Even those maggots I saw in the garbage bin looked natural. They were really no different from everything else. Seeing maggots in a bin like that didn’t repulse me. Sure, I poured some bleach on them, which was necessary and not driven by disgust.
We are all trying to survive, to make meaning in some small ways. We all try to make it to another day, another moment—no different from those tiny maggots.
Instead, we find disagreeable things everywhere. The crowded bus. The dirty street. The foul air. The disagreeable co-workers. It is endless.
Much of our trouble stems from an overactive mind and overthinking.
Like everyone else, we have allowed our over-exercised sense of good and evil to obscure the landscape. We have been blinded by likes and dislikes.
The closer we are to the stillness within (shorn of external considerations), the closer we are to putting away unnecessary thoughts or sentiments.
And what is this stillness? It’s that silent something deep in your chest (or heart, as some would prefer to say). Even though most people ignore it, it is there. It is something that we instinctively feel. It may not be immediately obvious to many people, but we can hopefully intuit it. The same cannot be said of the void, pure awareness, or God. Those things are not within reach. Stillness is.
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As soon as you wake up, you are carried off by the day’s activities.
You remember the enfoldment of sleep even as you brush your teeth. It had you so tight in its grip; would it really matter to you if you had stayed there and did not wake up again?
As often as you need to, you can briefly return to that feeling of being enfolded in stillness. It is within the realm of possibility.
In the same way that you do not choose what dream to dream, you do not get to choose how your life unfolds. You simply live it and somehow muddle through, with the occasional feeling of stillness acting as a buffer or interludes in between.
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Your previous night’s sleep seems farther away as the day wears on. Did you sleep overnight? Did you actually dream those dreams you remember?
The weather is hot. There is a forest fire not far from your town. And you had maggots in your garbage. But somehow, it’s all ok. Did some of that stillness in our sleep somehow creep into our daily lives? Were those maggots just more bits of dreams as far as deep stillness is concerned?
You are never far from that deep stillness, which has no judgment. It won’t get up and kick you or turn around and laugh in your face. It doesn’t care one way or another. And somehow, you think you shouldn’t either. It may be that you are still sleep drunk.
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