Quotes about Stillness

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.

When you lose touch with inner stillness, you lose touch with yourself. When you lose touch with yourself, you lose yourself in the world.

Your innermost sense of self, of who you are, is inseparable from stillness. This is the I Am that is deeper than name and form.

When you’re with stillness, you merge on some level with everything around you. You can’t pin-point where it’s coming from. From inside? From outside? Where? It just is. It is just this moment of peace and stillness. This is what you should be experiencing in your meditation. When you become very good at it, you will have the stillness with you all the time. It doesn’t leave. It never leaves. It is constantly with you—a sense of being. A sense of completion. And a sense of silence. A level of peace is with you at all times.

Waters from many rivers continually flow into the ocean but the ocean never overfills.
In a like manner, desires and attachments constantly flow into the mind of the Illuminated One, but he or she , like the ocean in its deepest depths, is totally still and never disturbed.

Society as That

All children crying tonight
Stop and be still
You are Love

All teenagers lost in fear
Stop and be Still
You are Peace

All Mothers praying for healing
Stop and be still
You are God

All fathers pushing to make it
Stop and be still
You are It

And all lost ones in thought
Stop and be very still
You are Truth

All nations fighting to be free
Stop and be still
You are already Freedom

Know This in Stillness

It is You.