On Sitting Still

05/08/2006 6:11 AM – 6:34 AM

When you cannot set the mind on a single point, set the body. It’s a crude hammer, but it will be enough. Be where you are, monkey-minded but still. There is a good enough thing. Don’t be swayed by chance. Sit up and do stillness.

If your mind races and you can’t stop it, sit or stand and be where you are. You are here typing. Your feet are flat on the floor. Your hands are resting on the speakers of your laptop. Your fingers are striking keys. Your eyes are following the curser as it moves across the screen, discharging letters. If the stillness is enforced on the body, and doesn’t flow freely from the mind, so be it. Stillness is the point. The quiet is the point. Perhaps the mind will follow, perhaps it won’t. Stillness is the point. Emotions rise and fall with the rising and falling of the fortunes of the day, let that still small point of quiet reserve be the anchor the keeps the ship from the rocks.

What do you expect from yourself? Physical transcendence? Ha. Don’t make me laugh. You live here in the real world, not the impossible fantasies of cruel fundamentalism. Be here now. Forgive them their trespasses, forgive yourself for believing them. Now let it go. Remember the beauty of your father. Remember the beauty of your mother. Remember the beauty of your brother. Remember the beauty of yourself. Forget the rest, it’s inconsequential to the path your walking on. You do not yet have to stand before the direct glory, so stop trying. Stand and feel the first rays of sunlight. Sit and type. Do what you must do in this plane of reality; it’s the only one you’re in today. There are the porch lights on the house down the street, still shining in the shadows of the low morning sun. There are the cars, parked by the side of the road, waiting without thought. That we are a very strange combination of quanta cannot be denied, but the super-quanta state is all that we have access to. Perhaps the rock doesn’t move because it has forced itself not to. Perhaps the dolphin doesn’t build cities because it’s evolved beyond the need to. I doubt it, but, really, what bearing does that have on your experience? Just let it go and be right here. I’m just typing words. You’re just reading them. Stand still and read. When you’ve finished, be still and do what needs to be done then. Come home. Come to anchor. Come to rest. That is all.