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Mind Has Rhythms
Stillness. I don’t think people know it very well. I know it well, but only because of how nature “favoured” me. Autism prevents much of that internal turmoil from ever forming, but it also blocks my being able to share well in human experience. Stillness is possible for everyone though. I’m not so sure the…
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Emotional Storm
Stillness is readily available. Any energy someone has to yell at you they gain from stillness, and that energy they are using to yell at you will be spent. Inevitably expended and force our minds back to stillness. But if you add your energy to theirs, can that quiet space arise? Someone yells at you…
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World In Stillness
We all are familiar with at least some stories of famous mystics, shamans, sages, of one form or another. At the very least, we have all heard some fairy tales. They are marked by something other than their great spiritual power. As amazing as they were, they were equally mysterious. They were mysterious because unlike…
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Dance Of Stillness
What does it mean if you have trouble sitting perfectly still? If you have to fidget and keep your hands busy? You have trouble sitting perfectly still, because you are trying to sit perfectly still. It’s like trying to stand unmoved with waves washing over you. You deny your connection to the world with an…
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Approach The Threshold
There is stillness in the world and there is stillness in the mind. They echo each other. The observer and the observed. The forces of the cosmic stillness give rise to the mind, and the mental stillness gives form to the world. They resonate most seamlessly in the still point, but even if we step…
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What Is Stillness?
There is a passage from the Bible. The words of Jesus to his apostles when they were aboard a boat on the storm tossed sea. All of the apostles were trying to figure out what they should do. Each having a different notion of what was wise or if they could do anything at all.…
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Between Thinking And Being
Is there a discordance between “sense” and situation? There is, yes. Situation is an opinion, a rigid pattern, a shell. Sense is music. Consider a loved one. If you try to understand them, what do you understand? What I can sense from them? Can you sense and try to understand? You understand what you perceive?…
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Witness In Stillness
In stillness, the blind find their way. In stillness, the deaf come to know the world. What if changes of mind are no different? If changes of mind are no different, does your insistence on any one way of being make sense? How does anything make sense? “Sense” is a narrow way of thinking. Or…
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Your Real Self
In stillness, I can have a thought for a moment then choose to have a different thought. Then choose to act on a thought if I like one of them. Can I do this by thinking? In thinking, it seems to take on a life of it’s own and we’re a dog chasing our tail.…
Category: Stillness
Stillness is possible for everyone. Stillness is the eye of calm in the center of the storm without which the storm can’t actually achieve the power it has. Human beings reject the very font of their own spiritual, emotional, and even physical strength. Stillness.
But the stillness… People fear it. They think it is death. First, there is no death. Second, in the stillness there isn’t a lack of form. There is perfect form, perfect clarity. This is why ancient elders sought to go into the stillness. The forms of the ancestors are not lost. They are perfected as is their wisdom.
“One’s action ought to come out of an achieved stillness: not to be mere rushing on.” D.H. Lawrence (British Poet, Novelist and Essayist, 1885-1930)
“Activity conquers cold, but stillness conquers heat” Lao Tzu (Chinese taoist Philosopher, founder of Taoism, wrote “Tao Te Ching” (also “The Book of the Way”). 600 BC-531 BC)
“If water derives lucidity from stillness, how much more the faculties of the mind! The mind of the sage, being in repose, becomes the mirror of the universe, the speculum of all creation.” Chuang Tzu (The most significant of China’s early interpreters of Taoism, 389-286 BC)