The Path to Living Stillness
“Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralyzed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds' wings.” - Rumi
Everything in the universe is balance and flow, balance and flow. It is actually a mysterious thing but it appears to be a balanced flow.
We normally experience balance as an unmoving state. Like those beautiful, natural balanced stone sculptures you see around. Somebody coaxed those rocks completely different shapes and sizes into a state of self-maintaining stillness.
The slightest touch could send the entire thing toppling over. And, eventually, that will happen because nothing created is permanent.
But there is a flowing balance that is constantly going on.
When you lean to the right, on a level so subtle we are barely aware of it, dozens of little muscles and hundreds of chemical processes are going on to be a counter force to the leaning. Without that you would, of course, fall over.
There is always a center point or equilibrium in everything we do. This fluid balance is at the heart of the deep teaching of The Middle Way or as I like to call it The Path of Living Stillness.
Life is in constant motion. Even the most solid looking objects are a bunch of tiny particles. whizzing through vast empty space. Your body is trillions of living creatures. Life is an ever flowing river of mystery. The Middle Way embraces this perpetual motion, expansion and contraction and says,
"This is the way of things.
Take no position about it.
Don't try to change it.
Don't try to stop it.
Stand at the center and watch with loving eyes."
There is a time for being ahead
There is a time for being behind
There is a time for being in motion
There is a time for being at rest
There is a time for being vigorous
There is a time for being exhausted
There is a time for being safe
There is a time for being in danger
The master sees things as they are
Without trying to control them
She lets them go their own way
And resides at the center of the circle
The Tao de Ching
The Middle Way is the flow between wisdom and love. It recognizes no absolute and so it can always choose the best option, in the constantly shifting field of time and experience. Sometimes things can be renovated. Sometimes they need to be torn down so that we may build anew. But if we stay in the center, in the Middle Way, having no favorites and taking no sides, the right way, that is the way that brings the most blessings in this moment, we will always be clear.
You will remain at the center, the hub of the turning wheel of life and experience yourself as the Path of Living Stillness.
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