Stillness Speaks

Silence and Stillness

• The Equivalent of external noise is the inner noise of thinking. The equivalent of external silence is inner stillness.
• Feeling the oneness of yourself with all things is true love.
• Even when there is noise, you can be aware of the stillness underneath the noise, of the space in which the noise arises. Become aware of awareness is the arising of inner stillness.
• Whenever you deeply accept this moment as it is - no matter what form it takes - you are still, you are at peace.
• True intelligence operates silently. Stillness is where creativity and solutions to problems are found.
• It is the intelligence itself -  the underlying consciousness out of which every form is born.
• Being still, looking, and listening activates the non-conceptual intelligence within you.

Beyond The Thinking Mind 

• If you can witness your own mental-emotional reactive patterns as they happen, then the unconditioned dimension of consciousness is already emerging in you.
• Spiritual Practice: Don't take your thoughts too seriously.
• The thinking mind is a useful and powerful too, but it is also very limiting when it takes over your life completely.
• Wisdom is not a product of thought. The deep knowing that arises through the simple act of giving someone or something your full attention.
• The next step in human evolution is to transcend thought. It doesn't mean not to think anymore, but simply not to be completely identified with thought, possessed by thought.
• Become at ease with the state of "not knowing."

The Egoic Self

• When you say "I", it is conditioned by the past and seeking to find its fulfillment in the future.
• Complaining and reactivity are favorite mind patterns through which the ego strengthens itself.
• Envy is a by-product of the ego, which feels diminished if something good happens to someone esle, or someone has more, knows more, or can do more than you.
• Guilt is another attempt by the ego to create an identity, a sense of self. The ego, however personalizes it and says, "I did that," and so you carry a mental image of yourself as "bad."
• Set goals, but know that the arriving is not all that important. The doing is fulfilling in itself every moment.

The Now

• The present moment is as it is. Always. Can you let it be?
• Since the future never arrives, except as the present, it is a dysfunctional way to live. It generates a constant undercurrent of unease, tension, and discontent.
• Now is the only place where life can be found.
• I am not my thoughts, emotions, sense perceptions, and experiences. I am not the content of my life. I am Life. I am the space in which all things happen. I am consciousness. I am the Now. I Am.

Who You Truly Are?

• It matters whether you succeed for fail in the eyes of the world. It matters whether you are healthy or not healthy, whether you are educated or not educated. It matters whether you are richr or poor -it certainly makes a difference in you life. Yes, all these things matter, relatively speaking, but they don't matter absolutely.
• Reincarnation doesn't help you if in your next incarnation you still don't know who you are.
• The truth is: you don;t have a life, you are life. The One Life, the one consciousness that pervades the entire universe and takes temporary form to experience itself as a store or a blade of grass, as an animal, a person, a star or a galaxy.
• Time is useless, however, for the most essential thing in life. the one thing that really matters: self-realization, which means knowing who you are beyond the surface self - beyond your name, your physical form, your history, your story.
• As you go about your life, can you be aware of yourself as the awareness in which the entire content of your life unfolds?
• By knowing yourself, playfulness comes into your life. You recognize this world as a cosmic dance, the dance of form - no more and no less.
• Through "you," formless consciousness has become aware of itself.

Acceptance & Surrender

• Can you detect even the slightest element within yourself of not wanting to be doing what you are doing? That is a denial of life, and so a truly successful outcome is not possible.
• Doing one thing at a time means to be total in what your do, to give it your complete attention. This is surrendered action - empowered action.
• The "yes" to what is reveals a dimension of depth within you that is dependent neither on external conditions nor on the internal conditions of constantly fluctuating thoughts and emotions.
• Surrender is surrender to this moment, not to a story through which you interpret this moment and then try to resign yourself to it.
• Surrender comes when you no longer ask, "Why is this happening to me?"
• Acceptance of the unacceptable is the greatest source of grace in this world.
• Do you know of someone whose main function in life seems to be to make themselves and others miserable, to spread unhappiness? Forgive them,
• There is nothing personal in all this. It is not who they are.
• When you surrender, your sense of self shifts from identifcation with form-  the thought or the emotion -  to being and recognizing yourself as that which has no form - spacious awareness.
• Leave Life alone. Let it be.

Nature

• You didn't create your body, nor are you able to control the body's functions. An intelligence greater than the human mind is at work. It is the same intelligence that sustains all of nature. You cannot get any closer to that intelligence than by being aware of your own inner energy field - by feeling the aliveness, the animating presence within your body.
• Watch an animal, a flower, a tree and see how it rests in Being. It is itself. It has enormous dignity, innocence, and holiness. Have you notice how deeply peaceful they are.
• Only when your noisy mind subsides can you connect with nature at a deep level and go beyond the sense of separation created by excessive thinking.

Relationships

• What you want from them may be pleasure or material gain, recognition, praise or attention, or a strengthening of your sense of self thought comparison and through establishing that you are, have, or know more than they. What you fear is that the opposite may be the case, and they may diminish your sense of self in some way.
• When you give your fullest attention to whoever you are interacting with, you take past and future out of the relationship, except for practical matters.
• Love does not want or fear anything.
• If her past were your past, her pain your pain, her level of consciousness your level of consciousness, you would think and act exactly as she does.
• With this realization comes forgiveness, compassion, peace.
• When you receive whoever comes into the space of Now as a noble guest, when you allow each person to be as they are, they begin to change.
• Knowing about and knowing are totally different modalities. One is concerned with form, the other with formless. One operates through thought, the other through 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.
• When your unconscious identification with your pain-body is broken, who you are able to observe it within yourself, you don't feed it anymore, and it will gradually lose its energy charge.
• Through selfless appreciation of the realm of things, the world around your will come alive in ways that you cannot even being to comprehend with the mind.
• Ultimately, of course, there is no other, and you are always meeting yourself.

Death and The Eternal

• Death isn't to be found anywhere. There is only the metamorphosis of life forms.
• Death is not the opposite of life. Life has no opposite. The opposite of death is birth. Life is eternal.
• At the hour of your death, the story of your life may, indeed appear to you like a dream that is coming to an end. There must be a consciousness in which the dream happens; otherwise, it would not be.
• Why have most of those who went through a near-death experience lost their fear of death? Reflect upon this.
• When you see and accept the impermanent nature of all life forms, a strange sense of peace comes upon you.
• Through facing death, your consciousness is freed to some extent from identification with form. This why in some Buddhist traditions, the monks
• regularly visit the morgue to sit and meditate among the dead bodies.
• Whenever an experience comes to an end - a  gathering of friends, a vacation,  your children leaving home. You die a little death... By learning to die daily in this way, you open yourself to Life.
• The peace of God can come to you through the contemplation and acceptance of death.
• Death is recognized as ultimately illusory - as illusory as the form you had identified with as yourself.
• It is a great privilege and a sacred act to be present at the person's death as a witness and companion.
• With the stillness comes the benediction: peace.

Suffering  & The End of Suffering

• Whatever is could not be otherwise.
• The inner alignment with Now is the nd of suffering.
• Suffering is necessary until you realize it is unnecessary.
• What a miserable day. She let me down.. Yes, The ego needs enemies to define its boundary, and even the weather can serve that function.
• Start pracitcing "not naming" with small things. Can you refrain from naming the experience as bad or painful? Can you immediatly accept the "isness" of that moment?
• Habit of creating suffering for yourself and others can come to an end simply by becoming aware of them as they happen.
• You cannot be conscious and create suffering for yourself.
• Accept what is. Accept that I'm agitated and angry? Accept that I cannot accept?
• Bring acceptance into your nonacceptance. Bring surrender into you nonsurrender. Then see what happens
• Suffer consciously, willingly. Then the physical pain can quickly burn up the ego in you, since ego consists largely of resistance.

http://www.happierabroad.com/StillnessSpeaks.pdf