How to Harvest a Rhythm of Stillness in a World of Perpetual Motion

Silence is an essential alchemical ingredient...

The Perpetual Motion Machine

Perpetual motion.

The tirade of ceaseless action.

The ongoing barrage of doing that fills our awareness.

‘Normal’.

The siren song of modernity, and the echo of concrete jungles always hums with an underlying sense of ‘doing’, for contemporary civilization would ask us to remain:

‘On’.

Our society is not designed for ‘still points’.

And the result is the continuous erosion, fraying and disintegration of the spirit.

The plumbing underneath the floor of modern culture never stops running; work brakes are filled with cigarettes or food, and evenings with glowing screens.

Culturally we are taught not to sit in periods of stillness, but to fill every void with some form of distraction.

Even meditation has become yet another checkpoint on the list of things ‘to do’, because it ‘increases productivity, lowers blood pressure and reduces stress’.

As the story goes, those are definitely things we ‘should’ want acquire.

Rarely do we speak about the virtue of ‘stilling’ for it’s own sake. True silence is not even culturally acceptable; consider the last time you saw someone in public totally enraptured, consumed, and relishing in total stillness…

It’s doubtful that you ever have.

Why is this?

One of the underlying core mythological narratives that runs our culture is that of the ‘perpetual motion machine’.

Unlike living organisms, machines ‘can’ work in an ongoing monotone rhythm with no real stoppage required.

The only limiting factor is wear and tear.

However, from an economical and industrial vantage point, the longer our mechanisms can run, the more volume they can produce, and thus, the more profit they make us.

We have turned time into money, and money into the core value that determines status, survival and statehood.

Periods of stillness ‘waste time and money’.

I have spoken about how human sensory faculties were once attuned to ecological and environmental information flows, and how that was altered by the birth of the industrial revolution, tethering our awareness to machines.

We live in machine culture, and there is an ‘transhumanist’ undertow that pulls us to be more like them. Cyborgs that have all but lost the soft animal body that is our ancestral inheritance, to become ‘perfected’ entities capable of living and working forever.

This is the dream of modernity.

Non-stop productivity and linear progress, forever.

To become perpetual motion machines.

Silence does not fit into this paradigm for to become silent is to ‘stop’, and at it’s deepest levels, to ‘die’ into spaciousness created by ‘nothing’.

---

A Song With No Spaces Between the Notes

French composer Claude Debussy said, ‘Music is the space between the notes.’

The silence between notes enables them to resonate, reverberate, and fully express themselves.

Without this space, the result would be noise and chaos.

The world today and the state it fosters is like a song with no spaces between the notes.

Or at best…

Our internal world, and energetic state blast like the speakers of underground German club, pumping electronic dance music 24/7.

Deep down, there is apart of you that’s tired of it.

Most of us never stop: we forgo the rich, and delicious silence that emerges from allowing our internal activity to ‘settle’ for a time.

I myself have found myself on this non-stop ride many times my life, only to ‘go off the rails’, crashing and burning.

We are not machines designed for perpetual motion.

While traditional meditative circles once spoke of ‘the monkey mind’, the state referred to by the ancient teachers has mutated, been amplified and had the volume turned up, becoming a droning chorus of monkeys.

If we slow down, and open ourselves to a rhythm that allows for periods of stillness, we return the space that happens between the notes.

Consider…

When have you last stopped, and fallen into stillness long enough to understand the birds?

---

Understanding The Birds

Forged in the desert, made new
I remembered how we once understood
the birds and the trees,
the whisperings of the wind
and the buzzing of the bees

And that we still can
if we let silence consume us,
tear us apart
until there is nothing left but silence

understanding itself,
in the wind and the trees,
the birds and the bees

Pim Vermeulen

---

The Hunter Who Sit’s Quietly In a Blind

This state of perpetual inner and outer motion are not innate or inherent qualities of the human animal.

We were not ‘designed’ for it.

It erodes our biological systems, strains the spirit and muffle’s the whispers of the soul.

For the deeper parts of us, often just ‘whisper’.

We do not have to look far to confirm this, for if we watch animals in nature they typically display a rhythm that includes periods of stillness.

Some animals remain totally still for hours or days on end.

An old teacher once told me that crocodiles are ‘master meditators’, for they can sit totally still for long periods of time, fully absorbed in sensation, attuned to their environment…just breathing.

For the deeper into ones ‘primality’ they go, the more silence they might find.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term ‘blind’, it refers to a ‘hidden’ location built by a human hunter, usually created by gathered vegetation, which allows them to ‘hide’ from their prey.

Often they are built around or in trees.

It is a hunting method deployed all over the world, and it requires extreme stillness for long periods of time, for it depends on ‘waiting’ for prey to present themselves.

This is a part of our ‘lineage’ as a species: a ‘full’ day could have meant sitting totally still… listening, watching, and waiting.

The pace of hunter gather’s is on average much slower than our pace today, for the breathed in and out with the flow of the living world.

Periods of activity were balanced with periods of stillness, in a world with no screens, career goals or perpetual motion machines.

Only the wild stillness…

---

Silence- The Essential Alchemical Ingredient

“All the wonders of life are already here. They’re calling you. If you can listen to them, you will be able to stop running. What you need, what we all need, is silence. Stop the noise in your mind in order for the wondrous sounds of life to be heard. Then you can begin to live your life authentically and deeply.”
― Thích Nhất Hạnh, Silence: The Power of Quiet in a World Full of Noise

We are all alchemist, for the language of life and death itself is alchemical.

Whenever we undergo change of any kind, alchemy is occurring.

At it’s core, alchemical reactions facilitate the change of one state into another state, through a series of phases.

Some of the most readily apparent examples of this are:

• The process of digesting food

• Water moving from solid, to liquid, to gas

• The creation of new land as magma cools to become solid earth

All this is alchemy.

This alchemy occurs ‘within’ as well:

• The series of realizations that allow to finally alter our ways

• The period leading up to a breakthrough that opens up new vistas of possibility

• The maturing of one’s consciousness that emerges from ongoing devotion to a set of practices

Those of us who cultivate alchemical practices are simply learning to surf more reliably with underlying aspects of nature.

Yet, the alchemy remains ‘incomplete’ without periods of emptiness, stillness and silence. Stillness is the space between the phases, the pivot point at the center of each phase, and the integrative agent that allows for the change to ‘settle’.

Whether someone works with alchemy consciously or not, silence (stillness) is an essential ingredient of the formula.

---

Organic Stillness & Rhythmatic Silence

There are entire traditions in the east built around ‘silence practices’.

I have spent years meditating in ‘silence’, (or for anyone who has engaged with such practices for any period of time knows, the reality is more akin to ‘silencing’).

While these practices can be immensely valuable, they are not the only way to integrate silence and stillness into one’s daily experience.

The method I want to share with you today, for integrating these states of consciousness is called Harvesting Pauses.

The Bones of The Method:

It is a method of fostering ‘organic stillness’ by settling more deeply into the spontaneously arising rhythm of ones day.

Periods of stillness/stilling follow periods of activity.

We might engage in a set of chores, write an article or finish a lively conversation, and then choose to pause.

Or perhaps we find a moment waiting for the gas to pump, to find stillness.

The state itself allows one’s awareness to move as it desires from external sensory information noticing whatever arises (sight, smell, sound, taste, sense), to internal bodily sensation noticing whatever arises (energetic movement, emotion), with one intent:

Pausing, Stilling, Stopping…Like sediment that has been kicked up by currents in a river, we become like a still lake , allowing the perpetual motion machine to cease.

This method is not based on ‘external stillness’ necessarily (though it does help), but internal stillness.

• Pauses can long (such as 20 minutes), or short (such as 20 seconds).

• These can happen as often as you like or need.

• Some days there are many small pauses, and others there is a single longer one.

The power of this method is that it slips into one’s daily way of being.

It allows us to begin to hear whispers again.

It is based in our organic animal nature, and innate physiology; for it calls back the spontaneously arising stops and starts, of the soft ancestral body…that needs periods of stillness.

At a deeper level, this is a method altering the fundamental rhythm of daily life, as a subversive act to the siren song of the perpetual motion machine.

---

Deeper Instruction in The Method