the still point of the turning universe

 

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The world's spiritual geniuses seem to discover universally that the mind's muddy river, this ceaseless flow  of trivia and trash, cannot be dammed, and that trying to dam it is a waste of effort that might lead to madness.  

Instead you must allow the muddy river to flow unheeded in the dim channels of consciousness; you raise your sights; you look along it, mildly, acknowledging its presence without interest and gazing beyond it into the realm of the real where subjects and objects act and rest purely, without utterance.


—Annie Dillard 
from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

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When you live your life at peace with every circumstance of your life, favorable or terrible, you situate yourself at the still point of the turning universe. Then you are the world of cause and effect itself, you become this. You become, with nothing between you and it, this precarious world. You are precariousness itself and so you are no longer subject to precariousness. When you live like this you are the master of precariousness, the master of cause and effect, and then everything is blessed, just as it is.

Interestingly, the root of the word precarious is "prayer,” or “imprecation.” When you fully enter precariousness, our ordinary human world of one mistake after another, you are “full of prayer,” open to connectedness. Then you can see how a life of human limitation is also a life of grace.


—Susan Murphy
Upside-Down Zen: Finding the Marvelous in the Ordinary

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At the still point of the turning world.

Neither flesh nor fleshless; 

Neither from nor towards; 

At the still point, there the dance is, 

But neither arrest nor movement.

And do not call it fixity.

Where past and future are gathered. 

Neither movement from nor towards, 

Neither ascent nor decline.

Except for the point, the still point, 

There would be no dance,

And there is only the dance.


—T. S. Eliot
from Burnt Norton
in The Four Quartets

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