Stillness: The First Doorway

Stillness is often the first doorway on the path of meditation.

Any serious meditator worth their salt knows something of this. When the mind starts to settle, one of the first signs we notice is a sense of inner peace and stillness.

The question is: what exactly are we encountering there?

We might assume this stillness is something we produce through the practice. We train our attention, reduce mental wandering, and gradually create a calm, peaceful state. At one level, that is true. Meditation does train the mind. It does work with attention and mindfulness.

But that is not the full story of what is happening.

What if meditation does not create stillness, but reveals it? What if stillness is not a manufactured state, but a natural quality of mind itself, something present from the beginning yet usually overlooked because we are so caught up in our experience?

Fire is hot. Ice is cold. These are not acquired traits. In the same way, the nature of mind is naturally peaceful. The Buddha described his experience upon awakening:

"Profound, peaceful, luminous, free from elaboration, and uncompounded; Such is the nectar-like Dharma I have discovered."

In Dzogchen, the nature of mind is often described as having an abiding aspect, luminous aspect, and aware aspect (Tib. gnas gsal rig). The abiding aspect is the empty nature of mind, the luminous aspect is the unceasing arising of experience in all its variety, and there is the clear knowing presence of awareness itself. The stillness we notice in meditation is connected with this abiding aspect, not as something separate from clarity or awareness, but as the peaceful, empty nature of mind. It is connected with emptiness in the sense that what is empty is also open, spacious, and free from elaboration.

What obscures this stillness is not experience itself, but our involvement in it. Thoughts arise, sensations come up, feelings surge, and immediately we follow them, build a story around them, identify with them. We become more focused on the movement than the space in which movement appears.

Meditation begins to reverse this habit. We learn to relax. We learn to let go. We allow what is happening to be as it is. And in that letting go, something becomes evident beneath the turbulence we usually take to be mind, there is a natural peace and stillness.

This is why the path that leads to stillness is not merely a state of one-pointed concentration on an object. Object-based shamatha is one method. It is a reliable and time-tested doorway to stillness. It helps calm distraction and train the mind. But the point is not to become dependent on concentrated focus. The point is to become familiar with the spacious, empty, abiding nature of awareness itself.

As that familiarity grows, stillness is no longer confined to formal meditation. It can be recognized in walking, speaking, listening, and working. It is not dependent on blocking out experience, but on remaining in contact with the open presence in which experience unfolds.

We discover that stillness does not require us to lock down our awareness in a world devoid of distraction. It is accessible to us as the undistracted, spacious nature of awareness within life just as it is.

So next time your resting in stillness in meditation, start to familiarize with the groundless, abiding aspect of awareness. Start to notice the natural spaciousness and openness of this awareness. Once you can recognize that in meditation, you can start to tune into it everywhere.

Give it a shot, and let me know how it goes.