All around us, lies boundless distractions… our smartphones, work problems, personal commitments, streaming services and so on that keep us universally stimulated and almost in a trance about how much our mind's are consuming and working in overdrive. This past week, as I mindlessly/annoyingly tried to find new music to listen to or a podcast of interest, it hit me - why am I seeking to consume more stimulus? At the time, I was driving through the Rocky Mountains, the sun was shining and instead of just taking in the present moment and soaking in its beauty, I was still transfixed on consuming more. It was all very innocent really, it was just my old programming…that was reciting its old demands to keep my mind occupied, to add additional layers of distractions. And although this thought came into my consciousness, I hadn’t fully begun practicing it. It wasn’t until I was trying to find a new show to watch one evening (meanwhile answering work emails), when my streaming account quit working, that again I realized, “okay Universe, I see what is trying to happen here…and I will quit resisting it”.
After a busy couple of months, I was being reminded to slow down, to be present and to just be. I can remember my first attempt years ago trying to sit silently in my own presence…the uncomfortable anxiousness that ran through my body. My mind is telling me to get moving, to get productive, to do “something”. But this is the beautiful part about being in the stillness of our own being…in those moments beyond those nagging thoughts, we connect with something deeper, something that has been yearning for our attention for all this time, something that deserves our most diligent patience, something that cannot be put into words but is awaiting its discovery. This was my reminder to reconnect with that place within…
“This is the inner guru, the inner guide. This is your own true self. For who you are when you finish with all your clinging to this and that, you are a being of pure love, pure compassion, pure wisdom, pure consciousness. You are perfectly present. And any time you need a friend to hang out with, sitting in your heart the size of a thumb is undoubtedly the grooviest friend you could ever have.” – Ram Dass
As Ram Dass explains:
"Silence is very much part of my universe now, an awareness of silence. My universe involves using silence and not waiting for something to happen, because the silence is what’s happening, because you and I come here seeking truth and the best I can understand it is that truth is not conceptual, that what you can think about isn’t the ultimate truth. That’s why God has no name, and that’s that process of getting to the place behind the form where discriminative things have merged or are unified.
If you and I come here to search for truth and then ignore the silence, it’s as if you flip it around and see the words arising up out of the silence, then you don’t see silence as absence of words because you’re resting in the silence rather than in the words. In fact a lot of my training of myself is to rest in the silence during the words because that quality of equanimity comes from being at rest, at peace. And that’s in there and at the same moment is all of the passion about life, that’s here. The difference is that those are really two different planes of consciousness, and the interesting question that I ask myself is as I understand the game of awakening better, the strategy, the whole thing about it, I’m aware it has to do with something.
“Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness… No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question…At any rate, they forbid our premature closing of accounts with reality.” - William James
This is The Way
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