You are the mountain – Not the weather around the mountain
From time to time, I’ll post a short reminder about our contemplative practice, and if something resonates, intrigues, or mystifies, I welcome you to comment as a way of building community and supporting each other. Today I am noting a core insight articulated by Martin Laird in his beautiful book, Into the Silent Land, Chapter One: Parting the Veil.
You already have what you seek
“Union with God is not something we acquire,” Laird notes. We are already one with God and one with each other in God; “separation is not possible.”
“The illusion of separation is generated by the mind and is sustained by the riveting of our attention to the interior soap opera, the constant chatter of the cocktail party going on in our heads. For most of us, this is what normal is….” What we regard as normal, however, this sense of separateness from God, is “the great illusion” that contemplative practice can dispel.
The mountain and the weather
“The marvelous world of thoughts, sensation, emotions, and inspiration, the spectacular world of creation around us, are all patterns of stunning weather on the holy mountain of God. But we are not the weather. We are the mountain. Weather is happening – delightful sunshine, dull sky, or destructive storm – this is undeniable.”
The problem is that most of us make the mistake of identifying with the weather. But, “When the mind is brought to stillness, we see that we are the mountain and not the changing patterns of weather appearing on the mountain. … For a lifetime we have taken this weather – our thoughts and feelings – to be ourselves.”
Stillness reveals the deeper reality of who we are.
Our worry, our depression, our self-doubt, even our sunny pride … too often we identify with these changing patterns of weather, these “uninvited guests,” but nothing could be further from the truth.
We are the mountain, not the weather around the mountain. In our practice, we can observe our worry, our depression, our self-doubt, and our sunny pride, and the liberating insight is this: what observes or notices the weather is not the weather. The inner observer is free of that which it observes.
Our practice can have the effect of settling us into that deeper reality: we are already one with God, we are free, and “nothing will ever be able to separate us from God.” (Romans 8:39)
See the original post and other resources at: https://contemplativechapel.substack.com/p/you-are-the-mountain
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