Stillness is neither thought nor the cessation of thought. Stillness stands steadfast as wisdom when the heart is luminous and clear. Uncontrived and unfabricated, wisdom is overlooked by blind oblivion. Stillness is not one state opposed to another. It is not an external phenomenon. It is incomprehensible and ineffable because at root, it is uncreated and unconditioned. It unifies, so as to ground what is integral. It illumines, so as to clarify what is translucent. It glorifies, to liberate the glorified. It deifies, to transfigure the deified.

stillness, the ruler of movement.

Stillness does not come and go. It is we who come and go. Stillness abides, like a vast evenness, limpid and pure. It is a transcendent realm of infinite clarity.

Stillness is not about focusing on nothingness; it’s about creating a clearing. It’s opening up an emotionally clutter-free space and allowing ourselves to feel and think and dream and question.

Stillness is neither dissipation nor dislocation. She is neither exclusion nor suppression. She is neither addiction to confusion nor fixation on separation. Stillness is ineffable freedom. Everything is ineffably free in true stillness. She is inexhaustible. She is endless. ‘After fire, a still small voice.’

So, true stillness is of God, from God, and wholly in God. With this we begin to enter into our rest. We begin to rest in peace. We begin to taste the bright mysteries of holy dying, that overcome death through death. Stillness is resurrection. It overcomes death by death. It reveals glory to wisdom. It unveils vision and wonder. Such wonder binds confused, divided thoughts. It is serene.

When you discover yourself lying on the ground, limp and unresisting, head in the dirt, and helpless, the earth seems to shift forward as a presence; hard, emphatic, not mere surface but a genuine force — there is no other word for it but presence. To keep in motion is to keep in time and to be stopped, stilled, is to be abruptly out of time, in another time-dimension perhaps, an alien one, where human language has no resonance. Nothing to be said about it expresses it, nothing touches it, it’s an absolute against which nothing human can be measured…Moving through space and time by way of your own volition you inhabit an interior consciousness, a hallucinatory consciousness, it might be said, so long as breath, heartbeat, the body’s autonomy hold; when motion is stopped you are jarred out of it. The interior is invaded by the exterior. The outside wants to come in, and only the self’s fragile membrane prevents it.

One must stand stiller than still.

This is the stillness behind motion, when time itself stops; the center is also the circumference of all. We are awake in the night. We turn the Wheel to bring the light. We call the sun from the womb of night. Blessed Be!

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. (Ch 1)

It can also happen that from time to time a certain stillness, without any insights, can fall upon a person,

The intellect cannot be still unless the body is still also: and the wall between them cannot be demolished without stillness and prayer.

Be still. Stillness reveals the secrets of eternity

For there is no such thing as perpetual Tranquility of mind, while we live here; because Life it selfe is but Motion, and can never be without Desire, nor without Feare, no more than without Sense.