What is the value of stillness?

Can stillness ever obtain among the lower centers?
As articles in this issue show, students of the Fourth Way rarely find stillness possible among the lower centers, our thoughts, emotions, movements, instincts.

Can we actually stop thoughts? Can we control the heart? 

The speed of the different lower centers makes the answer variable. Thoughts occur at a much slower speed than emotions, and can be more easily harnessed. The development of a steward begins to make control of our thoughts possible. But this takes techniques and much practice.  The use of a mantra, or the Jesus Prayer, can be useful to train a mind we wish to become still. Physical labor also balances and quiets the lower centers in general, removing leaks of energy.

To separate from our own emotions (or anyone else’s) requires shifting our identity to a more timeless state. The fast speed of the higher emotional center is a real contrast to our ordinary muddy emotional state. The world of emotional fears, concerns, and aspirations—even the quest for awakening—drop away when this higher state arises. Inner subjectivities grow quiet as we reach the value of stillness.

Do higher states, in fact, coexist with ‘I’s?

Yes, as several of our authors indicate in their articles for this issue. Yet in higher states it is clear that the ‘I’s are not real. They’re welcome to co-exist with higher states. They no longer obtrude. The longer and deeper we perceive higher states, the more our identity becomes rooted in the eternal. 

What is it to experience higher centers? With the higher emotional state, we proceed to look out purely, as an instrument of clear seeing, perceiving. The personal realm recedes here. Brief flashes of the higher intellectual center invite us to witness cosmic laws and principles, where the personal clearly has no place.

Is our experience of higher states wordless?

Sometimes a new baby seems to look out from a cosmic realm without words. Presence, indeed, seems to stop the ‘I’s. We drop who we are to become what we must be, a glad witness to the glory of the world around us. And the value of stillness is to be able to look out from ourselves to a more objective reality. 

Yes, life is real only then, when “I am.”

Rowena Taylor has been a student of the Fourth Way for nearly fifty years, and an editor of the FourthWayToday.org since its inception. Other articles of hers can be found here: https://fourthwaytoday.org/author/rowena/.