Stillness Is A Pleasure

by Dennis Green

To the Chiricahua and Mescalero Apache, stillness is a pleasure. It brings about peace, lucidity, clarity in all things. Not merely silence, but stillness. Absence of chatter, of movement, of thought. An empty mind. And a fullness of heart.

No one who has never experienced this state of being can appreciate it. It is the goal of meditation, of some forms of prayer, of T’ai Chi and Qi Quong, even of the ingestion of psychedelic drugs. It isn’t the hedonistic pleasure of “feeling good” or even feeling better, but a state of mind and existence in which feeling is irrelevant. Only the visionary state matters.

This is also a lucidity beyond human ken. A “seeing” into things described by Carlos Castaneda, seeing their true reality and beyond it, to the energy and matter that underlies all existence. Even dark matter and dark energy, invisible to the ordinary eye, but making up 98% of the universe, become visible to he who sees with this non-feeling.

Sometimes, it is an intimation and imitation of death itself — complete with the blinding white light of the last moments of conscious existence and awareness — and an experience that puts the soul at peace with the real thing yet to come. Sometimes it is the heightened lucidity of hallucination, a perception of those realities usually invisible to the naked eye.

These visions may be of the gods, and they may be therefore terrifying. They may be of such ineffable beauty that forever after the voyager is enraptured by the beauty that surrounds him in every natural setting or creature. He will never see “ordinary reality” — a tree or a mountain or a dog — the same way again, untouched by the divine.

Like all spiritual raptures, stillness leaves a person as a believer in the ineffable, and convicted of a certainty that is beyond criticism, cynicism, sanity and pragmatism alike. Its truth is so apparent, so obvious, that no further argument is necessary. And at the same time, an open-mindedness to the beliefs of all others, including the great bear himself, keeps open all the doors of perception.

Blake wrote, “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is — infinite!” I first heard that quote from professor-in-residence at UC Santa Barbara Aldous Huxley, who made it quite clear that the best cleanser for the human mind is a psychedelic drug. A few years later, and a few years after Huxley died, on acid, I took my first trip too. The stillness was almost overwhelming.

The sacred dances of the Apaches were declared “an offense to the people of the United States” and any violation of this prohibition was punishable by death. Until recently, so were their rituals involving peyote and mescaline. That’s how much the round eyes, the long hairs and the white settlers feared the magic of stillness. Europeans did their best to exterminate these “vermin,” but failed. Today, there are more Native Americans alive in this country than there were when Columbus arrived.

Geronimo was only the most famous chieftain of the Chiricahua Apache, but not the last. Down through the ages, surviving the relocation to reservations, the capture and kidnapping of children to the Christian boarding schools, and one massacre after another, the tribes have occupied Alcatraz, survived the Siege at Wounded Knee, the predations of missionaries and alcohol, and begun to regain and revive their Old Ways, the language and the stories and the culture.

Stillness is a pleasure. When I have said my piece, I will be still again. In that stillness, I am more ancient than the mountain, more powerful than the wind, and more peaceful than the sea. And no matter what you think, or say, no matter how pitiful your cries, I will have no mercy on your soul.

©2010 Dennis Green