Perpetual motion
The tirade of ceaseless action.
The ongoing barrage of doing that fills our awareness.
‘Normal’.
The siren song of modernity, and the echo of concrete jungles always hums with an underlying sense of ‘doing’, for contemporary civilization would ask us to remain:
‘On’.
Our society is not designed for ‘still points’.
And the result is the continuous erosion, fraying and disintegration of the spirit.
The plumbing underneath the floor of modern culture never stops running; work brakes are filled with cigarettes or food, and evenings with glowing screens.
Culturally we are taught not to sit in periods of stillness, but to fill every void with some form of distraction.
Even meditation has become yet another checkpoint on the list of things ‘to do’, because it ‘increases productivity, lowers blood pressure and reduces stress’.
As the story goes, those are definitely things we ‘should’ want acquire.
Rarely do we speak about the virtue of ‘stilling’ for it’s own sake. True silence is not even culturally acceptable; consider the last time you saw someone in public totally enraptured, consumed, and relishing in total stillness…
It’s doubtful that you ever have.
Why is this?
One of the underlying core mythological narratives that runs our culture is that of the ‘perpetual motion machine’.
Unlike living organisms, machines ‘can’ work in an ongoing monotone rhythm with no real stoppage required.
The only limiting factor is wear and tear.
However, from an economical and industrial vantage point, the longer our mechanisms can run, the more volume they can produce, and thus, the more profit they make us.
We have turned time into money, and money into the core value that determines status, survival and statehood.
Periods of stillness ‘waste time and money’.
I have spoken about how human sensory faculties were once attuned to ecological and environmental information flows, and how that was altered by the birth of the industrial revolution, tethering our awareness to machines.
We live in machine culture, and there is an ‘transhumanist’ undertow that pulls us to be more like them. Cyborgs that have all but lost the soft animal body that is our ancestral inheritance, to become ‘perfected’ entities capable of living and working forever.
This is the dream of modernity.
Non-stop productivity and linear progress, forever.
To become perpetual motion machines.
Silence does not fit into this paradigm for to become silent is to ‘stop’, and at it’s deepest levels, to ‘die’ into spaciousness created by ‘nothing’.
A Song With No Spaces Between the Notes
French composer Claude Debussy said, ‘Music is the space between the notes.’
The silence between notes enables them to resonate, reverberate, and fully express themselves.
Without this space, the result would be noise and chaos.
The world today and the state it fosters is like a song with no spaces between the notes.
Or at best…
Our internal world, and energetic state blast like the speakers of underground German club, pumping electronic dance music 24/7.
Deep down, there is apart of you that’s tired of it.
Most of us never stop: we forgo the rich, and delicious silence that emerges from allowing our internal activity to ‘settle’ for a time.
I myself have found myself on this non-stop ride many times my life, only to ‘go off the rails’, crashing and burning.
We are not machines designed for perpetual motion.
While traditional meditative circles once spoke of ‘the monkey mind’, the state referred to by the ancient teachers has mutated, been amplified and had the volume turned up, becoming a droning chorus of monkeys.
If we slow down, and open ourselves to a rhythm that allows for periods of stillness, we return the space that happens between the notes.
Consider…
When have you last stopped, and fallen into stillness long enough to understand the birds?
Understanding The Birds
I remembered how we once understood
the birds and the trees,
the whisperings of the wind
and the buzzing of the bees
And that we still can
if we let silence consume us,
tear us apart
until there is nothing left but silence
understanding itself,
in the wind and the trees,
the birds and the bees
[Feature Photo by Boris Smokrovic on Unsplash.]