Pathways to Stillness: Removing the Layers of Illusion

ISBN-13: 9781511811026 / Angielski / Miękka / 2013 / 200 str.

Bob Norton

Opis

Many people spend their lives in a state of unconsciousness suffering from excessive and invasive random thoughts that assail and clutter the mind. Such is the persuasive nature of this clutter that many of us take our thinking to be who we really are. As we grow, we lose sight of who we might really be as we unconsciously absorb and adopt the rituals and dictates of finding our place in conventional society. Our background, education and work shape and mould us into soldiers of the status quo, a wholly man-made construct which obligates all participants to accept its agendas, its behaviours and its truths. In many life experiences we find that our instinct rails against so many of society's falsehoods imposed, nonetheless as they are, as the only way to be. We then find ourselves adopting roles in order to cope and become forever busy keeping up with the pace of life in all its pretence and illusion. Pathways to Stillness seeks to identify and peel back these layers of illusion in order to be able to learn who we really are, instead of who we think we are. A mix of dialogue, short story and reflective narrative, Pathways to Stillness takes the reader down different routes to stilling the mind-chatter, realising the importance of stopping negative thinking, re-connecting with Nature, shedding unconsciousness for greater awareness, and finding ways to inner peace and calm - stillness. The major protagonist, Robert, appears in the role of seeker of stillness, finding his lifelong beliefs, ideas and principles gradually dismantled by Jonathan, a former mentor (Two Strangers One Soul, 2010). The discoveries he experiences - a combination of revisiting past experiences that won't go away and letting stillness embrace him instead of searching for it - go hand in hand with seeing all too familiar things with new eyes. He becomes aware, on his pathway to stillness, that when he changes the way he looks at things, the things he looks at seem to change. Pathways to Stillness is both a novel and step-by-step guide which gently leads the reader in the removal of unconscious illusion and the search for that elusive inner peace, free of worry, anxiety, guilt and fear.