Deep Stillness

Cell Sixty-Seven — Deep Stillness — is the Lila's penultimate teaching: the Samadhi state, the deepest contemplative absorption, where the practitioner and the practice become indistinguishable. What earlier in the journey was the effort of meditation has become the ground of being. What earlier was the practice of presence has become the natural condition of awareness.

The word Samadhi comes from Sanskrit roots meaning "to bring together completely." It is the state of the practitioner who has brought themselves so completely into the present moment, into pure awareness, into the ground of consciousness, that the usual sense of a separate self doing a practice has dissolved. The observer and the observed become one movement.

This is rare territory, and the Lila places it at Cell Sixty-Seven as an acknowledgment that it is not available at the beginning of the journey — it is the fruit of everything that has come before. And yet it is also not permanently inaccessible. It arrives in glimpses throughout the path, each glimpse longer and clearer than the last, until finally it becomes the ongoing condition of the advanced practitioner.

What the soul discovers in this stillness is not empty: it is full of everything essential. It is the fullness of being without form.

I am the stillness in which all things arise and to which all things return.