The Peace within
"When you experience yourself in stillness—that is, when you give your undivided attention to experiencing the truth about you—you will experience the conflict-free, calm, dynamic peace of perfectly centered abundant life energy. This exquisite peace deep within you is actually the experience of God, or the harmony of oneness felt within you as you. it's how God is experiencing Himself-Herself now and always. It is the phenomenological feeling-tone of Being, or Existence, and it is the truest thing about who you are. When you experience the peace within you, you will spontaneously undergo a fundamental transformation in the way you think about yourself and how you see the world. Nothing will seem quite the same ever again"- Erich SchiffmannYou imagine a spinning top. Stillness is like a perfectly centered
top, spinning so fast it appears motionless. It appears this way not
because it isn't moving, but because it's spinning at full speed.
Stillness is not the absence or negation of energy, life, or
movement. Stillness is dynamic. It is unconflicted movement, life in
harmony with itself, skill in action. It can be experienced whenever
there is total, uninhibited, unconflicted participation in the moment
you are in when you are wholeheartedly present with whatever you
are doing.
For most of us, however, most of the time, our lives do not resemble
a perfectly centered top, spinning so fast it appears motionless. Our
lives are more like a top in a somewhat wild, erratic, and chaotic
spin, we know we're alive because at least we're still spinning, but
we are not quite perfectly centered, and we are not spinning anywhere
near full speed. We don't have as much energy as we'd like, we are
not experiencing as much aliveness as we might, nor are we
experiencing the peace of stillness or the joy of being.
Stillness, therefore, is a higher energy state than what we're used
to. This is because we are rarely wholehearted, or unconflicted,
about anything. When you are not wholehearted, when you'd rather be
someplace other than where you are, parts of you shut down and begin
not to participate. Your energy circulation becomes constricted, and
the creative life force is unable to flow through you unimpeded. Your
energy flow, the amount of life force flowing through you, begins to
diminish. The source of the energy does not diminish, but the amount
that flows through you does. This leads to ill health, low energy,
lowered vitality, lack of enthusiasm, depression, frustration,
unhappiness, and suffering. None of this feels good.
When you are wholehearted about something, however, when you are
where you want to be and are participating fully in the moment you
are in—sometimes enthusiastic, sometimes mellow—you will
experience a new sense of aliveness. You will experience a surge of
energy, renewed vigor. This is not because there is actually an
increase in energy, but because you are not constricting it quite so
much. There is now a better energy flow. There is less conflict, less
friction, less not wanting to be where you are, and therefore—for
you—there will be the experience of more energy.
This occurs whenever you are not attempting to spin clockwise and
counter-clockwise simultaneously. Spinning in opposite directions
happens when you act on opposing desires, when you are conflicted
about what you are doing, not wholehearted — granted, this is most of
the time. Stillness happens when you relax inside and are in harmony
with yourself.
This is the point: When you experience yourself in stillness—that
is, when you give your undivided attention to experiencing the truth
about you—you will experience the conflict-free, calm, dynamic
peace of perfectly centered abundant life energy. This exquisite
peace deep within you is actually the experience of God, or the
harmony of oneness felt within you as you. it's how God is
experiencing Himself-Herself now and always. It is the
phenomenological feeling-tone of Being, or Existence, and it is the
truest thing about who you are. When you experience the peace within
you, you will spontaneously undergo a fundamental transformation in
the way you think about yourself and how you see the world. Nothing
will seem quite the same ever again.
Yoga
Yoga is a way of moving into stillness in order to experience the
truth of who you are. It is also a way of learning to be centered in
action so that you always have the clearest perspective on what's
happening and are therefore able to respond most appropriately. Yoga
is not the only way of doing this, of course, but it is an excellent
way. It is an ancient process designed to help you uncover and
discover your true nature so you can live daily life with that new
awareness.
As you move into the depths of stillness, subtle and powerful changes
will become apparent in your life. These will be both profound and
entirely welcome. You will become familiar with the creative God
Force inside you, the energy at your core. The world will look more
beautiful because you're seeing it as it is, without the distorting
influence of your conditioning. You will feel different, happy for no
apparent reason. It will seem as though you have undergone an
important change, a rebirth, as though you've become a new person,
and yet you will feel more yourself than ever before.
Moving into stillness in order to experience your true nature is the
primary theme of yoga simply because everything about you—every
thought, feeling, and emotion, as well as every aspect of your
behavior—is predicated on the way you feel about yourself. The way
you feel about yourself determines how you think, what you do, and
how you interact with the world. it's the basic factor that governs
the quality of your life, the degree to which you are interested in
living, and the way in which you interpret what's happening.
When your evaluation of self changes, when you feel differently about
yourself, everything about you changes: your thoughts, feelings,
emotions — every aspect of your behavior. The way you interpret and
respond to the events in your life will also change. You will
perceive the specific circumstances of your daily life differently
because you'll have a new awareness and vantage point. You'll have
less fear, fewer worries, more enthusiasm for life, and you will
spontaneously become more effective in all you choose to do.
Accordingly, the way you interpret and respond to what happened in
your past will also change. You'll look back and say," Oh, so that's
what was really going on!"And now, because you are seeing the
situation differently, with a clearer and more mature understanding,
you will find yourself able and willing to release old hurts,
attitudes, and response patterns that were founded on your earlier
limited understanding and that are now no longer appropriate. It
feels good to let go of the past and be new in the now.
The way you anticipate and imagine your future will also change. The
greater your understanding, the more grand your vision. Your
imagination will no longer be distorted by the fears and imagined
needs of the ego, but will be grounded in Reality. The future will
look bright. You will spontaneously become optimistic about the
future well-being of yourself and humanity and everything associated
with the earth, sky, and universe: Creation. Therefore, everything
about you and your world will change relative to your change in self-
image: present, past, and future.
Here is our situation: We are ignorant of our true nature, our real
identity. We don't know who we really are. This is because we have
never experienced ourselves directly. We have never stayed"home"
long enough to experience the truth about ourselves. We were not
encouraged to do this. Instead we accepted as true what other people
told us about ourselves. And, unfortunately, we were taught by people
who, in all likelihood, and through no fault of their own, did not
actually know.
For example, when you were a child and your mother praised you for
being"good," you defined yourself as"good.”You began to think of
yourself as a"good"person. When your father scolded you for
being"bad," you defined yourself as"bad," and you began to think of
yourself as"good"And"bad"At the same time. Other people said
other things about you, everyone seemed to have informed opinions,
and since you didn't know—you were just a child—you believed them
all. There was no reason not to. They seemed to know. Before too
long, and not surprisingly, it became very confusing because we were
defining ourselves and forming our self-images based on other
people's contradictory evaluations of who we are. From very early on,
a fundamental conflict was introduced into our psyches revolving
around this basic and most important issue: Who am I, really? And
because we were not encouraged to find out for ourselves, we believed
what other people told us. The result is that we feel guilty,
ashamed, embarrassed, and confused about who we are. We feel judged.
If you feel guilty, ashamed, embarrassed, or confused about who you
are, if you feel judged, you will invariably have difficulty giving
and receiving love. It will not feel natural to you to express love
easily. And when you are not giving or receiving love, when the
energy of love is not circulating or passing through you easily, you
gradually become bitter, you lose your natural sweetness. You
unknowingly restrict your primary source of nourishment and therefore
become hungry on all levels. You become unhappy or ill. You become
unpleasant company. You forget how to love, and you forget how it
feels to be loved. And all of this happens, to whatever extent,
because guilt makes you feel that you are not worthy of love, that
you do not deserve it, that you have none to give, and that in fact
you are unlovable.
To some degree, this is the conclusion many of us have unconsciously
taken on without further scrutiny. We take it for granted. We believe
it's true. We think our guilt is justified and that punishment is our
just reward. Our basic belief is," I deserved the suffering I
experienced in my past, and I deserve the suffering 1 am experiencing
now. And the future probably holds a fair bit of suffering and
hardship for me also. And then I'll die — and who knows what that's
like:l it's probably pretty horrible, too. I mean, life's not easy.
Let's be realistic here....”And yet, all of this rigamarole is due
to a fundamental misperception of Reality. All the guilt,
unworthiness, justified suffering, self-hate, unhappiness, and
unlovableness, as well as the subsequent inability to give or receive
love easily, have come into being because of an inaccurate and
incomplete perception of who we really are.
When you experience the truth of who you are, you will not feel
guilty, ashamed, embarrassed, or confused. You will experience
instead the tremendous relief of clarity — relief because you are not
the unworthy, undeserving person you thought you were and because the
internal pressure caused by these fundamental misperceptions is
finally being released. When this happens, you will experience a
healing sense of relief followed by a profoundly soothing inner
peace, an even"At-easeness"— a stillness.
Levels of Stillness
There are two levels of stillness. The first level involves learning
to relax, become centered, and meditate. The technique involves
sitting or lying down and being absolutely still — without reading a
book, talking, watching the television, or listening to the radio. It
involves deliberately pausing, stopping all physical movement,
becoming relaxed, calm, and quiet inside, and just being —
consciously being conscious. it's about being centered and still in
the moment you are presently in.
For a few minutes, every form of external activity stops. Then, in
that physical quietness, you turn your attention inward and focus on
yourself. Focus on what it feels like to be you. Experience you.
Immerse your conscious awareness in your own unique feeling-tone, the
feeling-tone of the Universe expressing Itself as you. Do this
deliberately in order to consciously experience the truth of who you
are.
LEVEL ONE
The first level of stillness is about being with yourself in order to
know yourself. This is accomplished by being wide awake and aware as
you deliberately relax into yourself. The idea is to consciously
enter into a state wherein you temporarily suspend everything you
think you know about who you are, including anything you have ever
been taught, and simply be attentive to what's going on right there
where you are. You practice being quiet, both physically and
mentally, as you pay attention to the sensations in your body, the
various thoughts in your mind, and your current experience of being
conscious and alive. You practice simple body-mind awareness, being
conscious of the moment you are now in, and thereby experience with
clarity the energy of you. You consciously experience yourself as you
actually are. In this way you open yourself to a new, truer, less
distorted experience of you and the world.
When you are able to relax and quietly suspend all your firmly held
false ideas and limiting beliefs about who and what you are, only
what is true will remain. You will then experience your ever-existing
truth for yourself. This is like polishing a mirror—removing the
grime—and seeing yourself clearly for the very first time. And
though this is not as easy as it sounds, it is also not particularly
difficult. Let me clarify something first, however. In order to let
go of the false beliefs you have about who and what you are, it is
not necessary to know which beliefs are true and which are false. In
fact, you probably don't know, and this is the problem. If you knew,
you would not be uncertain about your true identity. If you knew, you
would not be experiencing conflict and inner turmoil; you would be
experiencing peace. Therefore, let go of them all! Let go of
everything you think you know about who you are, and see what's left.
When you let go of everything you think you know about yourself and
stay with what's left, when you willingly abandon the contradictory
evaluations of who you are and courageously reach deeply into
yourself in order to experience yourself directly, you will come upon
a new experience of who you are. You will sense the creative energy
that is the life of you, and you will then define and think about
yourself in a new and expanded way. And since the way you think about
and define yourself is central to your perception, behavior, and
experience of the world, your world will spontaneously change as your
self-concept changes and comes into closer alignment with what's
really true.
LEVEL TWO
The second level of stillness involves living your daily life with
this new and growing inner certainty of who you really are. in other
words, meditation in action. This is not always easy, and it takes a
little getting used to, for it means staying in touch with the
deepest truth about yourself in the midst of daily life. This
involves continually letting go of the judgments, evaluations, and
contradictory opinions about yourself that arise in your mind
throughout the day and in your relationships with other people. You
do this by staying centered in your peace. You thereby learn to be
suspicious of any suggestion—from yourself or others—that speaks
of your guilt, your unworthiness, or your unlovableness. You learn it
is appropriate to disregard any remaining inner self-criticism
because in Level One you experienced yourself in a new way: as
fundamentally lovable, innocent of all blame, and therefore deserving
of every good thing.
Having experienced the truth about yourself in Level One, albeit
momentarily, you had an insight—a glimmer of clarity, a moment of
experience—about an inner truth that you can't quite ignore. You
experienced yourself in a new way and now know your deepest truth,
even though you may not yet fully believe it. Part of you knows the
truth, but you're not totally convinced, and understandably so.
Besides, when you are surrounded by others who are instead convinced
of other things, it is doubly difficult to overcome your doubts.
This is similar to what it must have been like for Copernicus when he
first suspected that the world was round. He had an insight into the
way things are, yet part of him probably still believed the flat-
world theory. And because he was surrounded by other flat-world
theorists, and because he couldn't yet prove the world was round, it
would have been difficult for him to be fully convinced or convincing
to others.
The way to experience the truth of who you are (Level One) is by
letting go of all your learned preconceptions about yourself and then
staying present and open-minded for the experience. The way to stay
in touch with your truth (Level Two), and confirm it to yourself over
and over until there is absolutely no doubt, is by continuing to do
what you did in Level One, but doing it now moment by moment during
the day. This means, essentially, letting go of pretense and self-
critical judgment and allowing self-acceptance — letting yourself be
who you truly are. Again, you do this by staying centered in your
peace, for only when you are at peace will you have the clearest
perspective. By staying centered in your peace in the midst of daily
life, you will validate your new perception of yourself and gradually
become fully convinced. As a consequence, you will then be convincing
to others.
Moving Into Stillness — Stillness: The Peace within (Erich Schiffmann)
www.movingintostillness.com/index.html
NOTE: If this page was accessed during a web search you may wish to browse the sites listed below where this topic or related issues are discussed in detail to promote global peace, religious harmony, and spiritual development of humanity based on the advent and message of the promised Messiah-Paraclete Shri Mataji, the final incarnation of His Spirit already known in these feminine forms over the ages:
www.lalita-devi.org/ — Divine Mother (Hinduism)www.holyspirit-shekinah.org/ — Divine Mother (Christianity)
www.tao-mother.org/ — Divine Mother (Taoism)
www.prajnaaparamita.org/ — Divine Mother (Buddhism)
www.aykaa-mayee.org/ — Divine Mother (Sikhism)
www.great-spirit-mother.org/ — Divine Mother (Native Traditions)
www.adi-shakti.org/ — Promised Return Of Divine Mother (Hinduism)
www.ruach-elohim.org/ — Promised Return Of Messiah (Judaism)
www.Spirit-Paraclete.org/ — Promised Return Of Paraclete (Christianity)
www.ruh-allah.org/ — Promised Return Of His Spirit (Islam)
“Now, the principle of Mother is in every, every scripture - has to be there.” Shri Mataji, Radio Interview 1983 Oct 01, Santa Cruz, USA
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