The Most Moving Experience There Is
The most moving experience there is
The Pure Intelligence Behind Life
One of the first things I teach you when you come on your first retreat, is how your mind is by far the greatest interference there is with the way that the higher intelligence that supports our life functions. When you look outside and you look at all the life going on around you and you see the trees and you see nature at work, there isn’t an active intelligence at work there. There isn’t an active intelligence there going, “It’s coming into springtime, I wonder if we should grow some leaves, and what if we made them this colour today? No I don’t like that any more, let’s change it.” Nature is a pure response. It’s perfect. It’s pure intelligence.
It’s on cue every time and the response to what is going on around it is always perfect. Now, that intelligence supports life perfectly and it would support your life perfectly as well if you would let it. But we are, as humans, blessed with this ability to be aware of ourselves as a discrete entity, a separate self-conscious expression of life. And that basic principle, i.e. to be self-aware, mutates over time from the basic sense of just being self-aware to creating an idea of ourselves, which over time becomes ever more complex.
The Pantomime of Self
How much of that energy you get as the active support for your life or not depends upon how much you are attuned to it, and how much you are in the way, trying to provide that support for your life yourself as an act of personal will. Now when we are doggedly attached to the personality view, then our life is a wilful effort to express just that; our pantomime. It is a personal effort to sustain our life, and to continue to project this idea of ourselves. But if you can dilute your attachment to this idea and start to trust the principle of your life itself, then that resistance is removed and you will find that everything starts to reorganise itself for you.
The intelligence is there and the only reason that it’s not working perfectly is that we are in the way. We don’t know how to metabolise fat in our liver, or how hard our heart should be beating, or how to focus the lens of our eye when we are looking near or far. But we have the ability to do these things perfectly. This life support has intelligence far greater than anything you would ever comprehend.
But we just don’t trust it.
Stillness Beyond Our Understanding
So when I ask you to tune into the stillness around you in the room as you meditate, I am asking you to take the sense of stillness in the room as something to come to resonate with because it’s calming to feel something that’s still. But there’s more than just stillness there. If you were able one day to really get your samādhi and feel this room you would enter into that clear light that’s everywhere. And the energy in that clear light is the power that supports all life.
It is beyond our mind and our understanding. If we wait until we can grasp this and satisfy our mind’s need to feel in control, we will miss it. This is the stillness that I am asking you to enter into and in that stillness is everything and nothing.
There’s something infinitely greater hidden just behind the veil. All you’ve got to learn to do is to still your mind enough to turn away from that with which it is obsessed, and in the moment of turning away from it that which is hidden is revealed. It’s always, always, always there. And it’s always perfect.
