miserable experience and still be at the core "at peace." You can be suffering through the loss of a loved one, career, belief or be in a health crisis an still have an inner peace. When you meet these unusual people, you remember them. The bottom line is tied directly to how one graciously accepts what is as opposed to demanding life be some other way for happiness to be. Happiness is that shallow and temporary fix one gets from stuff, position and comfort, while peace is that deep ability to not define the real self by such elusive qualities. Inner peace is the ability to say "is that so" when life does what it does and defeat the drama queen in all of us with presence.

Is it Good, or is it Bad?

I have a saying "It’s not good, it’s not bad. It just is." on the wall in my workspace and many clients comment on it. They like it even thought they can’t quite say why they like it. I think the reason is that down deep, we all know that one can’t judge how something works out no matter how it seems at the moment.

A client knocked it off the wall accidentally and cracked the glass. She brought it out to me in tears and said she was so very sorry. I said read it

I told her she made it even more perfect a truth than before by breaking the glass. I thanked her for how good the crack looked going all the way through the saying. She smiled and said "I get it but Dennis, you ain’t right." I hung it back up and now clients think the crack was deliberate for effect.

Who’s to say what is good or bad? So often what seems so good turns out to make a miserable experience. What seems so bad turns into the greatest teacher and opportunity. Doors open to better ways of being or an opportunity that never would have come any other way. Bad stomach cramps and a morning in the bathroom after an anniversary dinner the night before, gone bad, did , in fact, keep one business man from making it into work exactly where the first plane hit on 9/11. For him what’s bad certainly was good.

A "bad" experience can force one to let go of illusions, falsehoods and wrong concepts that will not serve one’s life experience. A "bad" experience can cause one to become more real, more humble, more compassionate and to possess an understanding . A bad experience, when viewed from the ego which is merely the mind’s false sense of the self can keep one frozen in time, bitter, angry and consumed with changing the unchangeable past. The ego is that unconscious and running mind that views itself as unique and separate from everything and everyone else. The ego views everyone and everything as a potential threat to itself and can only preserve itself with control, power, greed and attack. Ego runs and ruins organizations and sends governments off to commit genocide on those perceived as "them." All conflict is a battle of egos, and the need to be right. Give up the need to be right and you will have arrived at a state few attain to.

Eckhart Tolle in The Power of Now sums it up nicely:

"When two or more egos come together, drama of some kind or another ensues. But even if you live totally alone, you still create your own drama. When you feel sorry for yourself, that’s drama. When you feel guilty or anxious , that’s drama. When you let the past or future obscure the present, you are creating .the stuff of which drama is made. Whenever you are not honoring the present moment by allowing it to be, you are creating drama."

"Most people are in love with their particular life drama. Their story IS their particular life drama. When you live with complete acceptance of what is, that is the end of all drama in your life.

YOU CANNOT HAVE AN ARGUMENT WITH A FULLY CONSCIOUS PERSON."