When you lose touch with inner stillness, you lose
touch with yourself. When you lose touch with yourself, you lose
yourself in the world.
Your innermost sense of self, of who you are, is
inseparable from stillness. This is the I Am that is deeper than name
and form.
Stillness is your essential nature. What is
stillness? The inner space or awareness in which the words on this page
are being perceived and become thoughts. Without that awareness, there
would be no perception, no thoughts, no world.
You are that awareness, disguised as a person.
The equivalent of external noise is the inner noise
of thinking. The equivalent of external silence is inner stillness.
Whenever there is some silence around you — listen
to it. That means just notice it. Pay attention to it. Listening to
silence awakens the dimension of stillness within yourself, because it
is only through stillness that you can be aware of silence.
See that in the moment of noticing the silence around
you, you are not thinking. You are aware, but not thinking.
When you become aware of silence, immediately there
is that state of inner still alertness. You are present. You have
stepped out of thousands of years of collective human conditioning.
Look at a tree, a flower, a plant. Let your awareness
rest upon it. How still they are, how deeply rooted in Being. Allow
nature to teach you stillness.
When you look at a tree and perceive its stillness,
you become still yourself. You connect with it at a very deep level. You
feel a oneness with whatever you perceive in and through stillness.
Feeling the oneness of yourself with all things is true love.
Silence is helpful, but you don’t need it in order
to find stillness. Even when there is noise, you can be aware of
the stillness underneath the noise, of the space in which the noise
arises. That is the inner space of pure awareness, consciousness itself.
You can become aware of awareness as the background
to all your sense perceptions, all your thinking. Becoming aware of
awareness is the arising of inner stillness.
Any disturbing noise can be as helpful as silence.
How? By dropping your inner resistance to the noise, by allowing it to
be as it is, this acceptance also takes you into that realm of inner
peace that is stillness.
Whenever you deeply accept this moment as it is —
no matter what form it takes — you are still, you are at peace.
Eckhart Tolle,
Stillness Speaks, Part 1