"When you become aware of silence, immediately there is that state of inner still alertness. You are present. You have stepped out of thousands of years of collective human conditioning."
I've been reading Eckhart Tolle's Stillness Speaks. Tolle believes that stillness will save the world. This is a hard thing for me, child of busy journalist/activist/professor types, to accept. That is might be inaction, not action that will create a better world. But what Tolle says, what he conveys about the excitement of stepping out of conditioning, speaks deeply to the heart of my practice. I have felt those moments, those thrilling moments of stepping out of the flow of habitual belief, routine, buzzing cravings and unhealthy worries. They are what keep me coming back to this again and again.
