This Adyashanti quote from Emptiness Dancing is posted on the wall of my bathroom: “Stay in the silence and awakeness. Don’t lose yourself to sights, sounds, and feelings. Open yourself to them fully, but don’t move.” I hung the quote where I would see it multiple times a day because it calls to me so deeply, and yet when I allow my mind to puzzle about it, I can’t actually wrap around the whole.
It’s perfectly clear why—what the quote points to is too immense to be held. It can’t be understood by the mind; it can only be lived. My mind rushes to say, “That’s impossible! I can’t do both of those at once—take in the wild diversity while remaining still.” And that is the truth. “I”, the central character, cannot. When the belief in that character is released, and there is no “I” doing at all, awareness is all that remains. Awareness never moves anywhere. How could it?
Awareness is fully open, all the time. No exceptions. It has no aperture. When awareness seems shut down or not available, our central character has compiled a bunch of thoughts and beliefs, what-ifs and what-fors—that, like a cloud—seem to obscure. Beyond the cloud, the sun shines as ever. Shot through the thoughts and beliefs, in, under, above and beyond, awareness radiates.
© Skye Blaine, 2011
the heart of the matter 
What a perfect quote. That one is going on the bathroom mirror! Thank you! xo k
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Yes, it is seemingly difficult, because we have decades of that entrenched pattern. All of us! I love this quote from Francis Lucille, and perhaps it will be helpful:
”Just turn your heart towards this resonance. Don’t ask how, just do it. Do it again and again. Every time you think you have lost it, it’s very easy, just do it again, until it becomes as natural as a young child looking back to see whether his or her mother is still present watching. It’s a very simply gesture going back to that which you love the most.”
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I was thinking the same thing today.
I woke up bothered and upset about something (trivial in the scheme of things) and immediately I remembered: identify with the stillness, the silence.
But it’s much more difficult than I had imagined. Years of identifying with the clouds. Right now I keep switching between the two: clouds/sun/clouds/sun…
It feels as if there are two of me, but I know there’s only One.
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