All of the holiest scriptures, texts, and practices come from truth and point back to truth, but there has to be a moment where you leap back into yourself. And that leap happens only right now, when you are naked of everything but yourself, when you are innocent of what you have learned about who you are.

Another question I am often asked is, "How do I remain in a state of being 'stopped'?" Stopped is not a state. Neither silence nor stillness is a state. This is a very important distinction. You can get your mind into a state of relative calm, and you can get your body to relax, but the stillness I am referring to is by its nature always still. It is always stopped. All mental movement, all doing, appears, exists, and disappears back into this stateless stillness.

A state has a beginning, a middle, and an end. There are happy and sad states, altered and mundane states, high and low states, but the stateless presence of being is stillness. Awareness is stillness. Who you already are is stillness.

Your mind may be active with thoughts — thoughts about activity or thoughts about trying to stop — but that is all occurring in the statelessness of being, which is stillness itself.

If you can just get it out of your mind that unchanging stillness is something that can be done or practiced, something that you can succeed or fail at doing, then stillness, the presence of being, can finally reveal itself to you as your own self.

Recognize that the impulses to do stillness come from the activity of the mind that is appearing in stillness. That stillness is not dead or blank. It is consciousness. It is awareness itself, and you are that awareness. The thoughts, "I have to get still. I'm trying to get still. Why can't I get still?" are being observed by and experienced by stillness itself.

You think yourself to be a thought, and then because you think yourself to be a thought, you think you can lose stillness. Then you think another thought about how to recover what has been lost, and then another thought about your success or failure in that recovery, and then another thought about how great or how horrible you are because you

There are exquisite moments when there is no "you" being practiced, there is simply beingness.

have succeeded or failed. All the while there is this simple, present stillness that is aware of the whole play. It experiences the play, experiences the suffering of the play, yet is ultimately untouched by the play. The only thing that separates you from recognizing the truth of who you are as eternal stillness is following some thought that says you are not that.