We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started… and know the place for the first time.
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
Salvation, if we can talk about it at all, is the end of ambition, which is when you become completely one with your experience. Knowledge becomes one with wisdom…. You realize that you never needed to make the journey at all, because the journey and the goal are there already. It’s not so much that you are achieving liberation, but it is more that you realize that liberation is right there and that you needn’t have sought for it.
Chögyam Trungpa, Transcending Madness: The Experience of the Six Bardos
Stillness, a sense of the unchanging, is all around, and at different levels. Look for it, explore its effects on you, and let it sink in. For example…. there is the moment at the very top of a tossed ball’s trajectory when it’s neither rising nor falling, the pause before the first stroke of the brush, that space between exhalation and inhalation, the silence in which sounds occur, or the discernible gap between thoughts when your mind is quiet.
As stated earlier, thoughts can make our desire to sit still quite difficult. However, noticing them and, even more importantly, the emotions that give birth to them is the key towards greater freedom. As we sit, we can easily notice how we are always chasing our tail, moved by a desire to get something other than we have now, or to get rid of something that is bothering us. The big challenge is to how to switch off this as a process and get to the root of the problem, to discover how we can stop proliferating fears and fantasies and interrupt this quality of “always moving”. To do this requires that we become skilled at noticing the key moment of “contact”- when the senses, including the mind, encounters something that moves it towards, or away from. We can notice this when we can spot a change in our interior space, when a disturbed, or restless quality takes hold – we were calm one moment, then we see something or remember something or think of something and we are disturbed. So the practice is to try to notice what it arising, meet it and disengage from it, while bringing our awareness to the process itself. We ask ourselves – “What does it feel like to want this, or to want to get rid of that”….. “How does that concretely feel in the body, or in the heart”? We practice with trying to meet this moment without the impulse to fix it, or interpret it or judge it. The traditional teaching state that this is the way to step out of the stream, by not allowing the contact to gain a footing and proliferate:
