Stillness
AN ADDRESS GIVEN BY ANN HELLYER AT RICHMOND & PUTNEY UNITARIAN CHURCH
Some of the things that I have greatly enjoyed here, in our church community, have been the “Poetry for the Soul” evenings, the “Artist’s Way” group, and a year’s course, which a group of us recently completed, called “Living by Heart”. All of them have reminded me again and again of how important it is to have a rich inner life, and how that very life informs and creates our outer life.
What gives us this inner richness?
What brings us to a greater depth of being and an inner knowing of what is true for us?
What brings us a deep joy of being?
I suspect that if we each reflected on what brings richness to our inner lives we would have a wonderfully varied, diverse tapestry of rich inner experience between us.
What makes your heart sing and your spirit soar?
What brings you a deep joy of being?
Maybe it is poetry, music, a rich spiritual dimension to your life, inspirational words, the wonders of nature, colour, friendship, being deeply in touch with Source. Maybe it is healing, beauty in its many forms, dance, singing, a particular form of creativity, or great empathy with another, giving and receiving, or is it just resting, in pure, deep stillness, which brings a peace, a deep peace, that our minds could never give us? A peace that passeth all understanding where we realise that we ARE that peace itself, and that we are not separate from it? Where we discover that this peaceful stillness takes us to an inner knowing from where all our intuitions, inner guidance and wisdom spring forth? For stillness brings us to our true nature, to who we really are, in the depths of our being.
A Chinese poet, Do Hyan Cho, once wrote:
It is stillness that creates love.
Stillness can take us to the rapture of the heart, to deep contentment and deep knowing.
Stillness takes us to the mysterious.
It always brings an aliveness and peace.
And in stillness we know what is undeniably true.
Eckhart Tolle who wrote the “Power of Now” and a “New Earth” wrote:
When you lose touch with stillness, you lose touch with yourself. When you lose touch with yourself, you lose yourself in the world.
In other words when we lose the connection to our own stillness, we lose ourselves in things, in thoughts, and in forms.
What would it mean if we brought more stillness into our lives?
Sometimes it seems very difficult to do – amidst the complexity of modern day living, since there are countless things that need our attention in life. It is necessary to give attention to our families, to our work, our homes, the bills, the paperwork, the deadlines to meet, the meetings we have to attend, the friendships we want to nourish, as well as dealing with the increasing and complex forms of communication, from emails to the Internet, to text messaging, to Facebook, and Twitter, as the pace of life greatly accelerates.
How do we bring simplicity into the midst of complexity?
The mystics and wise ones have always shown us the importance of stillness, of true presence, to what is occurring in the present moment.
How do we bring the timeless into time? How do we remove that kind of stressful and frenzied living from our lives?
It is said that there is a horizontal realm of our experience – to do with the past and the future and to do with all our mental concepts and thoughts . . that part of us that wants to accumulate knowledge, which is very necessary for certain aspects of living, but the difficulty is that this part of us imagines, that this is all there is. This is where many of our difficulties, confusions and sufferings lie. We get trapped in thought, as if thought were the only thing that existed so we never come into a NON mental realm which holds something far deeper and far more mysterious than thought.
And yet, as well as this horizontal realm, there is, this vertical realm to our experience, you might call it the formless , the transcendent or spirit, that has nothing to do with anywhere else but this, with what is occurring right now in this moment. It is aware of many things that are not anywhere else but HERE, right here, and when this formless vertical realm meets the horizontal realm of form, this is where TRUE life begins again. The horizontal realm is of the mind . . it really thinks that this is all there is . . and it makes up theories about life which is like putting this great mystery, this infinity, that is within us all and surrounds us all in to a small box, clamping the lid down, and putting it on a shelf, and saying this is how it is. I got it! That’s it!
And as we get caught in a mental and physical realm, we can never reach into an expansive way of being beyond what our limited minds can think. There are great powers of mind and much has been created through these mental powers. There have been many discoveries and innovations that have improved our material life beyond measure. There are many things for us to be deeply thankful for, but thinking is very different from knowing, from an inner knowing of what is real for us, the ultimate reality, that is right here now, that can be directly experienced, lived and known.
There is a drive in all of us that wants to experience what is authentic, what is real, and perhaps the answer, rather than lying in theories, lies right in front of us in the ordinary simplicity of who we are. And it is said that anyone can recognise this truth, and that it is in this truth, that true freedom lies.
Have we come to know this timeless, formless, wordless, vertical realm which streams from the transcendent? Can we experience it now in this very moment? What are we aware of right now that is beyond thought?
It is stillness that brings us to this vertical and spacious realm, from where all our creativity springs. Stillness helps us to rest the mind in the heart and to reach into something deeper than the mind. And in this, clarity arises, for the stillness or transcendence itself, is doing the work. It is stillness that takes us to the deeper currents of life.
Dr Jill Bolte Taylor, who was a brain researcher, had a massive haemorrhage in the left hemisphere of her brain, which caused a severe stroke and she had the extraordinary opportunity to study her own stroke from the inside out. As soon as she lost the capacity to use the functions of her left brain, the capacities to analyse, organise, describe, to categorise, to think logically and in a linear fashion, she observed that her chattering mind was completely shut down and she experienced an extraordinary silence, and was utterly captivated by the magnificence of the energy and everything around her. She experienced immense peacefulness, and the “Stroke of Insight!” as she called it was a tremendous gift to her and to us, to understand how we can truly live our lives.
She found her consciousness shifted to the present moment, whereby she experienced herself totally at one with the universe, and Jill’s recovery unleashed in her a torrent of creativity from her right brain and she realised that we are ONE, we are WHOLE, we are PERFECT….but it is covered up by who we THINK we are.
Jill taught, by her example, how we might more readily exercise our right brains, with the intention of helping us, and all human beings, to become more humane. The more peace we project into the world the more peace we will have on this planet.
It is said that stillness is an act of kindness to ourselves, a gift, of focused time which allows us to sink into a more spacious state of mind from where many riches arise.
Perhaps this is why, the recent TV programme called “The Big Silence”, which helped to transform the lives of those who took part, and the “Global day of Stillness” which was held last November, where thousands of people committed themselves to a time of silence during that day, is having such a big impact on people’s lives, as more of us begin to experience the unbelievable nourishment in stillness.
One of the gifts of stillness, is its gift of simplicity, through the clarity that arises from it. Some people are very gifted in bringing simplicity into complexity, because they are in touch with the transcendent realm, for they know who they truly are and feel a great sense of oneness.
One of the challenges that I have set myself is to experience that still, silent point within, which can never be taken away from us, which has always been here, and always will be, and to ask myself, am I living from a ground of stillness or am I seeing everything through a filter of thought?
How might the world be changed and transformed if everything we did came from an inner stillness and inner direction rather than the surface panic, confusion, frenzy chaos, fear, lack of clarity instability and so forth, for these are nothing to do with the depth, clarity and wisdom which arise from stillness. Our naturalness is the core of our intelligence, and in my experience we find that through stillness.
What if we could reach into a deeper intelligence and clarity? As we reach into true stillness we may find the creative and compassionate solutions we are looking for to heal our planet and transform our world. We may find levels of inspiration and imagination utterly unknown to us at present as we allow transcendence to move through us. The stillness itself would be doing the work. We would be living a fulfilled life from a ground of peace.
Stillness has a rare and special quality to it not found in anything else. It brings a deep attentiveness with it, so we can see the essence and beauty of all things. It brings the gift of presence and from that realm of infinite stillness we can speak true words. We come into the heart of ourselves and into the heart of existence and can see things for what they truly are.
Finally I will leave you with two favourite pieces of wisdom:
Helen Keller wrote:
The best and most beautiful things of this world cannot be seen or touched, but are felt in the heart.
And a modern day saint, Gurumayi, has said that
The heart knows only simplicity
The simple truth
The simple love
It is only the mind that creates complications and logical reasons,
When you get in touch with this incredible simplicity
Which is beyond all colours, all names, all forms, all shapes,
There is nothing but love
There is nothing but devotion.