The Still Mind

Every effect of unhappiness in people’s lives is due to the absence of stillness of the mind. The human mind, until mastered, is the only barrier to freedom from worry, anxiety and fear. Unless someone is willing to give time to entering the body as a means of self-enquiry, they’ll be unable to realise their wondrous spiritual potential. There are innumerable meditation methods, each having some value; but the doing as any effort is only necessary until it becomes an ongoing state of being. 

The mind picks up the beat of the world, motivated by the frantic pace of modern living and the drive to meet deadlines. The mind translates this tempo as fast frame sequences of thought patterns, which are replicated on the television and movie screens as quick cuts from one scene to the next. In each new generation there’s a speeding up of the processing function of the brain in order to handle more information at a faster rate. This is why some elderly folk struggle to make sense of what’s going on in the modern world, which often seems like a blur. However, with so much to process these days, many younger people have a limited attention span and find it difficult to be still. Therefore it’s essential for the mind to be anchored to something tangible until this becomes a natural way of being.

The body has a natural resonance, which is the sensation of being alive – or, at the octave of truth, the reverberation of our eternal origins. This sensation, which is created by the abstract light emission of each cell in all life forms, inhabits every iota of the body consciousness. It’s the tingling sensation felt at the tip of the fingers and, at a finer degree, at the tip of the nose. An effective stilling procedure is to go around the body putting the attention on particular areas such as the shoulders, small of the back, knees and feet and registering how the sensation differs. As an inner connection is made more tangible, the sensation becomes ever finer with less emphasis on any particular part of the body. The breakthrough, when it happens, is the extraordinary realisation that the body has no actual shape and that what I am is the purity of being in sensory form. When practised regularly, a natural balance is established between inner and outer realms. This greatly enhances the sense of being rightly grounded and enables someone to function with a greater confidence and ease.

Behind the screen of thoughts and images, which for most people run on as a continual loop from the mental process, is the still mind: the timeless reality of our human spiritual system. Everyone at some time connects with the still mind, which is registered as a remarkable freedom, together with an integrity that is able to observe life and the affairs of humanity without judgement of anyone or anything. The still mind, in the absence of any positional bias, perceives not only the fact of things but is supported by the knowledge of whatever it focuses upon. With such a creative faculty available, why don’t human beings elect to spend more time in this realm of inner clarity? And the answer is that we’ve lost the ability to stay connected with the stillness of mind.

In the approach to the still mind, there can be no expectation of what’s going to be discovered. Seek and ye shall not find – only the re-affirmation of what was already known. The still mind is unknowable as any memorable reference or stored impressions of the past. People enter the still mind fleetingly when enjoying life, but are unable to appreciate at a conscious level the uninterrupted well of creativity at their disposal. The error is that people want to hold on to the good feeling by interpreting the experience and replaying it in the mind. This has the effect of cutting off the connection to the stillness which is now, and the person is back in time with all the niggling self-doubts and uncertainties. It’s to let go of the last moment of existence and to be simple and new as life itself.

The still mind is the state before science’s big bang. It’s what I am in each body as the purity of spirit in matter. Nothing can be done as an act of personal will to realise this as an uninterrupted state – except for one thing. And that is to love it by acknowledging its presence more than the love of the world.