Albert Einstein said
Stand still. The trees ahead and bush beside you are not lost.
If we connect to the stillness within, we move beyond our active minds and emotions and discover great depths of lasting peace, contentment and serenity. Some important teachings that I learnt from the book “Stillness Speaks”.
1. Silence and Stillness
When you lose touch with inner stillness, you lose touch with yourself. When you lose touch with yourself, you lose yourself in the world.
Stillness is awareness
The equivalent of external noise is the inner noise of thinking.
The equivalent of external silence is inner silence.
Whenever there is some silence around you – notice it. In the moment of noticing the silence around you, you are not thinking. You are aware, but not thinking. When you become aware of silence, immediately there is that state of inner still alertness. You are present.
When you look at a tree and perceive its stillness, you become still yourself. You connect with it at a very deep level.
2. Beyond the Thinking Mind
The human condition: lost in thought
Don’t take your thoughts too seriously.
The human mind, in its desire to know, understand, and control, mistakes its opinions and viewpoints for the truth. You have to be larger than thought to realize that however you interpret “your life” or someone else’s life, it is no more than a viewpoint, one of many possibilities.
When you feel bored, you can satisfy the mind’s hunger by picking up a magazine, watching TV, making phone call – Your mind is hungry for more stimulus, more food for thought. Try to stay bored and restless and observe what is feels like. As you bring awareness to the feeling, there is sudden space and stillness around it. “Bored person” is not who you are. It is simply a conditioned energy movement within you. Boredom, anger, sadness or fear are not “yours”, not personal. They come and go.
3. The Egoic Self
The mind is incessantly looking not only for food for thought; it is looking for food for its identity, its sense of self. This is how the ego comes into existence and continuously re-creates itself.
Complaining and reactivity are favorite mind patters through which the ego strengthens itself. By doing this, you make others or a situation “wrong” and yourself “right”. Through being “right”, you feel superior, and through feeling superior, you strengthen your sense of self. In reality, you are only strengthening the illusion of ego.
The ego needs to be in conflict with something or someone. That explains why you are looking for peace and joy and love but cannot tolerate them for very long. You say you want happiness but are addicted to your unhappiness.
If you set egoic goals for the purpose of freeing yourself, enhancing yourself or your sense of importance , even if you achieve them, they will not satisfy you. Set goals, but know that the arriving is not all that important.
4. The Now
When you make friends with the present moment, you feel at home no matter where you are. When you don’t feel at home in the Now, no matter where you go, you will carry unease with you.
The division of life into past, present and future is mind-made and ultimately illusory. Past and future are thought forms, and can be remembered Now.
5. Who You Truly Are
Self-Realization : Knowing who you are beyond the surface self – beyond your name, your physical form, your history, your story.
Most people’s lives are run by desire and fear.
Desire is the need to add something to yourself in order to be yourself more fully.
Fear is the losing something and thereby becoming diminished and being less.
You cannot find yourself in the past or future. The only place where you can find yourself is in the Now.
6. Acceptance and Surrender
Have you ever verbalized your inner reality saying, “I don’t want to be where I am”? – like the traffic jam, your place or work, the people you are with etc. It is true, of course, that some places are good places to walk out of – and sometimes that may well be the appropriate thing for you to do. In many cases, however, walking out is not an option. “I don’t want to be here” is not only useless but also dysfunctional. It makes you and others unhappy.
Do not have a reactive like/dislike relationship in life where you are in almost continuous conflict with situation and people. The habitual and reactive “no” strengthens the ego. “Yes” weakens it. You form identify, the ego, cannot survive surrender.
Doing one thing at a time – the essence of Zen
Doing one thing at a time means to be total in what you do, to give it your complete attention. This is surrendered action – empowered action.
Surrender becomes so much easier when you realize the fleeting nature of all experiences and that the world cannot give you anything of lasting value. You no longer demand that a situation, person, place or event should satisfy you or make you happy.
When you no longer place an impossible demand on a situation, person, place or event becomes not only satisfying but also more harmonious, more peaceful.
Surrender comes when you no longer ask, “Why is this happening to me?”.
Acceptance of the unacceptable is the greatest source of grace in the world. Whatever you accept completely will take you to peace, including the acceptance that you cannot accept, that you are in resistance.
Leave Life alone. Let it be.
7. Nature
Whenever you bring your attention to anything natural, that has come into existence without human intervention, you step out of the prison of conceptualized thinking. When walking or resting in nature, honor that realm by being there fully. Be still. Look. Listen. See how every animal and every plant is completely itself. Unlike humans, they have not split themselves into two. They do not live through mental images of themselves, so they do not need to be concerned with trying to protect and enhance those images. The deer is itself. The daffodil is itself.
8. Relationships
How quick we are to form an opinion of a person, to come to a conclusion about them. It is satisfying to the egoic mind to label another human being, to give them a conceptual identity, to pronounce righteous judgement upon them. Every human being has been conditioned to think and behave in certain ways – conditioned genetically as well as by their childhood experiences and their cultural environment.
When you pronounce judgement upon someone, that is not who they are, but that is who appear to be. To let go of judgement does not mean that you don’t see what they do. It means that you recognize their behavior as a form of conditioning, and you see it and accept it as that. You don’t construct an identity out of it for that person. That liberates you as well as the other person from identification with conditioning, with form, with mind. The ego then no longer runs your relationships.
As long as the ego runs your life, most of your thoughts, emotions, and actions arise from desire and fear. In relationships you then either want or fear something from the other person.
What you want from them may be pleasure or material gain, recognition, praise or attention, or a strengthening of your sense of self through comparison and through establishing that you are, have or know more than they.
What you fear that the opposite may be the case, and they diminish your sense of self in some way.
Love does not want or fear anything. It is wonderful to go beyond wanting and fearing in your relationships.
If someone’s past were your past, their pain your pain, their level of consciousness your level of consciousness, you would think and act exactly as they do. With this realization comes forgiveness, compassion, peace. The ego doesn’t like to hear this, because if it cannot be reactive and righteous anymore, it will lose strength.
Most human interactions are confined to the exchange of words. It is essential to bring some stillness, particularly into your close relationships. No relationship can thrive without the sense of spaciousness that comes with stillness. Meditate or spend silent time in nature together. When going for a walk or sitting in the car or at home, become comfortable with bring in stillness together.
If spacious stillness is missing, the relationship will be dominated by the mind and can easily be taken over by problems and conflict. If stillness is there, it can contain anything.
The root of frequent and repetitive drama in close relationships (insignificant disagreements triggering arguments and emotional pain) lies in the basic egoic patterns: the need to be right and for someone else to be wrong. There is also the ego’s need to be periodically in conflict with something or someone in order to strengthen its sense of separation between “me” and the “other” without which it cannot survive.
9. Death and Eternal
When you walk through a forest that has not been tamed and interfered with by man, you will see not only abundant life all around you, but you will also encounter fallen trees and decaying trunks, rotting leaves and decomposing matter at every step. Wherever you look, you will find death as well as life.
Upon close look, you will discover that the decomposing tree trunk and rotting leaves not only give birth to new life, but are full of life themselves. Microorganisms are at work. So death isn’t to be found anywhere. There is only the metamorphosis of life forms.
Death is not the opposite of life. Life has no opposite. The opposite of death is birth. Life is eternal.
Everyone is going to die, but that remains a mere mental concept until one meets death “in person” – through serious illness, or an accident of through the passing away of a love one. Most people turn away from it in fear, but if you do not flinch and face that your body is fleeting and could dissolve at any moment, there is some degree of disidentification, from your own physical and psychological form, the “me”. When you see and accept the impermanent nature of all life forms, a strange sense of peace comes upon you.
People tend to be uncomfortable with endings, because every ending is a little death. That’s why in many languages, the word for “good-bye” means “see you again.”
Whenever an experience comes to an end – a gathering of friends, a vacation, your children leaving home – you die a little death. A “form” that appeared in your consciousness as that experience dissolves. Often this leaves behind a feeling of emptiness that most people try hard not to feel, not to face.
If you can learn to accept and even welcome the endings in your life, you may find that the feeling of emptiness that initially felt uncomfortable turns into a sense of inner spaciousness that is deeply peaceful.
By learning to die daily in this way, you open yourself to Life.
10. Suffering and the End of Suffering
Is suffering really necessary? Yes and No.
If you had not suffered as you have, there would be no depth to you as human being, no humility, no compassion. Suffering cracks open the shell of ego, and then comes a point when it has served its purpose. Suffering is necessary until you realize it is unnecessary.
Much suffering, much unhappiness arises when you take each thought that comes into your head for the truth. Situations don’t make you unhappy. They may cause you physical pain, but they don’t make you unhappy. Your thoughts, your interpretations, the stories you tell yourself make you unhappy.
What a miserable day.
He didn’t have the decency to return my call.
She let me down.
Little stories we tell ourselves and others, often in the form of complaints. They enhance our self of being “right” and making something or someone “wrong”. Being “right” places us in a position of imagined superiority and so strengthens our false sense of self, the ego.
Life would be simple without such stories.
Suffering begins when you mentally name or label a situation is some way as undesirable or bad. Start practicing “not naming” with small things. If you miss a plane, drop and break a cup, or slip and fall, refrain from naming the experience as bad or painful. Naming something as bad causes an emotional contraction within you. When you let it be, without naming it, enormous power is suddenly available to you.