Quotes about Stillness

Inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it kinetic energy striving, but it comes to us slowly and quietly and all the time.

"We all share the wound of fragmentation.  And we can all share in the cure of unification.  Healing is the unification of all our forces -- the powers of being, feeling, kwowing, and seeing.

I look in the mirror and I look out the window and I see myself and others struggling to be in our bodies.  Struggling to know who we are and what we need.  To like ourselves, rather than wanting to be somebody else, or somewhere else.  I see our inability to relate, to communicate from the heart, to overcome our distance and alienation from one another.  I see us avoiding each other's eyes, at a loss to know what others need.  I see people searching for direction, trying to summon up their personal power, longing for the strength to be independent.

The wounded healer in me knows that healing our driven selves comes from our ability to empower our bodies, hearts, minds, souls, and spirits once more, bringing them into vital unity.  Spiritual healing means taking responsibility for being a whole person.  We have to take responsibility for being a body, for having a heart, for possessing a mind, for awakening our soul, for opening to our spirit.  We need to do right by our body, purify our relationships, use our mind for creative freedom and not enslavement, free the soul from the ego, and undertake the spiritual journey.  A whole person is an inspired person, one who embodies the spirit.

Disease is inertia.  Healing is movement.  If you put the body in motion, you will change.  You are meant to move: from flowing to staccato, through chaos into lyrical and back into the stillness from which all movement comes.

If you let your heart be moved, be open to the risk and the adventure of feelings, letting them work through to completion, you will change.  Tears turn into smiles, anger into embraces.

If you free your mind to experience and complete each of your life cycles, integrating their teachings and tasks, you will change.  It's when you stop moving through life that you get caught out of place, that you react to adult situations with childhood emotions.  Moving completely through your life makes you whole.

If you awaken your soul, you will change.  Engage your characters.  Watch yourself act them out.  Master them, and you're free to be, feel, think, and act as your distinct self.

The spirit in motion heals, expands, circles in and out of the body, moving through the layers of consciiousness from inertia to ecstacy.  Open to the spirit, and you will be transformed.

Movement is my medium and my metaphor.  I know that if a wave of energy is allowed to complete itself, it yields a whole new wave, and in fact that is all I really know.  Riding these waves means joining the cosmic dance that, as Dante says, 'moves the sun and the other stars.'"

The spirit of obedience is necessary not only in monks, but everyone else, too.  Even the Lord was obedient.  The proud and those who are a law unto themselves prevent the indwelling of grace and therefore never know peace of soul; whereas the grace of the Holy Spirit enters with ease into the soul of the obedient, bringing joy and quiet.

Non-doing has nothing to do with being indolent or passive. Quite the contrary. It takes great courage and energy to cultivate non-doing, both in stillness and in activity. Nor is it easy to make a special time for non-doing and to keep at it in the face of everything in our lives which needs to be done.

The teaching of the buddhas is: Find time and a place to remain unoccupied. That’s what meditation is all about. Find at least one hour every day to sit silently doing nothing, utterly unoccupied, just watching whatsoever passes by inside. In the beginning you will be very sad, looking at things inside you; you will feel only darkness and nothing else, and ugly things and all kinds of black holes appearing. You will feel agony, no ecstasy at all. But if you persist, persevere, the day comes when all these agonies disappear, and behind the agonies is the ecstasy.

Humans, like other animals, are shaped by the places they inhabit, both individually and collectively. Our bodily rhythms, our moods, cycles of creativity and stillness, even our thoughts are readily engaged and influenced by seasonal patterns in the land. Yet our organic attunement to the local earth is thwarted by our ever-increasing intercourse with our own signs. Transfixed by our technologies, we short-circuit the sensorial reciprocity between our breathing bodies and the bodily terrain. Human awareness folds in upon itself, and the senses – once the crucial site of our engagement with the wild and animate earth – become mere adjuncts of an isolate and abstract mind bent on overcoming an organic reality that now seems disturbingly aloof and arbitrary.

All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness.

Just become quiet, still, and solitary, and the world will offer itself to you to be unmasked; it has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

When we are able to make ourselves as still within as an untouched mountain lake, we have an exquisite reflection of all that is in and around us.

Man has to learn to seek first the kingdom of heaven, the place of stillness and quiet at the highest level of which he is capable, and then the heavenly influences can pour into him, recreate him and use him for the salvation of mankind.

When l  am very still I can dispel the illusion of distance to touch your face

Aimed at as something terminal or ultimate or absolute, quiescence is, from the standpoint of life, a form of death, a stillness and inertia, an impassivity. Life is infinite sensitivity to all things, the quicksilver sympatheticism of everything that belongs in the natural cosmos. The mind and will do close out or exclude extraneous distractions as a means to their powers of self-concentration ("Thinking is a momentary dismissal of irrelevancies," Buckminster Fuller). But Buddhism makes this quiescence not a means but an end in itself, incompatible as it may be with the very life of spirit and of will. Taken as a mere exercise or tonic, it has an utterly different value of course.

The approach to it  ( Mind, Absolute, Void, Buddha Nature, Enlightenment )  is called the Gateway of the Stillness beyond all Activity.  If you wish to understand, know that a sudden comprehension comes when the mind has been purged of all the clutter of conceptual and discriminatory thought-activity.  Those who seek the truth by means of the intellect and learning only get further and further away from it.  Not till your thoughts cease all their branching here and there, not till you abandon all thoughts of seeking for something, not till your mind is motionless as wood or stone, will you be on the right road to the Gate.

The beauty of a piece of music is not in its technique but in the Soul of its creator; nor is it in the
sound vibrations of the piece but in the silence of the Light from which the sound springs.

Curfews
Noise
Is a cruel ruler

Who is always imposing
Curfews.

While
Stillness and quiet
Break open the vintage
Bottles,

Awake the real
Band.

The hidden so-called scholars of old did not hide themselves and refuse to be seen. They did not close the door on their words and refuse to let them out. They did not shut away their wisdom and refuse to share it. But those times were all haywire. If it had been possible for them to act, they could have done great things, bringing all to Oneness without any sign of doing so. However, the times were not favorable and it was not possible, so they put down deep roots, remained still and waited. this was the Tao by which they survived.

Know that you have a center.
Know that you belong there.
Know that the path to the center takes no effort.

Dance is life.  Stillness is Love.  Together, they are everything.

Daily Nourishment

Nourish your Spirit with Stillness
Nourish your Mind with Knowledge
Nourish your Heart with Unconditional Love
Nourish your Body with Living Food
Nourish your Relationships with Thoughtfulness
  -- Tim Ong

Even when he is still,
The selfish man is busy.

Even when he is busy,
The selfless man is still.

Ponder being the first person with that telescope whose one eye expanded the universe, and thus created the largest cataclysms we may ever know as humans. Know You're Stillness, create your Universe, know God.

"God divides the stillness of His omnipresent Oneness into mated pairs, and simultaneously multiplies their power to simulate His omnipotence and omniscience through fast centripetal motion. He then unites His mated pairs to simulate His Oneness, and simultaneously multiplies their speed of centrifugal motion until they disappear into His omnipresent stillness."

"All the things that truly matter — beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace — arise from beyond the mind."

The U theory suggests that the central integrating thought ... will emerge from building three integrated capacities: a new capacity for observing that no longer fragments the observer from what's observed; a new capacity for stillness that no longer fragments who we really are from what's emerging; and a new capacity for creating alternative realities that no longer fragments the wisdom of the head, heart and hand.

X.
The nature of light is to shine.
The way of the river is to return home to its sea.
The essence of human is being.
For the sage there are no answers to the important
questions of existence such as, who am I and
why am I here.
The sage is silent.
The sage is smiling.
The sage just IS.

Returning to the source is stillness, which is the way of nature.
The way of nature is unchanging.
Knowing constancy is insight.

A quiet mind is all you need. All else will happen rightly, once your mind is quiet. As the sun on rising makes the world active, so does self-awareness affect changes in the mind. In the light of calm and steady self-awareness, inner energies wake up and work miracles without any effort on your part.

True freedom and the end of suffering is living in such a way as if you had completely chosen whatever you feel or experience at this moment.

This inner alignment with Now is 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 a human being, no humility, no compassion. You would not be reading this now. 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.

Most human interactions are confined to the exchange of words — the realm of thought. 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 being in stillness together. Stillness cannot and need not be created. Just be receptive to the stillness that is already there, but is usually obscured by mental noise.

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 mind exists in a state of "not enough" and so is always greedy for more. When you are identified with mind, you get bored and restless very easily. Boredom means the mind is hungry for more stimulus, more food for thought, and its hunger is not being satisfied.

When you feel bored, you can satisfy the mind's hunger by picking up a magazine, making a phone call, switching on the TV, surfing the web, going shopping, or — and this is not uncommon — transferring the mental sense of lack and its need for more to the body and satisfy it briefly by ingesting more food.

Or you can stay bored and restless and observe what it feels like to be bored and restless. As you bring awareness to the feeling, there is suddenly some space and stillness around it, as it were. A little at first, but as the sense of inner space grows, the feeling of boredom will begin to diminish in intensity and significance. So even boredom can teach you who you are and who you are not.

You discover that a "bored person" is not who you are. Boredom is simply a conditioned energy movement within you. Neither are you an angry, sad, or fearful person. Boredom, anger, sadness, or fear are not "yours," not personal. They are conditions of the human mind. They come and go.

Nothing that comes and goes is you.
"I am bored." Who knows this?
"I am angry, sad, afraid." Who knows this?
You are the knowing, not the condition that is known.