The Gap Revisited (3): Stillness & Fixity
Fixity is non-movement due to attaching to something.
Stillness is non-movement due to nothing.
The truth is that I tend to be attached to this and that: to ideas, to feelings, to habits, to people, things and places, to my own body and life. I attach even to stillness itself.
If, even though I am like this, I am proud of having understood something of the Buddha’s teaching, then, just in that false pride, there is a gap. But this is mainly how I am.
So please let me be for a while, to fixate on my own fixity.
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But there again, are there any questions?
Stillness is non-movement due to nothing.
The truth is that I tend to be attached to this and that: to ideas, to feelings, to habits, to people, things and places, to my own body and life. I attach even to stillness itself.
If, even though I am like this, I am proud of having understood something of the Buddha’s teaching, then, just in that false pride, there is a gap. But this is mainly how I am.
So please let me be for a while, to fixate on my own fixity.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
But there again, are there any questions?
posted by Mike Cross at 8:30 AM
2 Comments:
I find it difficult to sit for more than an hour. The top vertebra where my neck meets my back feels stiff and a little painful so I have to get up for kinhin or a cup of tea.
Despite being aware of this tendency to stiffening, it stays when much around it has released.
Do you suggest that if I truly experienced one bright pearl, that such stiffness would vanish? Or is experiencing stiffness just the lustre of the pearl?
You know what i think but maybe you'll shake that shit-filled conviction.
Hello MT,
The word “neck” and the word “back” are two stakes to which donkeys like you and me might tie ourselves for 10,000 years.
If you look at a skeleton, you will see that the head sits on top of a column consisting of a tailbone and a sacrum (the latter forming a bridge between two hip bones, and, sitting on top of the sacrum, five big lumbar vertebrae, 12 medium-sized vertebrae of the rib cage (each vertebra with two ribs jointed on), and seven more delicate neck vertebrae.
Your mission, MT, should you choose to accept it, is NOT to squash all these vertebra down with your head. It is a mission that is totally impossible to do.
A starting point might be to drop off your former fixed conception of the neck and back meeting each other. A skilled hand would possibly speed up the dropping off process.
This message will self-destruct in ten seconds. Good luck!
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