Religion and ritual can be vehicles for entering stillness. It says in Psalm 46:10, ‘Be still, and know that I am God.’ But they are still just vehicles. The Buddha called his teaching a raft: You don’t need to carry it around with you after you’ve crossed the river.
Eckhart Tolle
… still carrying a raft which rests my yoga mat:)
To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment.
Eckhart Tolle
“What’s held in attention has the power to change your brain.
Controlling your attention – becoming more able to place it where you want it and keep it there, and more able to pull it away from what’s bothersome or pointless (such as looping again and again through anxious preoccupations, mental grumbling, or self-criticism)
– is the foundation of changing your brain, and thus your life, for the better.”
-Rick Hanson, PhD
a Senior Fellow of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley