The Art and Science of Stillness

The Art and Science of Stillness The path of Evolutionary Enlightenment, like all enlightenment teachings, is a path of ego-transcendence. In Evolutionary Enlightenment, however, transcending ego is not an end in itself—it's a means to a higher end. The reason that we want to have the liberating experience of transcending our personal fears and desires and our culturally conditioned values is first and foremost to open up some space within the self—space for evolution to occur. Why is this important? Because being inspired by the idea of conscious evolution is one thing, while actually engaging in the process of evolution is something else altogether. Many people are moved by the notion of evolutionary becoming. But within themselves they are not free. They are trapped in psychological hang-ups and attachments, with little or no space for that which is new. Their souls are not liberated, and their choices and actions are still being shaped by unconscious adherence to values and perspectives that have nothing to do with being a liberated vessel for the evolution of consciousness and culture. Merely being inspired by the potential for conscious evolution does not automatically give us access to the fearless inner freedom to actualize that potential. In order to find that freedom, to open up that space for the new, it is essential that you liberate yourself to a significant degree from your personal fears and desires and your culturally conditioned values. The inner freedom I am describing is not different from the goal of traditional enlightenment. In the traditional approach, however, that freedom is an end in itself. In Evolutionary Enlightenment, as I have explained, the attainment of spiritual freedom is not the end of the path but, ideally, becomes the foundation from which to engage in conscious evolution. So the foundation of the path and practice of Evolutionary Enlightenment is nothing less than the position of traditional enlightenment itself. In order to release your own consciousness and psyche for the wider and deeper embrace of the life process that Evolutionary Enlightenment demands, you must disentangle yourself, you must significantly free yourself from your karma, your history, your culture, and your personal ego. How does one discover enlightened awareness? There are two ways that you can gain access to the intoxicating joy and ecstatic wakefulness of that timeless spiritual attainment: spontaneously, or through making noble effort. Like an unexpected visit from God, for no particular reason, the doors of perception can spontaneously open, expanding your awareness to reveal a higher and deeper dimension of your own consciousness. This kind of spontaneous experience often happens in the company of a spiritual master who has access to this unmanifest ground, or among a group of inspired individuals who have come together to share mystical truths. You can also, however, assume the posture of freedom and experience enlightened awareness simply through disciplined effort. Traditionally, the metaphor for this radical freedom has been the image of the seated Buddha, perfectly still, eyes closed, his awareness focused within, his attention on the infinite nature of his own consciousness. So the way to practice this radical position is to literally take the posture he is taking—to engage with what I call "the art and science of stillness" or the traditional practice of meditation. The ability to be very still is foundational, because stillness is the perennial portal that gives us access to the dimension of ourselves and of life itself that is the source of traditional enlightenment. In learning how to be still, you are choosing to stand for and express that deepest part of yourself—that empty no-place before the beginning of time, before anything ever happened. That formless ground of Being is always the deepest dimension of who we all are, and it is the ultimate source and wellspring of all that is. In that ground, nothing ever moves, because there is no time, no form, no subject or object. There is only One, eternally at rest and at peace. By assuming the inner and outer position of stillness, you are bearing witness to the deepest part of yourself in the world of time and space. It is important to put a lot of time into practicing the art and science of stillness, until you become firmly rooted in the enlightened position it represents. Meditation is very simple. It is a posture —not as much a physical posture as an inner posture in relationship to your experience. Outwardly, it is important to be able to sit still and be deeply at ease and alert. Inwardly, being still means having no relationship whatsoever to anything that is happening, has happened, or will ever happen. Be still, relax, pay attention, and assume no relationship to anything that arises. That is the posture of freedom. * * * Rightly understood, meditation and enlightenment are one and the same. Meditation is the experience of a particular state of consciousness that has certain qualities, which are also the qualities of enlightened awareness. This is why meditation can be understood as a metaphor for enlightenment. When you meditate, you consciously choose to assume the enlightened relationship to your own experience, which means you are letting everything go. I'm pointing to an inner position in relationship with your own mind and emotions—a position that is free from compulsive identification with fear and desire, with time, thought, memory, and feeling. Taking this position requires enormous spiritual courage. If you do it, however, you will discover why the Buddha looks so happy and so peaceful. You will experience the joy of letting everything go—all the thoughts, feelings, and sensations that arise. When you look at a powerful statue of the Buddha, you can see, in his face and posture, his experience of the freedom from the momentum of karma and from all the fears and desires that are associated with it. That peace is attractive for any of us who are tormented by the movement of our own minds, and by the unpredictable rollercoaster of our emotional experience. It promises release from the frustration of ongoing existential confusion, repeated disappointments, and endless craving after things that are ultimately insubstantial. If you have the courage to let go of everything, while practicing the art and science of stillness, you will get a sense, or an intimation, of what the Buddha's experience might have been like. But you have to authentically do it. Imagine what it would be like to let go of everything and to have no desire for anything other than utter and unconditional release. In order to experience this inner freedom, when you sit down to meditate, you should be holding on to nothing. The whole point is to have no attachment whatsoever—no attachment to life, no attachment to death, no attachment to anything in this world. It is not a matter of letting go of any thing in particular. If there is something specific that's troubling you psychologically and emotionally, you can try to let go of it and you may feel more peaceful, but that's not meditation—and it's not freedom. Many people think that if they could just let go of this or that, they would be free. But if you are going to be free in a context of enlightenment, you have to be willing to let go of everything. The freedom of enlightenment itself is only won through letting go absolutely. So in the posture of meditation, which is a metaphor for enlightenment itself, unless in every moment you are letting go of everything, you are wasting your time. Meditation only becomes real, powerful, authentic, and liberating when it is a practice of letting everything go. Otherwise it is reduced to little more than a psycho-spiritual relaxation technique. It may make you feel better, but it won't set you free. Feeling better and being free don't necessarily mean the same thing. Feeling better is relative; being free is not. Ultimately, spiritual freedom depends on how profound is your ability to let go of everything—and not just once, but over and over again. If you understand what it means to let go of everything, you know everything you need to know about meditation. Then your meditation is real. It's the posture of freedom, the posture of enlightenment. It's a profound existential stand you are taking in relationship to life and death; a spiritual position you are assuming in relationship to eternity. So when I teach the art and science of stillness, I embrace the traditional enlightenment as foundational. Meditation, as a metaphor for enlightenment, is the practice of the unconditional willingness to be free from, to transcend, and to let go of anything that is in your way. * * * The all-important reason we need to take this position, once again, is that most of us are simply not available for the enormous task of conscious evolution. We are too busy with the contents of our own mind, hypnotized by the fears and desires of our personal egos, and paralyzed by the beliefs and expectations of culture. Our thoughts and emotions are like an ongoing drama that holds our attention captive. How available can we be for the creative process when our attention is distracted, when the self is still caught in a psychological prison and limited by unenlightened cultural perspectives? If you feel trapped by what's happening within your own mind, you are also inevitably going to feel trapped by what's happening in the world around you. The relationship that you have with life always starts with the relationship you have with your own mind and emotions. Unknowingly, we tend to build prisons in our minds and then we live in them. This is why we need to be very careful about which particular thoughts and feelings we choose to identify with and, even more importantly, to act upon. The thoughts or emotions that you choose to follow have karmic consequences. Once you act upon a thought or an emotion, a whole chain of events is set in motion—a lifetime can be built on a single thought. Too much of the time, we are barely conscious of which thoughts or feelings we are choosing to follow, and why: Are we blindly reacting to the prejudices and predispositions of the culturally conditioned self? Are we continually swayed by the fears and desires of our personal ego? Or are we fearlessly responding to our higher and deeper impulses, to the call of our own Authentic Self? The relationship that you have with thought, with the content of consciousness, will determine your destiny. * * * The reason you meditate is not to become free. When you awaken to the ground of Being, you discover that you already are free. In this deepest part of your self, nothing has ever happened. You have not been born; even time itself has not yet begun. The purpose of meditation is to recognize, over and over and over again, that you are already free. If your practice has power, if your experience of the ground of Being is deep and profound, you will discover and rediscover that, in truth, you are not a prisoner. You are not held captive by your own mind, nor are you imprisoned by your thoughts and emotions. This timeless mystical insight sounds so simple, but it's so, so easy to forget. The ground of Being is a deeper, infinitely more subtle dimension of your own consciousness that cannot be perceived by the gross faculties of the conditioned mind and ego. You can't see the ground of Being; you can't taste it; you can't touch it. Even if you have directly experienced the unconditioned freedom of that empty ground, when you return to the world of conditioned mind and ego, you're likely to doubt it. The mind simply cannot cognize this dimension of formless Being, and the ego cannot know it. That's why it's important to practice the art and science of stillness as much as you can. If you meditate regularly, with a strong intention, you will keep rediscovering that you are not a prisoner. You cannot recognize that enough. Until your conviction in your own freedom is unwavering, and you're able to prove it through unbroken consistency in the way that you live, meditate every day as if your life depended on it. You need to keep having that experience. Each and every time you realize that you're not a prisoner, it gives you a deeper confidence in that empty ground that is your own deepest self. It builds a conscious conviction in the liberating truth of no-limitation. When you practice the art and science of stillness, you must strive to maintain that posture of unconditional freedom, no matter what your inner experience may be. In that posture, you disengage your attention from attachment to and identification with all thoughts, images, memories, emotions, beliefs, and convictions, and simply allow it to come to rest upon awareness itself. If you want to be a liberated vessel for the evolutionary impulse, you must learn how to directly experience the chaos and confusion of your own mind without being disturbed by any of it. Only if you can bear it will you be able to take responsibility for it. If you can't calmly endure the chaos of your own mind, others will inevitably suffer the consequences. If you can't handle the movement of your own thoughts and emotions with ease, while you are simply being still and paying attention, then how are you ever going to make the appropriate choices when you are walking, talking, and engaging with others? Meditation is training for life. Stillness is training for action. When you assume no relationship to the content of consciousness, it doesn't matter what arises—you may experience the most sublime, ecstatic, and liberating revelations; you may be swamped by mundane and meaningless chatter; or you may be overwhelmed by frightening and irrational thoughts and impulses. But you remain disengaged and unmoved. Once again, we all have to be careful with the choices we make in relationship to our own internal experience, day to day, hour to hour, moment to moment, because there are always consequences. Whenever you allow yourself to be thrown around unconsciously by the inner storms of thought and emotion, and even worse, make wrong choices as a result, you will always pay a price for it. The worst part of that price is your own confidence, and your own belief in your capacity to evolve. But if, like the Buddha, you remain motionless and radically disengaged, inwardly and outwardly, when the storm passes, you'll experience a tremendous sense of exhilaration. You will realize that your own heart's conviction is more powerful than the chaos of your mind. That being said, it is no easy task to disembed our consciousness from a habitual and conditioned identification with thought and emotion. In order to discover what an appropriate, conscious, freely chosen relationship to our own experience could be, the first step, once again, is always to have no relationship to any of it. To go beyond the mind, you have to first reject the mind completely. Discovering what it means to stand free from the whole conditioned flow of thought is absolutely fundamental. It's prior to anything else. Our relationship to thought is everything. It's what determines how free we will be to create our own destiny and to consciously participate in the evolutionary process. Learning what it means to assume no relationship to the content of consciousness is the critical step in making it possible for you to align yourself with the Authentic Self, rather than the ego. Taking this bold step will enable you to take control of your own life in a way that nothing else can. Letting go of everything certainly doesn't mean we should conclude that all the contents of the mind and memory are wrong. Much of our history is of great value, and the highly developed capacities for emotion and cognition are some of evolution's greatest gifts to us. But if we want to be free, we have to be willing to let go of all of it first and then see how it looks after the fact. Only through letting go of everything will we eventually come to rest in the infinite ground of Being. That is the place from which we can make miracles happen. That kind of unconditional freedom is the foundation that makes conscious evolution possible. * * * As I said in the opening pages of this chapter, on the path of Evolutionary Enlightenment, the posture of stillness is not an end in itself. For those of us who are committed to the evolution of consciousness and culture, and who are endeavoring to participate wholeheartedly in the life process, we cannot remain in that posture of no relationship. Quite the opposite. To be an evolutionarily enlightened human being, you must cultivate dynamic and deeply creative relationships with time, with thought, with feeling, with others, with the world. And those relationships must be constantly informed by conscious, liberated attention, rather than by the unconscious conditioned assumptions of the personal and cultural ego. Your attention will become liberated by learning to assume the enlightened posture of no relationship. In this way, you can discover over and over and over again what it means to have a completely fresh, ever-new beginning to your relationship with time, thought, feeling, others, and the world. The experience of enlightened awareness is the perpetual knowing of that place within yourself where there is always an ever-new beginning. It's the ongoing revelation that anything is possible. That is what we discovered when we traveled all the way back to before the beginning of time—that in that mysterious no­place nothing has ever happened ... and that is why everything is possible. If the mysterious knowing that everything is possible becomes your fundamental and consistent reference point, then you will be an evolutionarily enlightened human being. You will always have access, in some way, shape, or form, to a perspective in which nothing has ever happened and everything is always possible. That's a very different orientation to life than most people can imagine. Too often, our relationship to life is based on conscious and unconscious cynicism and doubt—an underlying presumption of limitation that clouds our perspective on just about everything. It's important to understand that the experience of this ever-new beginning does not automatically wipe away your past. When you rise from your stillness, you still have to deal with the often harsh realities of human life and the challenges of your own karmic predicament. Your past will still be there, but it will no longer be an overwhelming obstacle to your own higher development. The unavoidable trials of a deeply committed life will continue to confront you, but now, because of where you are rooted, you are always in touch with the immediacy of infinite potential. In this way, in Evolutionary Enlightenment, the perennial practice of assuming no relationship to the content of consciousness not only aligns you with the inherent freedom of the empty ground of Being, but, even more importantly, it makes space within you for the limitless creative potential of the evolutionary impulse to reveal itself. It forges the emotional conviction that real change is possible, and it generates a renewed faith in your own capacity to evolve. If you want to develop in profound and significant ways, it is essential that you build up a reservoir of spiritual and emotional conviction, a source of boundless freedom that will give you the energy to transcend the apparent limitations of your own emotional, psychological, and cultural experience. By embracing stillness with deadly seriousness, you cultivate that freedom and conviction in no-limitation as a fundamental existential reference point. Meditation takes you back to zero, and creates the space for the ever-new beginning that is the essence of enlightened awareness. But always remember that you are the one who has to generate the momentum for your own higher development. Time and time again, you have to let everything go, until there is no question that whatever life confronts you with, you will respond, before thought, from the very best part of yourself—from your own Authentic Self, the evolutionary impulse, that infinite possibility that burst out of nothingness and became the whole universe.