Click for audio: The Mystery of Stillness
He who believes in me, as the scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water’ (John 7:38).
Imagine you have two elements, a jar of pure water and a bowl of soil, sitting on a table before you. Let’s say the water represents the niedrigster preis viagra soul and the soil represents the earth. Scoop a couple of tablespoons of the soil into the jar, put the lid on and shake it. Now it appears that you have created a third compound: muddy water. This is an appearance only, for we still have but two elements: water and soil. If you pour this muddied water through a proper filter, you will see the water has not lost elemental integrity.
Think of your soul in the same way. Our incarnation into a body is a kind of mixing of water and earth. The result is a consciousness increasingly opaque with earthly influences. How muddied this water becomes will depend on how much soil we put in the glass.
Using this same illustration, let’s imagine our water is muddy and we are told that if we let the jar become still, the water will clarify. We set aside our jar in a place where it will not be disturbed. Sure enough, the mud settles to the bottom and the water is clear.
If we think of meditation in this way, we can see why many get little benefit from doing it. We may experience the clarity and relaxation of stillness as all of our earthly concerns settle and how to get free cialis our mind clears. When we re-engage with our life, however, it’s like shaking up the jar. All the muddiness returns. Nothing within the jar has changed.
Now suppose we remove the lid and place a hose of running water into the jar. We are going to have an entirely different outcome. The fresh flow of water will eventually wash out every bit of soil. We can put the lid on, shake the jar to our heart’s content and we will still have clear water.
Meditative stillness is not about finding peace within the muddy water of your consciousness. It’s about taking off the lid, so to speak, of your self-definition and tapping that river of living water that flows from the core of your being.