On Stillness, Zen and Trying to Be Our True Self

Christopher Walker

INSPIRED

Chris@ innerwealth.com

Tel +61 417 209636

By Chris Walker - Innerwealth Real Spirit

ON STILLNESS - ZEN AND STRIVING TO BE OURSELVES.

You can spend a lot of time learning how to be somebody. Usually, what you learn is how to be somebody else.

Do you learn to be yourself? Well I don't think so. I think we learn how not to be ourselves. The question is always imminent with this type of conversation: Which self?

Are you the money? Are you the person holding the money? Are you the earner of the money? Are you the protector of the money? Are you the spender of the money? Or are you someone else and the money selves are just like suits you wear and they are all changeable, plastic, cheap imitations of who you are?

To put our faith in tangible goals would seem to be, at best, unwise. So we do not strive to be pilots, we do not strive to be bankers, nor policemen, nor doctors. WE STRIVE TO BE OURSELVES.

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Some people define themselves by the opinion of others. For example: Christians might say "I am God's child" this is a great way to get around the question, blame someone else for the decision. There are those who say "I don't give a f..k about it" but life's little challenges usually makes that laissez-faire attitude evaporate, eventually. Today, together lets strip the façade and find out really who you are because once you know it, life becomes a sort of puppet show, and it's quite lovely to play in, irrespective of the circumstances. This inner space is called Zen and what I refer to as "Stillness."

Zen is a space within a space. An emptiness that, when contacted, makes you feel full. Fulfilment does not come from filling yourself up, it comes from emptying all the stuff that makes you feel bad. When you strip away the baggage you are, in every sense of the word, enlightened. It's just a matter of getting to it. Let me explain:

Zen in its essence is the art of seeing into the nature of one’s own being, and it points the way from bondage to freedom. By making us drink right from the fountain of life, it liberates us from all the yokes under which we, emotional beings are usually suffering in this world.

This body of ours is something like an electric battery in which a mysterious power latently lies. When this power is not properly brought into operation, it either grows mouldy and withers away or is warped and expresses itself abnormally. It is the object of Zen, therefore, to save us from going crazy or being crippled. This is what I mean by freedom, giving free play to all the creative and benevolent impulses inherently lying in our hearts. Generally, we are blind to this fact, that we are in possession of all the necessary faculties that will make us happy and loving towards one another. All the struggles that we see around us come from this ignorance… When the cloud of ignorance disappears… we see for the first time into the nature of our own being.

This is a time to be deeply delving into the mysteries of life where we are asked to choose between the ‘Everlasting No’ and the ‘Everlasting Yea’” — a notion Nietzsche intuited when he resolved, “I wish to be at any time hereafter only a yea-sayer!” At this fork in the road of existence mastering the principles of Stillness can make the critical difference in leading us toward a meaningful and fulfilling life.

Life is after all a form of affirmation… However insistently the blind may deny the existence of the sun, they cannot annihilate it.

Much of that blindness comes from our attachment to a small sized and reactive identity, what many people call their ego. Paradoxical as it may sound the solution is not the eradication of the ego, as so many suggest, but its expansion.

We are ego-centred. But if the ego-shell in which we live is made from judgement, criticism, expectations, beliefs, religious ideals, learnings and experiences that are never questioned, the ego-shell becomes the hardest thing to outgrow… We are, however, given many chances to break through this shell, and the first and greatest of them is in the corpse pose.

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But the loss of the mental equilibrium produced by the polarised pull of “Everlasting No” and “Everlasting Yea,” causes so many cases of nervous prostration can also derail and anguish us and stop us from simply being comfortable lying still, alone, in silence with out own self as company.

The more you suffer the deeper grows your attachment to your character, and with the deepening of your attachment to your character you can begin to skim over the surface of the most beautiful penetratingly awe-inspiring secrets of life. All great artists, all great religious leaders, and all great social reformers have come out of these intensest struggles by breaking through the sound barriers of their own self limiting beliefs. They fought bravely, quite frequently in tears and with bleeding hearts but finally found the "holy grail" of perfect stillness, or in more parochial words, love.

Those ego-stripping struggles can be of the intimate, most non-material kind — relationships and love....

Love makes the ego lose itself in the object it loves, and yet at the same time it wants to have the object as its own… The greatest bulk of literature ever produced in this world is but the harping on the same string of love, and we never seem to grow weary of it. But Stillness is love and through the awakening of love we get a glimpse into the infinity of things… When the ego-shell is broken open and the ‘other’ is taken and being a part of our own body, we can say that the ego has denied itself or that the ego has taken its first steps towards the infinite.

I propose solutions by directly appealing to facts of personal experience and not to bookknowledge. The nature of one’s own being invites contradictions between what we want and what we've got. We are always hungry, even sometimes proudly hungry for less, or for enlightenment, or whatever. It here that our mind rages against the struggle between the finite and the infinite, between what we've got and what we want, and there's an opportunity to be grasped by a higher faculty than the intellect…

Lets be sure. The intellect has a peculiarly disquieting quality in it. Though it raises questions enough to disturb the serenity of the mind, it is too frequently unable to give satisfactory answers to them. It upsets the blissful peace of ignorance and yet it does not restore the former state of things by offering something else. Because it points out ignorance, it is often considered illuminating, whereas the fact is that it disturbs, not necessarily always bringing light on its path. This is why, Stillness and Love are achieved first and foremost in the torture of physical Dead Stillness. By lying perfectly still, the mind and intellects scream for assertion, but you must just let the monkey jump about in its cage until it is exhausted or resigned.

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It is not easy. We are not taught this process. We have created a self based on the complete opposite. So much of our higher education is premised on the spirit of tearing things down rather than building things up — on how intelligently a student can criticise and counter an argument — which has, unsurprisingly, permeated the fabric of public discourse at large. We have a culture of criticism in which critics, professional and self-appointed, measure their merit by how intelligently they can eviscerate an idea, a work of art, or, increasingly and alarmingly, a person. We seem to have forgotten how to acquire what Bertrand Russell called, “a high degree of intellectual culture without emotional atrophy” in his magnificent meditation on why construction is more difficult yet more rewarding than destruction.

The intellect is best at pointing out what doesn’t work, and as such can be a force of destruction, but when it comes to what does work, to the art of moral construction, we must rely on a wholly different faculty of the human spirit.

The history of thought proves that each new structure raised by a man of extraordinary intellect is sure to be pulled down by the succeeding ones. This constant pulling down and building up is all right as far as philosophy itself is concerned; for the inherent nature of the intellect, as I take it, demands it and we cannot put a stop to the progress of philosophical inquiries any more than to our breathing. But when it comes to the question of life itself we cannot wait for the ultimate solution to be offered by the intellect, even if it could do so. We cannot suspend even for a moment our life-activity for philosophy to unravel its mysteries. Let the mysteries remain as they are, but live we must find Stillness in amongst this rubble. Stillness, the heart, therefore, does not rely on the intellect for the solution of its deepest problems.

As nature abhors a vacuum, Zen abhors anything coming between the fact and ourselves. According to Zen there is no struggle in the fact itself such as between the finite and the infinite, between the flesh and the spirit. These are idle distinctions fictitiously designed by the intellect for its own interest. Those who take them too seriously or those who try to read them into the very fact of life are those who mistake a finger for the moon.

For anyone who has ever experienced the soul-squeezing sense of not-enoughness — and in a consumerist culture, most of us have, for the task of consumerism is to rob us of our sense of having enough and sell it back to us at the price of the product, over and over Stillness is a quiet taste of reality unburdened with marketing tricks and consumer rhetoric.

Life as it is - suffices. It is only when the disquieting intellect steps in and tries to murder it that we stop living and loving and imagine ourselves to be short of or in something. The intellect has its usefulness in its proper sphere, but let it not interfere with the flowing of the life-stream. If you are at all tempted to look into it, do so while letting it flow. The fact of flowing must under no circumstances be arrested or meddled with. Remember, nothing comes from you, it only comes through you. This is how the intellect can work for not against you.

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The great fact of life itself flows altogether outside of the intellect and beyond the realms of the imagination.

No amount of wordy explanations will ever lead us into the nature of our own selves. The more you explain, the further it runs away from you. It is like trying to get hold of your own shadow.

Stillness is a gateway into precisely that elusive nature of the self:

Stillness must be directly and personally experienced by each of us in our inner spirit. Just as two stainless mirrors reflect each other, the fact and our own spirits must stand facing each other with no intervening agents. When this is done we are able to seize upon the living, pulsating fact itself. Stillness and love are empty words until then.

Inner Wholeness

We have been led astray through ignorance to find a split in our own being. We somehow things there is a better me and a worse me. But there was from the very beginning no need for a struggle between who we are and who we can become. That what we have and what we do are not in conflict, that the peace we are seeking so eagerly after has been there all the time. This is the blessing of the most complex of yoga postures, "The Corpse Pose."

Stillness offers the ultimate promise, both practical and profound, to “deliver you from the oppression and tyranny of your own expectations, your intellectual accumulations” and offers, instead, a foundation of character at once solid and transcendent:

The result of Stillness 10 minutes a day in Corpse Pose may be considered a discipline aiming at the reconstruction of character. Our ordinary life only touches the fringe of personality, sometimes making huge efforts to consolidate it. As such, it cannot cause a commotion in the deepest parts of the soul… We all too often live on the superficiality of things, making goals and earning money, seducing and tricking ourselves and others. We may be clever, bright, and all that, but what we produce in that way lacks depth, sincerity, and does not appeal to the inmost feelings… A deep spiritual experience, Stillness, is bound to effect a change in the moral structure of one’s personality.

And yet this “reconstruction of character”” is no cosmetic tweak:

Being so long accustomed to the oppression [of the intellect], the mental inertia becomes hard to remove. In fact it has gone down deep into the roots of our own being, and the whole structure of personality is to be overturned. The process of reconstruction is stained with tears and blood… It is no pastime but the most serious task in life; no idlers will ever dare attempt it because it goes straight down to the foundations of personality and shatters the ego-shell, opens us up, and gives us back the freedom we thought we lost.

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