Slipping Into Stillness

When we learn to bring our mind into alignment with itself, clarity is the result. We begin slipping into stillness because we are flowing with what we are. Our minds become single-pointed, our internal state still, because our thoughts and actions are a direct extension of the deepest levels of ourselves.

Stillness is not a state of stagnation, but brimming potential. There may be an absolution of verbal-linguistic thought, though there is consciousness, the experience of which is amplified. And from this deeper experience desires and inspirations pour forth as ideas, insights, and understanding.

To continually return to this place of stillness, always to be slipping into stillness, we must become dynamic people. Not in the sense of charisma or enthusiasm in the eyes of the onlooker, but in how we are perpetually evolving and progressing forwards.

We must grow with what arises within and through us from silence, expressing and manifesting all that emerges from stillness. Because we will not be able to return to stillness until we resolve and actualize the information-inspiration that comes to us in these experiences.

I have found that all intense spiritual experiences give us knowledge. They occur to teach and instruct, not simply for us to feel good and mystical. They give us information and how we need to live, what we are, and who we need to become. Thus if we do not become dynamic people, learning how to constantly grow and change with this information, then we will cease slipping into stillness.

We will periodically lose internal stillness, lose our connection with Spirit, because we have not adapted ourselves in accordance with Spirit, because our Ego is too rigid. Until we can adapt our behavior, habits, and thinking according to both what feels best and what is most effective, both at the same time, then our minds will be turbulent until we have resolved ourselves.

Stillness Into Stillness In All Our Actions

Meditation is not the be all and end all of life or spiritual discipline. It is the practice which brings us into contact with Spirit, assisting us to cultivate a connection to and awareness of Infinite Intelligence. Though to sit in that awareness for all the waking hours of our life is not the purpose or path for most of us.

Instead, we must learn to dynamically live in that awareness in all of our actions. This is the highest attainment. Find the spiritual states of awareness achieved in meditation in everything that we do, which also entails a removal of all those things which contradict a spiritual state. We will find ourselves slipping into stillness ever more deeply as our attention is consumed by degrees by all that resonates most deeply with who we are.

This stillness comes about when we are deeply engaged in our lives. When our actions are an extension of who we are. When our daily habits are designed to cultivate and express the highest and deepest of ourselves. Approaching this ideal is at the heart of self-realization, because it is the process of our thoughts, emotions, and actions all coming into alignment with the people we have discovered ourselves to be. Slipping into stillness is the byproduct of this path.

In order to achieve states of fulfillment and inner peace, satisfaction in the work that we do, we each must inevitably progress towards doing what makes us happy. Doing what makes us feel alive and engaged. To achieve this we will need to gradually develop the skill, knowledge, power, discipline, and value to earn the right to do these things for a living.

It genuinely doesn’t matter what level we do what we love at. What is important is that we consciously choose to fill our lives with all that makes us happy. Always searching for work that fulfills us, ways to serve others, areas and experiences we need in order to grow and awaken, and the truth we have within us that needs to be expressed.

Remember that you can begin this journey at any stage of life. Find a couple of hours each day that you can spend for yourself, on yourself, on some project, practice, hobby, or art that allows you can find yourself in. Surfing, rock climbing, music, dance, drawing, architectural design, gardening, scrap-booking, sewing – anything.

Stillness Through Patience

The doorway to a deeper experience of reality, to slipping into stillness, has always been through patience. Franz Kafka understood this when he wrote

“You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”

– Franz Kafka

The average person today, as the average person of all ages, only lacks the patience to sit quietly. No person has any real deficit but the patience necessary to discover the qualities, capacity, confidence, strength, or drive within themselves to learn and grow in the ways that they want to so they may become what they desire to become.

We lack only the patience to sit without distraction so that what is within can resolve not only into understanding and clarity, but action too. So that your desires can take a tangible form within your mind, so that you can actualize them as habits, and realize them as achievements.

In other words, we have not learned the art of staying with problems and challenges. When a thing is difficult, we don’t need to try something else. We need to slow down in our minds so that we may stay with a challenging piece for longer. All you need to do is develop the attention to stay with pieces for longer. For however long it takes for understanding to occur, for us to break through to deeper levels of experience of a thing.

The art of maintaining our attention on something, and living from this deeper place, is an art that seems to have been lost. A person will gradually begin slipping into stillness as these two criteria are met. As they do what is emotionally important to them in their life, and as they begin to slow down in their minds and so create, learn, and act more powerfully. Living from this place of stillness because the individual is in alignment with who they are, so that they are in alignment with the universe, and the universe in alignment with them. The center of their own storm.

The Art of the Spiritual Warrior

This is the way and art of the peaceful warrior, the spiritual warrior. These principles of slipping into stillness are the requirements along the path to sink deeply into spirit. Our lives cannot be filled with frenetic energy, in that our minds cannot be going in a billion directions. Yet this does not mean that our lives cannot be multidimensional. We just need balance, and discipline.

Slipping into stillness is a principle of acting with greater intention, nothing more. Every piece and every task is done with greater intensity and depth, because we now understand that every choice possesses a greater weight. What we allow into our lives and minds must be chosen with greater discretion.

This is possible even amidst the demands of daily life in the modern world. You can meditate in motion, if what you do is conducive to meditation in that it is in alignment with your True Self and with Spirit. The distractions of the modern world are what keep people from slipping into stillness, because the material and the superficial entrances and hypnotizes a person away from what they actually are.