Stillness.

 

“It is only the mind that is confused, contradictory, broken up that is unstable, neurotic, seeking, striving, struggling. So we come to a point where the mind is totally clear and therefore completely immovable. You understand? Immovable not in the sense of a mountain, but immovable in the sense that it is so completely, has no problem, no… all of that; therefore it is extraordinarily stable and therefore pliable. Right? Now such a mind is quiet. And you need to have a mind that’s absolutely silent—absolutely, not relatively. There is the silence when you go of an evening in the woods; there is great silence. All the birds have gone to bed; the wind, the whisper of the leaves have ended; there is great stillness. There is the outward stillness. And people observe that stillness and say ‘I must have that stillness,’ and therefore depend on the stillness of being alone—you understand? Being in solitude. That is not stillness. And there is the stillness created by thought. Which is, thought says, ‘I must be still, I must be quiet, I mustn’t chatter,’ and gradually it produces a stillness. But that is not it, because it is the result of thought operating on noise. Right? So we are talking of a stillness which is not dependent on anything. And it is only that quality of stillness, that absolute silence of the mind that can see that which is eternal, timeless, nameless. This is meditation.” J. Krishnamurti Excerpt from Talk 7, Saanen, 1979

We often seek silence—through solitude, through effort, through quieting the chatter of thought. We go to the woods, sit alone, or tell ourselves to be still. But is the stillness we cultivate truly silence, or simply another product of the mind's striving? Krishnamurti suggests that any silence produced by thought—by discipline, by withdrawal, by dependence on external conditions—is not silence at all. He points to a different quality of stillness, one that arises only when the mind is no longer confused, no longer seeking, no longer in conflict with itself. Such a mind, he says, is extraordinarily stable and therefore pliable. What happens when the mind is no longer pursuing stillness, but is itself utterly quiet? And what, if anything, can such silence reveal? When you trust that God will guide your life as best possible and have full faith in him thought will still you can just notice how things fall in place like a jigsaw puzzle. The magic is so soothing, life a joy to live.