What is Stillness? Debunking the Misconceptions.
Stillness is not a state of mind. It’s not a place where thoughts don’t Appear.
Neither is it a place of de-excitation or lack of desire.
Stillness is simply this; you as you are, with no desire to change anything about your current experience. No desire to avert from it, and with no dependency on it to stay the same in order to be happy.
The reason we believe that stillness is something that is accompanied with a lack of thought or calmness is purely because, to begin with, we are usually so disturbed and distracted by our thoughts or feelings that in order to feel no resistance to experience (stillness) we must remove the majority of our usual experience from our experience.
For instance, it’s easier to experience the stillness of the screen when we turn off the movie.
Stillness is in the recognition of the screen while the movie is playing.
What would recognising the screen do? Well, the screen, representing our fundamental nature of pure consciousness, is the essence of acceptance.
It’s nature is to accept everything that comes into itself. Therefore to recognise the screen, is to synonymously recognise our essential nature of pure loving acceptance.
This means of course, that we no longer unwillingly resist what appears and therefore live in harmony with experience and it’s diversity of appearances.
We could consider the essence of meditation or meditative practices to be the preparation for our eventual fixed attention on the stillness of the screen, and later to eventually see that the movie itself, is simply a rainbow dance of the ever present and imperturbable screen.
When this is seen, we no longer want to resist our experience. The screen is what we are. The screen does not resist the movie. Why would it?
What within the movie could ever disturb the screen?
When there is no resistance to what’s occurring, we are in that moment in perfect harmony.
Perfect harmony is the stateless condition of pure, raw, being alive.
What being alive should be like, divested of the resistance to it.
The common word we use for this is to feel alive. What our ancestors felt at the before middle and end of a good hunt. What we feel at the before middle and end of a romance. What we may notice on our death bed as the before middle and end of a life well lived. That sense of truly feeling alive. Or simply, happiness itself.
That is what this stillness is pointing to. Except, we don’t just want to experience the serenity of aliveness when in certain moments.
We want to live in it, as it is already our complete and fulfilled baseline condition. The raw experience of being alive.
All the Love and Wonder,
Saja.
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