be still and know

Imagine you are walking alone at night on a country road.  

No people or cars or houses around, just enough starlight to see your way, 

the only sound the sound of your shoes on the road and the swish

 of your clothes as you walk.  You feel the stillness inside of things come close. 

You stop. Now there are no sounds, except the almost-never-heard hush of things being.

You sense the stillness on all sides and an identical stillness within you.

 It makes you uneasy, as if you are about to be extinguished. 

 You try to think, to establish yourself against the stillness,

 but the voice of your thoughts sounds thin, metallic.  

You feel an irrepressible need to be distracted, to change the stillness

 and its overwhelming of you. 

You walk home thinking about plans for tomorrow.

But in the quiet of your room you realize what happened: you got scared. 

 You got scared of opening into the stillness, of allowing it to be.

  It was a close call.  You see how throughout your life you have invited 

one distraction after another to prevent just this from happening.  

Now you feel disappointed in yourself. So instead of turning on your computer

 or reading a book or getting something to eat, 

you sit down and invite the stillness back.

A phrase you once heard comes to you, 

from Psalm 46: "Be still, and know." Be still. Be still.

You arrange your body as you have learned to do.  You sit in a comfortable, 

alert position, with your back vertical so you don't slump or drift off. 

 You let your body be motionless, quiet.  The motionlessness of your body

 is a helpful friend; you know it is temporary, and in fact it is

 not really motionless - little shifts and sensations keep happening - 

but the relative stillness of your body reduces your identification with it,

 with the sense you are your body's ambitions and memories and likes and dislikes.

Learning to sit still, to settle like this, is called by Tibetan lamas "the first motionlessness."

 A quiet body at ease relaxes the persistence of thoughts.  Once the first motionlessness

 has been learned, they say, then it doesn't matter if the body is motionless or moving,

 for the the ground of stillness is always available.  But for now you need this helpful friend, 

and you sit still.

Now you invite what the lamas call "the second motionlessness."

 This is the still, empty openness "behind" each of your senses, 

the openness in which your senses arise.  You relax into that openness.

 To say it is not moving points to its nature, but that's not entirely accurate. 

 It is not the opposite of motion, or of the visible, or of sound. 

 This motionlessness is not definable - it is not a sensation.

 Nevertheless it has an almost kinesthetic effect on you, 

as if it is vanishing you, as if the existing one you thought you were, 

the receiver, the photographic plate that records your experience, this"one,"

 becomes transparent. You begin to feel the same threat of vanishing 

you felt on the road, but now you relax and let it be.

  "The third motionlessness" comes now, unbidden. 

 It is the stillness of presence itself - the stillness of a clearness that is always here,

 behind and within everything. It is what allows everything to show up.

  It is empty too not made out of anything, yet it is awesome and radiant in its presence.

  It is without being an it.

You remember now how the phrase from Psalm 46 continues:

 "Be still, and know I am God."

"God"  - this old, strange word that sounds like a judge and yet still resonates beyond that -

 could it mean - could it have first meant - this empty Presence without form,

 appearing as all form?  You realize you are trying to figure it out and you stop.

 Be still, and know I am God.  The knowing is not thinking.

 It is presence being present to presence.

You find yourself wavering here - one moment at ease in the clarity, 

and in the next thinking about it.  You hear the words again:

 Be still. Do nothing. Let be. Don't fill anything in. 

 No need to figure anything out. Relax.

A sense of peacefulness opens in you, vast and without dimension.  

This what Sufis call sakina - vast, peaceful tranquility without dimension -

 and suddenly you are smiling, your eyes are filling with tears - a joy -

 could it be called that? - a joyousness like praise and thankfulness together,

 love pouring forth from nowhere, the whole show showing up - 

mountain, sky, stars, bodies - from nothing, from stillness.

In remembering the Real, all hearts find joyous peace.

- Qur'an 13:28

~ Pir Elias Amidon

from Free Medicine

 photo by Kathy Chow

 

 

troubled thoughts

Instead of conditioning the next moment with troubled thoughts,

 you surrender your investment in them;

 now the next moment is open, untroubled, and free. 

 

 There is no need to judge the world around you; 

you simply allow it to be what it is. 

 

 If the situation calls for a response from you, fine; you respond,

 not from defensiveness or judgment, but from the natural ease of your presence.

 

  In the quiet mystery of surrendering your thoughts,

 you have released any fixity of belief or position-taking,

 and you are welcomed by openness, quiet, and a most subtle joy

 - a lightness of being. 

 

 In surrendering something of no real value, 

you have gained the world. 

 In the openness of unknowing, 

you are completely safe and innocent.

~ Pir Elias Amidon

from Free Medicine 

art by Dali

you come fresh

You come fresh from the place where names are not needed.
In that place there's a blissful secret most of us can no
longer remember. We have forgotten. But soon you
will start to learn words. You will learn to say what you
feel and want, and with that saying you too will forget
what is so natural to you now. Or perhaps you will be
lucky, and a current of the bliss you came from will
continue to stream through your heart...remembering
the beauty of your origin.


.....each of us is unique, and each of us has to find
our own way. I suppose it's only natural that I
should want to give you some advice...


Know you are safe...
Everything is all right forever.
We are made out of light.
One day you may doubt it -
that's part of the drama...
Just remember - you are safe...


Walk in the open air.
Spend as much time as you can
in nature, in places that humans
have not built on and paved over.
The natural world will teach you,
heal you, and replenish your soul
with its beauty. It is, like you are now,
fresh from the generosity of the
Unnameable.


Be interested in everything.
Be a generalist.
Be curious and amazed by things.
Listen to others.
Welcome new ways of seeing, but
always think for yourself.


Follow your love.
Do what you love.
Love what you love.
I'm not talking simply
about love that's affection
or passion - but love that
continually moves to heal...

Little one, you are about to start
a great adventure.
Follow your love.
Be interested in everything.
Walk in the open air.
Know you are safe.




~ Elias Amidon
with thanks to Mystic Meandering
 art: 99 names of Allah

a flow of aliveness

animated by a flow of aliveness

 that resists crystallizing into a system of thought or belief -

 although it does not hesitate to enjoy

 thought and belief for the delight or communion they may reveal.

open, free-wheeling, inclusive

 in view and practice, non-definitive, experimental, non-sectarian,

 warm-hearted, and non-attached. 

 embraces the full range of human experience 

while settling nowhere, 

capable of a subtle openness and 

... equally open to spontaneous delight and sensual extravagance. ...

grateful for beauty in all its forms of disclosure, 

recognizing happiness and grief and all 

emotions in between as free offerings of the Unnameable into Itself.

it negates conclusion-making while affirming the indefinable.  

A kind of love-mysticism, it loves

 the edginess and poignancy of human life 

while seeing through its apparency to the stillness within.  

Present without agenda, kind without being moralistic, 

it reaches across the seeming divisions between

 people and societies with the confidence of the light 

that is common to us all.

 ~ Pir Elias Amidon

excerpts from Free Medicine

for the sake of others

The story goes that in certain Native American tribes, when a person became psychologically unstable, she or he was placed in the middle of a circle of tribal members – men and women, children and old people – and required to spin around and around until collapsing to the ground. The tribal member toward whom her body faced now became her special charge. She was obligated to care for that person, see to their needs, and be their companion and friend. The understanding was that caring for someone else is what stirs personal healing.

When we ache from the pain of loss or rejection, the pain of depression or loneliness, the pain of feeling unloved, from bodily pain or even the pain of impending death, the ache can feel agonizingly private to us. We feel alone in our pain: it encloses us in an isolation that feels terribly unfair. How is it possible then to offer care for others?

When Robert Kennedy lay dying from an assassin’s bullet, his blood spreading across a kitchen floor, he opened his eyes and asked, “Is everyone all right?” I like to believe that question eased his homecoming. At least it taught me this counter-intuitive calculus: when you are in need, give.

Giving in this way requires a shift in our hearts. In moving from self-concern to other-concern, we enter a deeper belonging.

The Native American ritual is charged by the healing power of belonging, not altruism, for altruistic behavior benefits another at one’s own expense. The circle of tribal members embraces the wounded person, who returns that embrace. Both are healed.

So to say “when you are in need, give,” is not an injunction to be virtuous or to sacrifice your need in favor of another’s. It is to step from the loneliness of separation into the seamlessness of Being where nothing and no one has ever been separate from anything else. Our absolute belonging is not an idea, nor do we need to make it happen, nor make ourselves worthy of it. It’s already and always so.

“Stepping into the seamlessness of Being” doesn’t require us to travel any distance – it may be more accurate to say it steps into us when we allow it to. A generous heart is first of all a receptive heart.

If I feel the need to be seen and loved for what I am, and if I sit in that need waiting for someone to respond with what I need, I might sit for a long time in disappointment. But if I stop waiting and simply give, as best I can, what I’ve been waiting for, my world turns inside out. The connection I longed for is revealed – maybe not in the way I wanted or expected, but in a more fundamental sense of belonging. I am now able to receive.

The way this happens is a kind of magic that is always available to us. The distressed woman falls to the ground. When she looks up she sees in front of her an old toothless grandmother. She takes her hand. What is it that passes between their hands?



~ Pir Elias Amidon, from Free Medicine