Just Being Still

Sometimes, I prefer to stay still.

All the running around, shouting, doing work, accomplishing and planning appears ridiculous in these times. I wish to throw off everything and every concept I despised and every concept I believed in. In days of such times, I prefer not to even think about anything. 

It appears ridiculous because at the end, it gets you nowhere. The movement is only notional – after Death, all that we do, is erased. Then why should we keep doing something? Nowadays, I see everybody supremely engaged with billion tasks every second of their life – as if – a single moment of stillness would have been sacrilege! Hyperactivity, anxiety, stress are all a result of giving oneself lack of time and being overly attached to thoughts. 

The first impact of sitting still is that one becomes aware of the riot of thoughts that our mind generates. By practice, one is able to see the characteristics of thoughts – desire, emotions, feelings, intellect. One is able to see the impulse for those thoughts – environment, body, person, social construct or anything else. By further observation, one is able to see what “connections” do thoughts generate and what do these connections lead finally to – anger or joy or rationality or something else? This is called “perception”.

One may then start to decide, which connections need modifications and which connections need to be dropped off? By this, we are ensuring our own calmness. By sustained practice, we limit ourselves to very fundamental thoughts – and come close to understanding experience of Time and Space.  We therefore realize, that ‘we’ was a notional identity that we had created for us (a space-time phenomenon). This can be modified, altered, transformed for our own good. 

Finally, the fundamental learning is about realizing the experience of transcendence and going beyond mind-body consciousness. That zone is the zone of “no fear”. It is pure Space. Anything less than that (grosser than that) generates fear because of identification with mind-body.

Our responses in life are required to go in the above direction. By realizing pure Space, our movement acquires depth. 

Otherwise, at a fundamental level, we are all alone. Birth and Death and the journey spanning these two events is mine to take – any other thing in this journey is incidental – is happening outside me and I am choosing to respond to it because of my mind-body consciousness. Thus, watch the nature of your thoughts. It holds the key to everything.