How Stillness Speaks is and/or is not speaking to you.

 Prompt: write up how Stillness Speaks is in fact speaking, and/or not speaking, to you at this time, and to flesh this out with some detail, including some reference to the book itself. In doing this, you can consider at least some of the questions that follow below, they’re just prompts to get you going. In fact, if you find yourself just writing on your own about the topic — how Stillness Speaks is and/or is not speaking to you — and don’t end up using any of these questions, that would be fine too. What thing or things in Stillness Speaks have resonated with you the most? This could be ideas, passages, chapters, images, stories, examples, anything. For example, what Tolle writes about the ego, or nature, or relationships, or death, or surrender, etc. What in it has seemed most plausible? Less plausible? Maybe even just “out there”? Or completely wrong? Have you been able to observe the lack of stillness there may be in you, as it is happening? Or a little later? Or maybe a lot later? Or maybe some of each of these? What has that been like? Does it make any sense, or have you been able to tell, that when you can observe in this way, that in you which is able to observe the lack of stillness is itself already the stillness that is also in you? Tolle sometimes calls this “watching the thinker”. Do you have any sense that this inner stillness — as contrasted with your thoughts, emotions, and situations — is your own innermost essence, as Tolle claims it is? Or does that seem, at this point, far from the case? -If you’ve managed to read Stillness Speaks more than once this term, did you find the re-reading helpful or illuminating? Did you notice different things the second (or third, or…) time through? Have you felt the book doing what Tolle calls “its work, to awaken you from the old grooves of your repetitive and conditioned thinking”? (Introduction) Here’s a short passage from early in the book, at the beginning of Chapter 2, “Beyond the Thinking Mind”: “The stream of thinking has enormous momentum that can easily drag you along with it. Every thought pretends that it matters so much. It wants to draw your attention in completely… Here is a new spiritual practice for you: don’t take your thoughts too seriously.” -Are you able to practice this, to “witness your own mental-emotional reactive patterns as they happen”, and to experience thereby (yourself as) “the awareness in which thoughts and emotions happen”? Does that feel or seem like not taking your thoughts too seriously? Does that seem to be bringing the space of awareness around the reactive turbulence? Does that have any effect on the turbulence or your experience of it? Towards the end of Chapter 3, “The Egoic Self”, Tolle writes, “Your unhappiness ultimately arises not from the circumstances of your life but from the conditioning of your mind.” Then, at the beginning of Chapter 5, “Who You Truly Are”, he writes “You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level.” -What kind of sense, if any, is this making to you now? Do you have some sense of separation, or disentanglement, between the egoic self, the fearful and needy mind-made self, and who, according to Tolle, you really are? One way to approach this would be to consider how preoccupied you are with “the circumstances of your life”, to what degree they rule over or determine the quality of your experience. There’s no right or wrong here, only getting a clear read on where you are, wherever that is right now. Realize that just to see that and how this is going on in you is already to not just be determined by the circumstances of your life. -Here’s a short passage that comes close to the end of Chapter 7, “Nature”. Tolle writes: “A great silence holds all of nature in its embrace. It also holds you.” Do you find this at all meaningful, and if you care to, can you say something about how or how not? As a complement to “watching the thinker”, Tolle talks about “entering the Now”, and this passage seems to me to be one that might help to bring this about. Does that make any sense to you? -In the last chapter, “Suffering & the end of suffering“, Tolle advises, “Bring acceptance into your nonacceptance. Bring surrender to your nonsurrender. Then see what happens”, from the last chapter, “Suffering & the End of Suffering”, hold any water for you at the present time, and could you say a little about how or how not? You might pair this with the statement in Chapter 6, “Acceptance and Surrender”, “Acceptance of the unacceptable is the greatest source of grace in this world.” Can you say a little about how this is the key to the essential transformation of the egoic self into alert stillness, which is how the shift in consciousness in “Shift happens” happens?