The Book of Rest. James Reeves
these moments don’t always come the minute you buy that car you’ve had your heart set on or get that promotion or resolve that conflict with your cousin. They often come out of nowhere.
Which means it is possible this feeling of being ‘at one’ (of everything being completely OK), exists regardless of what we think, do and have. It is possible that at the essence of all our experience, is a pervading sense of everything being just as it should be.
There are countless words and expressions that point towards the ‘state’ and the ‘thing’ that lies beyond the mind and beyond experience. You might use ‘consciousness’ or ‘awareness’. You may have heard of ‘nondualism’ and the ‘non-dual state’ – simply meaning ‘not divided’ (‘not two’). Or if you’re used to a more ‘new age’ vibe then there’s ‘source’, ‘soul’ or ‘white light’. Perhaps you’ve even come across the police-drama-sounding ‘witness state’? And when describing what it feels like to be in this state, we might use words such as ‘peaceful’, ‘blissful’, or describe a sense of pervading stillness or feeling of balance and harmony.
Whether we use any or all of these terms or we make up our own, we can never accurately describe any of it because it is necessarily elusive. The state is a no-state and the feeling of being in it is nothing but pure being.
In this book, our preference is for ‘essence’ or ‘essential self’, and when we talk about connecting with it, we like to say we are ‘being’, but all these descriptions are merely our way of pointing to something that you ultimately need to experience yourself in all its word-less, thought-less glory. It might not have a name, but it’s right there, in front of your nose (well, actually, it’s behind your nose, and in front of it, too, and it’s none and both of those things, it’s what’s aware of your nose. . . etc.).
When we rest, when we do nothing, we give ourselves the chance to go beyond our mind and beyond our experience. Ultimately, in moments of not doing and of experiencing only our awareness, we are in a state of one-ness. We don’t feel the separateness of our bodies, the conflicts of our emotions, the differences between ourselves and others.
It is a difficult concept to get our heads around, since our minds love to objectify, to have a ‘thing’ to cling on to. We’re all very uncomfortable with not knowing. We want to make this thing that cannot be named a thing. Our head really doesn’t like what this thing implies: that it cannot control our individual experience of life.
You might already have your own understanding of consciousness, and have your own words for it, and perhaps even a different system for thinking about it. If you are attached to how you already think about this quality we are exploring, perhaps you could consider letting go of your current beliefs, or at least hold them a little less tightly.
— We are not any one thing.
Rest and theory
There is a history to the teachings and the terminology we are sharing with you (and then asking you to unlearn), but more importantly there is a mystery. Some traditions of yoga consider consciousness as being personal or separate from life itself, while other teachings called this theory into question and after further exploration determined it to be a quality that seems all pervasive. The yogis’ experiences of awareness brought the insight that it was utterly impersonal, though entirely inclusive; that what we are at our most essential is actually universal, all pervasive and utterly unified.
If you enjoy particle physics (and what’s not to love?!) then you’ll know that science is forever changing and shifting its theory on what, ultimately, we’re all made from (and by ‘we’, we mean us, the planet, the solar system and beyond – everything ever). Some theories are moving closer towards determining that we are all one and the same thing, flashing in and out of existence, in a space that is bound neither by space nor time. This is interesting in relation to what we’re trying to point you towards in this book, but it’s still just theory.
We cannot write about rest without discussing its apparent counteragent, energy. In the traditions from which many of our teachings come there are certainly references to energy that do not marry with the scientific observations on the subject. Science defines energy not as a ‘thing’ but as a measurement of an object’s capacity for doing work, whereas new age and esoteric communities talk about energy as though it were a separate entity – a ‘life force’ or ‘qi’ – capable of moving through time and space and affecting objects as it does, perhaps charging them up ‘positively’, or healing them somehow.
Some people expect yoga and meditation to take them on a journey where they will eventually experience some kind of heavenly fanfare and this life force will reveal itself to them. Some people believe they have special powers that enable them to see such forces. We can entertain the idea that they possibly do (and possibly don’t), but that doesn’t help the vast majority of us who either don’t believe in such energy or do but have never witnessed it. We like to work with observations and enquiries that anyone can do right now.
Therefore, with a nod to a tradition that’s at least 3,000 years old and a thumbs up to the science that is excited by the fact that everything might be the same thing, even though we have no idea what that thing is, we have permission to lean into the vast mystery that resides beyond current knowledge and reason.
Rest and your feelings
The times in our life when we feel most rested are the times when we are not wishing to change any particular aspect of our experience. And herein lies the problem: the times we feel most rested are the times when we need rest the least. When we’re overwhelmed by our experiences and our feelings, our desire to control them becomes stronger, and we rest less. We are rest-less.
During the course of our lives, we have had spells of feeling wonderful, awful, bored, depressed, extraordinary, anxious, weird, ill and, occasionally, something that we might call normal. We suspect you have had a similar journey, and perhaps like us, you couldn’t always put your finger on why you felt one way or another. Feelings can be like that: unpredictable, unexpected, uncontrollable, unfathomable – all the uns.
How many times have you said to yourself after something you were dreading, ‘That wasn’t so bad!’? Or have you ever found yourself moved to tears quite unexpectedly by a film or book (or even an advert)? And what about anger? Intense rage can fire up out of nowhere – stubbing your toe, a snappy comment from a colleague who hits the wrong button (a button you maybe didn’t even know you had), a slow driver when you’re already cutting it fine.
And then there’s anxiety, the tenacious destroyer of all things restful, coming at the most unexpected of times and leaving in just the same way.
ASK YOURSELF
Can you recall a time when an intense emotion came up seemingly out of nowhere?
Once we recognise that feelings are flighty fellows, we can become open to the possibility that there is not much to be gained from trying to control them. We might start to see that it is our incessant desire to control how we feel and control the experiences that we think will lead to us experiencing particular feelings that exhausts us and, ironically, leaves us feeling the very thing we wish not to feel.
Once we realise that how, why and when we feel the things we feel is not something we have all that much control over, we might want to ask ourselves if there is much point in becoming overly attached to or afraid of any of our feelings or the experiences we think they relate to. Feelings will come and go, and we’ll rarely know exactly why.
With all these unforeseen feelings playing out as they seemingly so wish, there is, perhaps surprisingly, an opportunity to consider ourselves a little less at their mercy. There is the chance here to step back and notice an inherent calm amidst this chaos. Whenever we experience a feeling, we also notice it. We are aware of it coming and going. We watch it. We observe it. We provide a space in which it can play out, and then leave. So what is this space?