Читать книгу The Book of Rest - James Reeves - Страница 18

Rest is a naturally occurring phenomenon. It is the thing that happens between, behind and around all our experience. It is the space that appears, however fleetingly, between all of the activities, all of the stuff and all of the thoughts, and while we might not think it has any value, it is the glue that binds everything together.

By stopping and doing nothing for a while you can recover the ability to recognise this spaciousness and begin to feel spacious about life again.

Throughout this book we will be exploring the ‘you’ that exists beyond your thinking mind – the you that is part of the space between everything else. We will look at how rest is both a means to experience this aspect of your existence and also the results of being reminded of it.

In this and the following chapters we will consider the relationship between our feelings, experiences, rest, restfulness and this concept of ‘being’ over ‘doing’ – being in the moment, being aware, being mindful, being human (all the beings).

Along the way, we will come across many apparent contradictions and paradoxes. . . and then they will dissolve. . . so long as you don’t try to figure them out.

— We will go round in circles, and we will see that this was all part of the journey.

You’ve probably heard the expression, ‘at one with the everything’ or ‘at one with the universe’. It’s a phrase that seeks to capture that feeling of there being nothing in our experience that we wish to change. In these moments, we feel held, connected, resolved, at ease, open. There is no sense of conflict or resistance.

But in these moments, we are not actually thinking, ‘I am the universe and the universe is me’, because, most likely, we are not thinking at all.

Crucially, these moments don’t always come the minute you buy that car you’ve had your heart set on or get that promotion or resolve that conflict with your cousin. They often come out of nowhere.

Which means it is possible this feeling of being ‘at one’ (of everything being completely OK), exists regardless of what we think, do and have. It is possible that at the essence of all our experience, is a pervading sense of everything being just as it should be.

There are countless words and expressions that point towards the ‘state’ and the ‘thing’ that lies beyond the mind and beyond experience. You might use ‘consciousness’ or ‘awareness’. You may have heard of ‘nondualism’ and the ‘non-dual state’ – simply meaning ‘not divided’ (‘not two’). Or if you’re used to a more ‘new age’ vibe then there’s ‘source’, ‘soul’ or ‘white light’. Perhaps you’ve even come across the police-drama-sounding ‘witness state’? And when describing what it feels like to be in this state, we might use words such as ‘peaceful’, ‘blissful’, or describe a sense of pervading stillness or feeling of balance and harmony.

Whether we use any or all of these terms or we make up our own, we can never accurately describe any of it because it is necessarily elusive. The state is a no-state and the feeling of being in it is nothing but pure being.

In this book, our preference is for ‘essence’ or ‘essential self’, and when we talk about connecting with it, we like to say we are ‘being’, but all these descriptions are merely our way of pointing to something that you ultimately need to experience yourself in all its word-less, thought-less glory. It might not have a name, but it’s right there, in front of your nose (well, actually, it’s behind your nose, and in front of it, too, and it’s none and both of those things, it’s what’s aware of your nose. . . etc.).

When we rest, when we do nothing, we give ourselves the chance to go beyond our mind and beyond our experience. Ultimately, in moments of not doing and of experiencing only our awareness, we are in a state of one-ness. We don’t feel the separateness of our bodies, the conflicts of our emotions, the differences between ourselves and others.

It is a difficult concept to get our heads around, since our minds love to objectify, to have a ‘thing’ to cling on to. We’re all very uncomfortable with not knowing. We want to make this thing that cannot be named a thing. Our head really doesn’t like what this thing implies: that it cannot control our individual experience of life.

You might already have your own understanding of consciousness, and have your own words for it, and perhaps even a different system for thinking about it. If you are attached to how you already think about this quality we are exploring, perhaps you could consider letting go of your current beliefs, or at least hold them a little less tightly.

— We are not any one thing.