Peace & Happiness are the True Nature of All Living Beings.

Let’s begin by observing and acknowledging a simple fact about all living beings: Life reveals that the true nature of living beings must be peace and happiness, as everyone instinctively seeks them while avoiding conflict and suffering. Yet, our pursuit often leaves us with less peace and more disappointment, highlighting the challenges and imperfection of the happiness we seek, which frequently appears tainted with sorrow.

Why, then, are we experiencing the opposite?

An estimated 99% of people are unaware that everything that exists shares the same essence and origin as them, making us not only identical but part of one unified organism. Furthermore, most people hold beliefs that are ungrounded, unscientific, and ignorant of the true nature of existence. This ignorance is responsible for all forms of physical and mental suffering: physical and emotional pain, hunger, desire, jealousy, hatred, greed, exploitation, inequality, injustice, war, and more. 

Modern societies and the institutions created to make life easier make no effort to understand how everything truly exists, nor do they address the illusion of duality that everyone has accepted as natural. We and they perpetuate the false beliefs that trap us in an endless cycle of dissatisfaction, conflict, and war. Most people remain oblivious to the unbiased and irrefutable facts of existence, and many are unwilling even to acknowledge these facts as facts. Not only are we failing to help one another understand the root cause of personal and global suffering, and how to effortlessly end them, but we also don't know what that cause is—and often seem indifferent to discovering it.

The way to end all personal and global problems and suffering was discovered over 2,000 years ago by Nagarjuna and put into scientific and logic-based formulas. A bit about Nagarjuna’s discovery. Yet, to this day, not a single public or private school offers a course on it. Isn’t that strange?

We crave happiness and peace, yet we fail to understand why they always seem just out of reach—or come at a truly horrific cost to others, nature, and ourselves. True happiness and peace, however, are free and can be realized instantly when the root cause preventing them from existing in our lives is understood and removed. This understanding is crucial to ending all forms of suffering and preventing future ones by eliminating their very cause. True peace and happiness can only be experienced when we take a moment to honestly observe and acknowledge that our current perception of an individual self and others is simply contradictory to the facts—like an illusion.

How do we observe and recognize the facts about existence?

We need to ask ourselves: who can truly claim to possess an individual self?  

Everyone feels and believes they are an individual self—but are we, or are we something far greater? If we were truly an individual self, we would have to be a singular entity, full of our own essence and not a product of everything else and their essence. To be full of our own essence would mean that we possess our own unique, self-generated nature capable of bringing us into existence. So, are we a self-produced singular entity? 

Let’s be honest and observe the facts without relying on conceptual answers or our beliefs. The facts of how we exist are what we seek. Are we truly one thing, inherently full of our own essence?

If we are honest in our observation, we will recognize that individuals are not singular entities. Our bodies and minds are made up of an infinite number of ever-smaller, non-singular parts. Each part, and the assemblage of parts we call "bodies", "me," or “them,” was not self-generated but is instead a product of the whole—of universal nature and universal essence. Thus, none of us can claim to have a personal essence that is unique or different from anyone or anything else in the universe. Everyone is a product of the same universal physical and non-physical parts. Everyone is a composite of everything else and their essence.

This applies to our minds as well, the non-physical aspect shared by all living beings. Each moment of consciousness is not one unchanging moment full of its own essence. Each moment is composed of an infinite number of ever-shorter moments, and each of them is also made up of even smaller moments. Every moment, regardless of its length, is a product of the preceding moment, forming a continuous flow of events. This realization challenges the common belief in a permanent person or an unchanging soul because there is no separate owner apart from the ever-changing body and mind. If there were an unchanging soul or "me," the body and conscious experiences of the mind would belong to someone else and be experienced by someone else—not by me. Of course, this is not how anyone experiences themselves, proving that many beliefs we've accepted as true are nonfactual, unscientific, and illogical. These beliefs are based on wishful thinking and the fantasy that we somehow exist as a permanent, separate being in a universe where nothing is permanent.

By acknowledging how we and everything else exist, we can conclude that no object or person, including us, exists as our senses tell us. Our senses perceive everything as if everyone and everything had its own individual self. This is what our senses tell us about the world and ourselves. However, this is not true. It must be a trick our mind plays on us because, according to the facts, no one exists this way.

The blind believe in labels trick us into experiencing others when there are none but ourselves?

Since everyone is identical to the whole that produced them, there are no inherent differences between anybody except for relative and superficial ones, like being tall, short, big, or small. All differences exist in our mind's concepts—the labels our mind creates and projects onto physical forms. What most of us forget is that labels, concepts, and names originate in our minds and do not come from the physical forms our minds perceive. We need to recognize that labels exist only in our minds and do not originate from the side of physical forms. Yet, 99% of us believe that the labels we use, which are merely sounds, come from the people and objects themselves. Our mind tricks us into thinking that when we perceive a physical form and think or say "me" or "them," we are merely acknowledging what we perceive. However, this belief is utterly opposite to the facts. Most of us do not realize that the labels exist nowhere on the side of the physical forms, yet we somehow believe that they have always been there, one and the same as the physical form. This is not true. There is no "me" or "them" anywhere in reality except in our minds as thoughts, labels, and concepts. The forms are there but where is the me or them without the label? Please, check for yourself.

Summary:

True peace and happiness become effortless when we realize how everything exists and let go of the false ideas we once held as true. The simple science and logic that explain how everything exists versus how it appears to our senses are unbiased and irrefutable—they are facts of life. A simple recognition that our senses are deceiving us into believing the world and ourselves are separate entities is all it takes.

Vast Self seeks to help everyone and every institution pursue true peace and happiness and put an end to conflicts and wars. We aim to help people recognize the false preconceptions and misunderstandings they hold about themselves and the world so that everyone can find the inner peace and happiness that has previously eluded them.

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