But at first I wondered: did this shift in subject mean that Iyera California. A neutral palette of grey, white and pale wood evokes a sense of stillness, giving a calm and mindful ambience. The delicate balance of faux fur on the.Having known Pico Iyer for quite some time, on paper and in person, as a perpetual example and occasional mentor in the writing of place, it delights me to watch him attract more listeners than ever with the talks he’s given in recent years, the most popular of which advocate something called “stillness.” But at first I wondered: did this shift in subject mean that Iyer—a California-grown Brit from an Indian family who mostly lives in Japan (“a global village on two legs,” as he once called himself), known for books like Video Night in Kathmandu, Falling off the Map, and The Global Soul—had put his signature hard-traveling ways behind him?Stillness in the Storm DISCLAIMER: All articles, videos, statements, claims, views and opinions that appear anywhere on this site, whether stated as theories or absolute facts, are always presented by Stillness in the Storm as unverifiedand should be personally fact checked and discerned by you, the reader. Any opinions or statements herein.
In 1994, shortly after the most revealing interview he ever gave, Cohen had moved to the Mt. The delicate bridling of that paradox is what novelist and essayist Pico Iyer explores in The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere ( public library) — a beautifully argued case for the unexpected pleasures of “sitting still as a way of falling in love with the world and everything in it,” revealed through one man’s sincere record of learning to “take care of his loved ones, do his job, and hold on to some direction in a madly accelerating world.”Iyer begins by recounting a snaking drive up the San Gabriel Mountains outside Los Angeles to visit his boyhood hero — legendary singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen. Wilson, the poet Robert Hass described beauty as a “paradox of stillness and motion.” But in our Productivity Age of perpetual motion, it’s increasingly hard — yet increasingly imperative — to honor stillness, to build pockets of it into our lives, so that our faith in beauty doesn’t become half-hearted, lopsided, crippled. “Faith is the ability to honor stillness at some moments,” Alan Lightman wrote in his sublime meditation on science and spirituality, “and at others to ride the passion and exuberance.” In his conversation with E.O. Katie is the author of Running Home: A Memoir as well as an editor and columnist for Outside Magazine where she writes the popular parenting column, Raising Rippers.Stillness Is the Key offers a simple but inspiring antidote to the stress of 24/7 news and social media.
The week I was visiting, he was essentially spending seven days and nights in a bare meditation hall, sitting stock-still. And he was working on simplifying himself as fiercely as he might on the verses of one of his songs, which he spends more than ten years polishing to perfection. Iyer reflects on Cohen’s particular impulse and what it reveals about our shared yearning:Leonard Cohen had come to this Old World redoubt to make a life — an art — out of stillness. I could hardly believe that this rabbinical-seeming gentleman in wire-rimmed glasses and wool cap was in truth the singer and poet who’d been renowned for thirty years as an international heartthrob, a constant traveler, and an Armani-clad man of the world.Cohen, who once described the hubbub of his ordinary state of mind as “very much like the waiting room at the DMV,” had sought in the sequestered Zen community a more extreme, more committed version of a respite most of us long for in the midst of modern life — at least at times, at least on some level, and often wholeheartedly, achingly. Midway through his time at the Zen Center, Cohen was ordained as a Rinzai Zen Buddhist monk and given the Dharma name Jikan — Pali for “silence.”I’d come up here in order to write about my host’s near-silent, anonymous life on the mountain, but for the moment I lost all sense of where I was.
“What else would I be doing?” he asked. The real feast that is available within this activity.”Was he kidding? Cohen is famous for his mischief and ironies.He wasn’t, I realized as he went on. “Real profound and voluptuous and delicious entertainment.
For Cohen, Iyer observes, the Zen practice was not a matter of “piety or purity” but of practical salvation and refuge from “the confusion and terror that had long been his bedfellows.” Iyer writes:Sitting still with his aged Japanese friend, sipping Courvoisier, and listening to the crickets deep into the night, was the closest he’d come to finding lasting happiness, the kind that doesn’t change even when life throws up one of its regular challenges and disruptions.“Nothing touches it,” Cohen said, as the light came into the cabin, of sitting still… Going nowhere, as Cohen described it, was the grand adventure that makes sense of everywhere else.But the paradox thickens the closer we get to its source. But the words carried weight when coming from one who seemed to have tasted all the pleasures that the world has to offer.Iyer beholds his encounter with Cohen with the same incredulous amazement that most of us modern cynics experience, at first reluctantly, when confronted with something or someone incomprehensibly earnest, for nothing dissolves snark like unflinching sincerity. This seems to me the most luxurious and sumptuous response to the emptiness of my own existence.”Typically lofty and pitiless words living on such close terms with silence clearly hadn’t diminished his gift for golden sentences.
Amazon The Art Of Stillness How To Use Them
(The most common reason to resist, of course, is people’s protestation that they simply can’t do it or aren’t cut out for it, which is merely the time argument by a guise of greater denial — it simply means that they haven’t put in the time to get good at it there is a reason it’s termed a meditation practice — mastering it obeys the same basic principles of attaining excellence as any skill.)A century after Bertrand Russell admonished that the conquest of leisure and health would be of no use if no one remembers how to use them, Iyer paints an empirical caricature of the paradoxical time argument against stillness. The second most common reason nonpractitioners have against meditating is that they don’t have the time to do it — not enough time to learn to live with presence. And yet even though meditation is our greatest gateway to everyday transcendence, most adults in the West don’t practice it.
Productivity, and some thoughts on wisdom in the age of information.
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