Stillness Is the Way
Edited extract from the Gold Coast Talk July 1993.
The book ‘Stillness Is the Way’ contains Barry Long’s intensive meditation course.
Inside me, inside the body now, it is like deep dreamless sleep. There is no movement, no thought - nothing but the everlasting presence of that indescribable thing called life or God. There is only God or life, which is me, a stillness, a silence, an absence.
Stillness is the way. But stillness is only the way. While there’s a road, you can go off it. That’s why Krishnamurti said that truth is a pathless land. But I tell you that stillness is the way, the road, to absence. And absence has no path in it. The pathless land that Krishnamurti was talking about is absence: absence of any thing, any thought, any wanting.
I teach you, first of all, to be still. I quieten my self by the presence of my intellect, or my intelligence looking into my body and seeing the swirling, emotional self there. By not wavering, in my intelligent perception of it, it starts to quieten. It becomes more still. But, of course, more still is not still. The so-called spiritual path is to become more still, more still. Stillness is the way.
Stillness is now. Going inside, in the practicality of this moment, what you’re going to feel is not still. The past is inside the body now. Feel it?
The best part of the past in the body is sensation. Do you feel a sensation in, say, your hands? Or your stomach, or anywhere; do you just feel pure sensation? Anything you feel other than that is self. When the sensation starts to get any more content, that’s emotion, unhappiness. So I still my self down until I reach pure sensation. That’s what meditation is supposed to be about. It’s not an end in itself. It is purely to bring some quietude into the restless, discontented one, my self.
Then I reach sensation, like now. To reach it, there’s only now. Sensation consists of the equivalent of little specks of sand being dropped onto a surface. Feel it? There’s no emotion attached to it. It’s just pure sensation, the base of the body. Pure sensation is the first – or last – created thing.
To get through sensation, I have to go more and more into nothing. Between each speck of sand or sensation is space: nothing, absence. This is what the living process, the meditative process, the spiritual life and the state of being that I teach, is about: the switchover from perceiving the something, the little speck, and perceiving or being the nothing in-between each speck. This cannot happen while you’re perceiving the sensation, because the perceiving creates the sensation. But as I get stiller, and just rest in the sensation, it disappears and I go into and I become the space between the specks. In that state I am in the state of being. I have left existence. I am in deep, dreamless sleep although I am awake.
The mind wants to reflect on this nothing. But the mind can only reflect on something, like sensation. It cannot reflect on nothing. So the mind says, ‘I’ve lost it’. As soon as you go through the sensation the mind is disengaged. It’s of no use to you whatsoever. As soon as you look for something, like sensation, you will create it. But when you are not attached to the looking, the sensation disappears and you go into the stillness of being.
The mind wants to know what’s going on - and it can’t know - so it brings you up out of the stillness into being something, like a thought. So then you disengage from the mind, as best you can, and focus again on the sensation. Be easy and you will go through the sensation – no problem.
Stillness is the way to the pure sensation. And then I go through into the pathless land – the place of no choice, the place of absence. I have to go into nothing inside, behind the sensation. I’ve got to return to the nothing out of which I came. And I’ve got to do it while I’m actually in this animal body. It’s an enormous thing to do. But, then, it’s the only thing to do. There’s no thought here, nothing to prove here, nothing to doubt, nothing to fear, nothing to want. It’s just a state of absence; and that is creativity.
My creativity is nothing – nothing to speak of. It’s the creativity that Krishnamurti used to speak about. For it is nothing. In that nothingness I am spontaneous. I am creative. I am what I am. Not wanting to be anything. Not wanting to improve. Not trying to do. Just doing, just being, like now.
To be really creative is to be free of unhappiness at any moment. As long as you’re free of unhappiness, there is something that comes out of you that contributes, by the divine intelligence, to all life around you. You don’t have to try. And when you do anything, even walking down the street, it will be creative.
So stay in this place as often as you can. Practise it. For stillness is the way. And absence is my place.
The Moment of Decision