Written by Wes Annac, The Culture of Awareness - http://tinyurl.com/oenumd8

I wrote the following for the reader’s question segment of The Culture of Awareness Weekly Newsletter.

Our question this week comes from a reader who wants to know if true, lasting peace on earth can be attained.

“Is it possible to have complete peace while living on earth? Will the world reach a peaceful state soon?”

Like others, I hold hope that a new day’s on the horizon and humanity will eventually embrace peace over division and war. This is what most seekers strive to see, and the hope is for the things we’re doing to inspire others to contribute to a revolution that’s just begun.

I think the rest of the world will have to open up before we can create heaven on earth, but despite the amount of people who still feed lower states of consciousness on a daily basis, I think lasting inner peace is attainable here.

It isn’t easy, and it requires mastering our physical and spiritual faculties. I’d imagine lasting inner peace can only be attained with serious mental and emotional discipline, which, in essence, allows us to continuously detach from the aspects of life that makes us feel like strangers in a place that seems filled with negativity and hardship.

I think the problem with finding and sustaining inner peace is that we’re confronted with the harsher realities of life every day, and it can make us feel like this world isn’t the heavenly home we want it to be.

What most of us don’t know is that with heaven comes challenge. Attaining inner peace will help us feel more heavenly, but in order to do it, we’ll have to embrace the daily challenges that refine our consciousness and teach us things we need to learn.

Even the most difficult and challenging situations have something valuable to offer, and the hardest part of sustaining inner peace is calling on it when we just don’t feel strong enough; when our own negativity (or the negativity of the world around us) feels so strong that we can’t resist letting it in and subsequently feeding it.

As hard as it is for some to contemplate, we really are in complete control of (and completely responsible for) our emotions and the things we say and do. When we step away from the inner peace we want so desperately to sustain, we separate ourselves from it and put ourselves in a state of division from peace, love and spirit.

We erect a wall between our finite earthly selves and our centered, multidimensional selves, and we convince ourselves the love-filled reality we enjoyed only a moment ago is as distant as the Pleiades. It isn’t, but once we distance ourselves from it and embrace negativity, we’ll probably convince ourselves it is.

The less people who are aware and centered, the harder it’s going to be.

This doesn’t have to deter us from pursuing it, and it’s actually necessary in that it uses extreme catalyst to catapult us into mastery. It’s an intense path, but the rapid and extreme lessons we learn on earth allow us to quickly and difficultly learn the lessons we need to learn to become unflinching masters who can show the way for others.

The hardest lessons we face essentially catapult us into mastery. If we reach a point where we want true and lasting inner peace more than anything else, we’ll have to detach from the desire to feed negativity, however justifiable it sometimes seems, and continuously monitor our thoughts, feelings and actions. We’ll basically have to become masters.

I don’t want to seem like a spiritual drill sergeant by urging us to take more responsibility for the attainment of lasting inner peace, and it’ll be just as hard for me as the rest of you to actually do it. But I’ve been led to think through a series of life lessons that if we seriously want inner peace, we have to work for it. We have to fight for it.

Like a spiritual warrior on an emotional battlefield, we have to claim inner peace.

We have to embrace it in the worst, hardest situations; the times when we could easily fall into negativity and make ourselves miserable. This advice comes from someone who’s failed to stay centered plenty of times, and I know from experience that we’ll continue to be miserable until we take responsibility and make a change.

We can’t just make a change – we have to sustain it. We’ll have to be diligent in every moment (while still being relatively detached), and make sure we don’t fall into old habits that lead us to negativity.

In a way, all it really entails is recognizing when negativity enters our consciousness (whether it gets there from an internal or external source) and handling it with a centered mind and an open heart. It requires the discipline mentioned earlier, and keeping it up in the face of all situations could be a long journey, but our victory will be sweet.

Mastery and lasting inner peace are naturally permeating the world as everyone awakens, and the more consistently and enthusiastically we embrace them over negativity when the latter comes our way, the more they’ll stick with us.

They’ll eventually be natural parts of us that we call forth with ease, and by the time this happens, maybe the rest of the world will have opened up to them too.

This concludes this week’s reader’s question.