Mindful with the "stillness stick"
I want to share some underdoggish ruminations in support of "not still"... and want to semanticize aloud a bit towards how we might be a little more delicate and mindful when we wield the 'stillness stick' in our lived spiritual strivings of wholeness and healing. Indiscriminate injunctions... beating ourselves and others into being "still" in order to be spiritually healthy obviously isn't the very efficacious, but on a subtle and metaphoric level, we can easily fall into that. So, let's have the non-still have it's say about this stillness stick.
What is the 'stillness stick'? Like the 'kill the ego' stick which is not so sexy any more, it is the well-intentioned though ineffectual fashion to attempt greater ways of being/abiding, choosing/acting, developing/evolving, and healing (through a footing in the spaciousness and stillness of the loving Source)... by inadvertently suggesting a repression of full lived expression towards a homogenized spiritual stillness "expression" ...a stillness taken out of context... regardless of an individual constitution, age, culture, or any other lived reality and circumstance.
We know that the 'witness' striving toward dis-identified and non-attached "stillness" can itself become an attachment standing in the way of wholeness and healing... a sort of egoic inflation and hijacking of spirituality and Self. This becomes evident when any state or constitutional trait in self or other that does not seem "still" is immediately judged, dis-identified, suppressed, repressed, or projected... and a serious attempt is made to overlay stillness in the place of whatever expression may not even have been 'owned' or identified relationally or experientially in any meaningful way.
The "stillness stick" works well (as when literally whacked by my Zazen teacher across the back bringing me back to full embodied presence) when not used to beat yourself or anyone else up and when recognized as "lived, full-spectrum, embodied, and relational" stillness (the stillness at the core of all expression...likened to the fully present and full color "flow" state and mindfull experience that has been so well researched, but also toward whatever level of congruent and attentive being one may at the present time be capable of)... but "stillness stick" will harm when it becomes a shadow shunning and homogenizing tool of repression and judgement. Though we know this, our conditioning of 'doing' it right can easily and subtly lead to unhealthy 'stillness stick' bashing.
It is possible to confuse the meaning of stillness for many... and care must be taken. Extremely phlegmatic constitutions, psychotic immobility, dysfunctional shyness, repressive stoicism, introverted aloofness... all have "manifest" stillness. With the fiery passion of a samurai, would we, however, be able to see the pristine stillness in a swift and well-executed strike? And yet, what we mean is beyond that "still", isn't it. Beyond words and abstrations, there it is... "still". Just don't turn it into a stick or "schtick" please!
Living in Kyoto, the Ox-hearing scene comes to mind... the lived stillness of the return to the marketplace... though we perhaps need to remember that we do not live in it 'after' years of stillness stick (contemplative and meditative spiritual practices), we live as human beings in a relational world right now... and the 'non-still' stillness of the marketplace experience becomes just as much as 'the way' as the stillness stick practice toward the return ot it. They are unified.
And so, the non-still, as we know, is an integral path of the still... but we have to remember to consciously integrate that without bashing it to smithereens with the "stillness stick"! When we are not still, we need to learn to live into the identification enough to see what it teaches... just as much as we need to 'witness' it and not identify with it. Obvious, but when the stillness stick is in hand, it is often forgotten.
If prone to beat with the stillness stick, we need to learn to put the stick down enough to live fully and play a bit with the illusions and drama... we may be very good at stillness and non-attachment/non-identification... and this serves us well... but the shadows will have their say when we go overboard... so let us take caution.
We may already know that it is "really O.K.", with all the conscious and responsible attentional capacity and developmental perspective we can muster (of the wider noetic consciousness) to "not be still" as an integrative force of wholeness... to fully be and meaningfully act in the "marketplace" each day "AS IF" all the attachments, identifications and manifest things WERE real (in perspective of the Source) ...and taking the suchness of THAT path just as seriously in individual and collective growth and spiritual evolution... yes, we may 'know' it, but I think we can be much more alive, realistic, effective, loving and forgiving of ourselves and others in how we go about it. So let the non-still have it's say too and be mindful of how you wield the 'stillness stick'.
CKJ
