Inner Work

For the week of November 24, 2008

Stillness: Warm, Intimate, and Cognizant

We acquire the taste of stillness through quiet contemplation, just sitting in outer and inner stillness. The outer stillness consists of a quiet space with no distractions or intrusions, as well as a relaxed body. The inner stillness just is, but to come to it is a variable process that depends on our experience, our understanding, and our current inner state. The journey into stillness is a journey from effort to non-effort.

One way is to focus at first on a very narrow aspect of experience. For example, a classic Buddhist method involves placing and holding our attention on the sensations associated with the air going in and out of our nostrils. In this, we do not intentionally change the pattern of our breathing. To help us focus, we can count the breaths 1 to 10, and then again from 1, while keeping our primary attention on the actual sensations of the breath. If we lose the count, we simply start again at 1. By the time we can stay with the breath and the counting continuously for several minutes, our thoughts are slow and sparse.

At that point we drop our exclusive focus on the breath at the nostrils, as well as the counting, and instead open our attention to include our whole body. As thoughts, impulses and sensory impressions come, we simply let them go. We do not chase them away and we do not follow them. They arise on their own and they disappear on their own.

Resting in our body, we notice the silent spaces between and behind our thoughts, the spaces of pure awareness, pure consciousness. We allow ourselves to be immersed in that stillness, letting it soak through our entire being.

That stillness of mind allows us to go yet further into the peace of stillness by opening the stillness of will. Here we no longer try to “do” anything. We do not attempt to manipulate our experience in any way. We drop all our inner burdens and reactions to them. We just sit and let things be as they are. This non-doing carries us through the last leg of our journey into stillness.

And there we find, perhaps to our surprise, that the stillness is not devoid of all qualities. First, it is cognizant. It is the very substrate of our mind and being. Stillness sees. It is awareness, consciousness itself. Further we find that this fundamental awareness is not cold, unfeeling, or foreign. On the contrary, it welcomes us into its intimate warmth, as its peace suffuses our heart. The stillness belongs to us and we belong to it, as if it were part of our body.

Once we become grounded in the ever-present ocean of stillness, outer stillness becomes less necessary. In that state, we can walk through noise and distractions, through a crowded marketplace, and remain at peace in inner stillness, even with thoughts. Thoughts do not disturb our inner stillness. We see them as thoughts and let them be, while we remain in the stillness beneath thoughts. And we can reopen our contact with the stillness at any time, at will.

But until we have that grounding, we cannot readily enter, much less sustain, contact with stillness. That is why the journey goes from effort to non-effort. The effort of focusing our attention narrowly, followed by whole body awareness, gathers our being into, and gives us a foundation in, the present. From here, we can open toward stillness without drifting off with some passing train of thoughts. If we went directly for the non-effort of stillness, we would soon fall into a pseudo-still reverie or dreamlike state. Instead we ground ourselves in our whole body and in awareness itself to enter the warm and intimate yet vast peace of stillness.

For this week, practice the journey into stillness.

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