(Source: Stillness in the Roar of Experience)
1. The final version of this book came together in a dream. My wife, my son, and I were watching a documentary in the dream. There was a sequence of events that conveyed how sad, beautiful, and unrelenting our lives were. We followed these scenes to the conclusion. It was like a puzzle that needed to be peeled away layer by layer. It took me some time to get what it was trying to say. I saw the image of a person balancing a pencil on a finger; maybe he was even spinning it, and then it all stopped with the pencil impossibly suspended in midair.
At that point, I woke up from the dream feeling sad, but I understood the message well. It says: Know your existence through stillness.
2. At some point, we must prepare for the end. It isn’t complicated. It consists of getting rid of most of what we carry. After we’ve shed enough of our burden, we may realize we have believed the wrong thing. We may have labored under the illusion of movement, but we have never moved. Appearances around us are constantly shifting, but somehow, it is as though we have remained unmoved. Have we changed over the years? Or have we only adjusted to the changing circumstances? It is as if we have all along been rooted to the ground, more like a tree than an animal.
3. You are born into a life where you have no say about your arrival or departure. In fact, since the day of your birth, it has been as if you are caged, and you will live in that cage until you are dead. You plot and pray for an escape from that cage. You imagine getting out in some way, in the spirit or otherwise, and somehow remaining intact. But you will never escape. Your hopelessness is justified. The point, then, is this: Can you progress from feeling hopeless to equanimity?
4. Who are you? Can you tell me who you are without telling me what others think you are?
We are saddled (or blessed) with human awareness, so, unlike other Earth creatures, we must know time, space, and inevitable doom.
Yet, when you ask a man how he feels about his life, he will most likely hesitate to reply.
“Are you sad?”
“Am I sad? No, I am not sad.”
But he’s not happy either.
Nothing. The man cannot feel himself. Put another way, he cannot find any feelings for his life. Isn’t it strange when he has a feeling, or at least an opinion, about almost everything else?
Without being able to feel our existence, is it any wonder we are lost? We may have a bit of pride somewhere. Some disgust. But nothing deep. Nothing memorable.
It is as though we are barely aware.
5. A human being moves across her terrain like an automaton. Although she is conscious, she looks as though she is mesmerized. She has never known stillness. Her mind, focused on wants and desires, has a near-absolute hold on her. Rather than freeing her, her ability to interpret, project, and plan binds her. It tells her that what she sees is all there is.
Our intelligence has empowered us as a species, but it has also reduced us. It ushers in misery instead of liberating us with understanding and insight.
One man turns to the sky. He admires the stars, wide-eyed, much like an excited child.
Another man sees the same thing and wants to die. He wants to die into it, into the imagined relief. He scans the room for a sharp object.
Misery isn’t just a lack of happiness. It is what we feel when we are deeply unhappy, and the unhappiness chokes us.
It is easy to dismiss the misery of others but quite impossible to do so when it is one’s own.
Misery isn’t bad weather. It is a bolt of lightning, a prophet from the center of our being, coming out to scream at us for our indulgence and distracted mind and our being stuck on superficial thrills and differences.
(To be continued in part 2)
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