Although I must eventually return to house and work and a host of obligations, for a few hours, at least, nobody will disturb me. There is no telephone in this room, no television, no radio, no computer, no electrical device at all except for a light and a fan overhead. I do not switch them on, because the sun gives me all the light I need and a breeze through the windows keeps me cool. Although cars rumble past now and then on a road that skirts the far side of the meadow, they disrupt the stillness only briefly. Otherwise, I hear the churr of cicadas and crickets, the rattle and purl of birdsong, the drumming of a woodpecker, and the trickle of these words as they run from my mind through my fingers onto the page.
Stillness….
THE HUT CREAKS as the boards expand in the sun, like an animal stretching as it wakes. Tonight, after the sun goes down, the joints of cedar and pine will creak again as they cool. The hummingbirds will keep darting from blossom to blossom until the cold drives them south for winter. The crickets will keep on singing day and night until the first heavy frost, and then they will carry their song with them into the ground. Even in the depths of winter, beneath soil frozen as hard as iron, hearts will beat in burrows, and the creek will run beneath a skin of ice. There is no absolute stillness in nature. In the nails that hold this building together, electrons whirl. Even the dead yield their substance in a ferment of decay.
Scientists have pondered the perceptual effects of ocular motion, and those of its counterpart, ocular stillness, for over 200 years. The unremitting 'trembling of the eye' that occurs even during gaze fixation was first noted by Jurin in 1738. In 1794, Erasmus Darwin documented that gaze fixation produces perceptual fading, a phenomenon rediscovered in 1804 by Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler. Studies in the twentieth century established that Jurin's 'eye trembling' consisted of three main types of 'fixational' eye movements, now called microsaccades (or fixational saccades), drifts and tremor. Yet, owing to the constant and minute nature of these motions, the study of their perceptual and physiological consequences has met significant technological challenges. Studies starting in the 1950s and continuing in the present have attempted to study vision during retinal stabilization-a technique that consists on shifting any and all visual stimuli presented to the eye in such a way as to nullify all concurrent eye movements-providing a tantalizing glimpse of vision in the absence of change. No research to date has achieved perfect retinal stabilization, however, and so other work has devised substitute ways to counteract eye motion, such as by studying the perception of afterimages or of the entoptic images formed by retinal vessels, which are completely stable with respect to the eye. Yet other research has taken the alternative tack to control eye motion by behavioural instruction to fix one's gaze or to keep one's gaze still, during concurrent physiological and/or psychophysical measurements. Here, we review the existing data-from historical and contemporary studies that have aimed to nullify or minimize eye motion-on the perceptual and physiological consequences of perfect versus imperfect fixation. We also discuss the accuracy, quality and stability of ocular fixation, and the bottom-up and top-down influences that affect fixation behaviour.This article is part of the themed issue 'Movement suppression: brain mechanisms for stopping and stillness'.
Through works that bring together objects, movement, or the living body, The Paradox of Stillness explores the intersections between performance and visual art. The exhibition features some 100 artworks by successive generations of artists who test the boundaries between stillness and motion, mortality and time.
Achieving inner stillness requires disciplined practice because your mind instinctively wants to occupy the spaces in your thinking and when others are quietly processing what they are learning. You have to get comfortable with the beautiful emptiness of not knowing what will come next in the conversation.
Stillness is a concept album -- the title tune opens and closes it in moody stillness -- and a transition piece all at once, for Sergio Mendes seemed to be searching for a viable way out of the Brasil '66 formula. Indeed, "Righteous Life," using a different L.A. rhythm section, is really a folk-rock record, a good one, and a far cry from the bossa-propelled '60s. So is the funky voodoo cover of Stephen Stills' "For What It's Worth" in its own way, though the old Brasil '66 sound does come in very handy in a superb treatment of another folk-rock song, Joni Mitchell's "Chelsea Morning." Yet Mendes also experiments with different, more authentically Brazilian rhythm patterns in a brilliantly propulsive rendition of Gilberto Gil's "Viramundo" and a lovely Oscar Castro-Neves/Sebastiao Neto tone poem, "Celebration of the Sunrise." This would also be Lani Hall's farewell to Sergio Mendes, leaving the band in mid-album on the way to becoming Mrs. Herb Alpert and starting a solo career, to be replaced by the Brazilian Gracinha Leporace, who is now Mrs. Sergio Mendes. Overlooked in its day, Stillness is the great sleeper album of Sergio Mendes' first A&M period.
A century after Bertrand Russell admonished that the conquest of leisure and health would be of no use if no one remembers how to use them, Iyer paints an empirical caricature of the paradoxical time argument against stillness. Citing a sociological study of time diaries that found Americans were working fewer hours than they were 30 years earlier but felt as if they were working more, he writes:
H ere we are from the exuberance of Mahashivratri to the stillness of Samyama. Shiva is an ultimate symbol of exuberant action and motionless stillness. From extraordinary or almost superhuman levels of activity in the last month we have come to the stillness of Samyama.
So, you want to be still, but you are alive and kicking! To bring this life to a certain state of stillness, one must completely dissociate with the activity of the mind. Physiological activity is not a problem -- we can still that very easily -- it is the psychological structure that is active. You need to understand this, the advantage that the body has over the mind is that even if you keep the body still, it exists. But if the mind becomes still, it does not exist. So, the mind will not let you become still, it will do many things unless you are entirely dissociated with the nature of your mind.
Samyama is a state where you are fully aware that you are not the body, the mind or the world. If you are free from these three things, there can be no suffering. That is the aim of Samyama, to move from the chaos of the body and the mind, to the utter stillness within. Six hundred and seventy diehard seekers have come from all over the world to reach this state, and they are doing phenomenally well. For the first few days, they struggled through their physical limitations, but have now moved beautifully into stillness.
Yet it is also true that as this dance of life is unfolding there is one thing that always remains ever-present. A stillness at the heart of who you are. A silent awareness. The space in which the dance of life is always unfolding.
In that stillness you can find refuge: a shelter from the storms and seasons of life, a quiet in the midst of the chaos, a connection to the part of you that transcends the passing of time and changing forms. In that stillness you can find a home within yourself: a place to rest out of the race, a wellspring of ever-available love and wholeness.
See if you can invite more moments of stillness and presence into your days. A two minute rest under a tree. A one-minute mini-meditation after you get into your car before driving off. A short pause before sending an email. Punctuate your day will little moments of stillness like this.
Where logic and language may fail, you might sense something sacred in that stillness. Or, perhaps have an intuition that you are a part of something much larger than yourself. Though it might defy explanation you may even touch a wholeness and oneness at the heart of who you are.
That's a very beautiful way of framing it. And I really feel like that's our future. So we've got our work cut out for us. There is a big difference, as you know, we talk about between loneliness and aloneness and one of the potential powers of befriending your own awareness is that awareness is always at home and at home in a way that means that you're not lonely, even though you're alone. In other words, you can be completely at home with things exactly as they are in this moment. That does not mean that the world doesn't need to change, that we don't have to work for social change or or right wrongs or anything like that. But for the present moment, again, it's possible to inhabit it in such a way that that it's timeless and that you have no place to go. And you can be at home in this moment as it is without having to accept injustice, but to actually experience being at home. That sense of embodied wakefulness actually is healing and transformative. And when I like to sometimes call it the domain of being, when you can just be and you don't have to fill your mind up with this, that and the other, and then you engage out of that domain of stillness being clarity alone, but not lonely. Then when you let your doing come out of that being, whether it's going back online or whether it's going to work or whether it's engaging with your children or grandchildren or anybody, then you're showing up in an entirely new way and everybody benefits from that. And that's one of the ways in which I use the word healing, that it's coming to terms with things as they are. But from a wisdom perspective and from a perspective of non dual, not this-ing and that-ing and other-ing all the time. And that means the potential for us actually seeing a greater unity even in a huge diversity. And I feel like whether we're talking about the body politic or we're talking about this body or mind, that awareness is the only actual power that I know that's a human attribute of our genetics that's capable of actually engaging, embracing the whole in such a way that we show up whole, which is the meaning of the word health and healthy and holy for that matter, so that if we learn to recognize our own wholeness, and what if we create an epidemic of that, a love affair with being who you already are and not having to be incomplete, where something else has to fill you up. And then you can have relationships that are profoundly satisfying because they are no longer dependent in a certain kind of dysfunctional way. And at every age, you know, talking about the pandemic, I've been speaking with a whole bunch of different people. And I realize the 19 year olds have been suffering in a way that I don't, you know, it's not my experience, but imagine being 19 and being sort of kept apart in this kind of way. The 17 year olds and the 15 year olds, the 13 year olds every age is being affected by this differently. And I feel like we really have to wrap our minds around what that is and honoring their sovereignty, honoring what's right with them, what's what's whole in them, so that they recognize that their intrinsic nature is wholeness and that they can bring this into every aspect of the challenges of life in ways that actually the world is calling out for, and I would say even starving, for on every level. 2ff7e9595c
Comments