Finding Peace in the Groundless Ground of Being

In a world fractured by tribalism and distrust, a discovery of the groundless ground of being may be the most radical thing we can offer each other.

Written by Radhule Weininger

There is a type of peace that does not depend on circumstances. It is not the peace of a ceasefire, nor the temporary calm between crises, though we long for that kind of peace, too. It is something more fundamental – a peace found when we are willing to release our grip on certainty and touch the what the mystics across traditions have called the groundless ground of being.

In a world fractured by tribalism and mistrust, this discovery may be the most radical thing we can offer each other. 

Every great wisdom tradition, in its own language, points toward the same threshold. In Buddhist teaching, we speak of sunyata – emptiness or openness – the luminous, spacious nature of awareness that lies beneath the surface turbulence of our thoughts and reactions. When we rest in this open awareness, even briefly, we discover that the ground we thought we were standing on was never solid to begin with. Paradoxically, this groundlessness is not terrifying. It is liberating. 

The Wisdom of Mystic Traditions

The Tibetan Mahamudra tradition calls it the natural mind, always already present, like the clear sky behind the clouds. We do not manufacture this peace. We uncover it. 

The Christian contemplatives knew this territory well:

• Meister Eckhart wrote of Gelassenheit, which he described as a type of letting-go or a release into the ground of the soul where the divine dwells in silence. 

• The anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing counseled practitioners to abandon all conceptual knowledge of God and enter the darkness of pure presence. 

• Thomas Merton described a place beyond the false self, a "no-where" that is everywhere.

For these mystics, peace was not a reward for believing but a direct encounter with the living ground that upholds all things.

In the Sufi tradition, Rumi pointed to this same depth when he wrote of a field beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing. That field is not a metaphor for compromise. It is the ground of being itself, where the beloved and the lover dissolve into love. The great Sufi practice of dhik (the remembrance of God) is a means of wearing away the heart's false coverings until only the real remains. When Rumi says, "Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there," he speaks of the peace that lives beneath our moral certainties, a peace that takes no sides because it holds all of life.

The Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah describes Ein Sof, the infinite, boundless source prior to all form and name. In hitbonenut, the contemplative practice of deep reflection, the practitioner moves beyond discursive thought into the vastness from which all creation flows. In the Hindu tradition, the Upanishads declare Tat tvam asi (“Thou art that,”), pointing to the identity of the individual self with the universal ground of consciousness Brahman described this as sat-chit-ananda: being, awareness, bliss.

After more than four decades of contemplative practice and 35 years of clinical work as a psychologist, what strikes me is that these are not competing claims. They are complementary maps of the same territory. When a Buddhist practitioner rests in open awareness, when a Christian contemplative enters the prayer of quiet, when a Sufi turns to dhikr, when a Jewish mystic meditates on Ein Sof—they each, in their own way, touch the groundless ground. They each discover that beneath the constructed and the defended identity, there is something vast, benevolent, and utterly at peace.

Why This Matters to the World

This matters for the world because this kind of peace is not passive. It is generative. Our relationship to others shifts when we touch the ground of being. The boundaries between "us" and "them" become more porous. We begin to sense what John Makransky, in his Sustainable Compassion Training, calls the "field of care,"  an inclusive warmth that arises naturally from deep awareness. This is not a sentimental feeling. It is an orientation, a way of being present to the world's suffering and beauty without collapsing under its weight.

The deepening practices of each tradition – meditation, contemplative prayer, sacred movement, and chanting – are not private indulgences. They are wellsprings of moral clarity. When we are rooted in the ground of being, our commitment to the common good does not arise from ideology alone but from a felt sense of our shared belonging. We do not serve the world because we should. We serve because the boundary between self and other has become transparent enough that another's suffering calls to us directly.

In these turbulent times, we need this interfaith vision more than ever. Each tradition's particular beauty and rigor matter. This is not a flattening of our differences. It is a mutual recognition that our deepest practices lead to the same open ground, and from that ground, to the same imperative: care for one another, care for the earth, and care for the generations to come.

Peace, then, is not merely the absence of conflict. It is the presence of the ground. And the ground, as every tradition whispers in its own sacred tongue, has been here all along, waiting for us to stop, listen, and let it hold us so we may hold the world.