Stillness transcends thought...

Thinking is not the enemy. It is not necessary to turn off thought or somehow obliterate it, nor is it really even possible . Thought and emotion have their place and can be very useful sometimes.

There is nothing wrong with thinking itself, but there is often something a bit unbalanced about our relationship to thinking. The basic human dysfunction in terms of obscuring our direct experience of reality is that we take our thoughts about reality to be the primary reality, and it is secondary at best.

So obliterating thought is not the answer. However, we do need to transcend thought and change our relationship to thought and the consequent emotions and reactions to thoughts that always result from any thought that is engaged or entertained.

We do need to see that all thoughts and emotions arise and cease in a still and silent presence. This still and silent presence is the primary, unchanging reality that never comes and never goes but is always here and now, beneath every thought or emotion as it were. All the thoughts and emotions and experiences we ever have are constantly coming and going but the silent, still presence alone remains.

This silent presence cannot even properly be called an experience at all. It is the primal reality in which every experience comes and goes. It is existence or being itself. But stillness is not the absence of thought. It is the transcending of it.

"Be still and know that I am God."


Francis Bennett