– Taken from Ron Timm’s lecture on the New Year’s Meditation Retreat, December 2024 –
Sitting here, standing here, practicing stillness.
In Chinese the traditional term for these practices was Zuo Wang, which means ‘to sit and forget’. So you can say: just keep forgetting, forgetting and forgetting until you have forgotten what you have forgotten. You can say it is a process of clearing out. It is actually a process of purification. Overall, on the way towards stillness, the work is done by reducing.
This is why we sit still, we stand still, we reduce outer activity. We dim the light in the practice room, so we reduce outer stimulation. We turn the senses inwards. I mean stillness and cultivation of stillness is nothing else than: less, less, less. Which, you have to notice, is in opposition to the times and the society that we live in, which is: more, more, more.
While, what the Master says is that there are just four things that are important in life.
Things of importance: birth
First, it is important to be born. Now we think: ‘Right, it's important, otherwise you wouldn't sit here, you couldn't even talk to me.’ Yes, but also in the Eastern tradition they say you can be born many times. You can be reborn. Now, talking about rebirth, many people think about afterlife or reincarnation, so we come to death already, which is important. But you can be reborn in this life. And this is what you can take care of.
You can be reborn when you can change your life completely. Or destiny can change your life, so you will have to be reborn. In other cultures there is a concept of a spiritual rebirth: you are born into this world and then you start your spiritual path, that is where you are reborn into the world of spirit, a world different to this one. But you can also be reborn every day, every morning - if you don't know so much. Not if you think you know already what is to come, 'I have seen it all before.' Maybe, maybe not. You may be surprised today.
As an example, the Master was very often teaching in Switzerland, that is where I met him. Whenever he visited people invited him for a day out, wanting to show him around. And they always went to the Jungfraujoch with him. It is the top in the mountains reachable by cable car, so everybody can go there, but you are above 4000 meters and it costs a hell lot of money. It is very scenic, though full of Japanese and Chinese- they take their photo and then they go down. So everybody always took him there because they wanted to show him the best, right?
He went to Jungfraujoch, as he told me, something like a hundred times. Because whenever people asked him: 'We will go to Jungfraujoch, have you ever been there? He would say: No. ‘Would you like that?' He always said: ‘Yes, of course’.
And when they went there, he was going: ‘Oh, wow, that is, wow, never seen that. It's amazing, thank you so much.’ Of course, for once it is Chinese culture, you don't want to disappoint your host. So you have to go a hundred times to Jungfraujoch. But that was also his attitude. Well, today he hasn't been there, so let's go! It is different every time.
Things of importance: death
If birth is important, death is important. Whatever we do, that is what the Master always says, we have to prepare for dying. Because it is the next big thing. And you don't know when it is coming.
People eat healthy because they want to have a long life. But actually they do so because they are afraid of dying. You can live as healthy as you want, which I advocate you should. But you will die. You might think: ‘But I live longer when I live healthy.’ Maybe. But that just means you can be longer afraid of death. In the end, you can get hit by a car and you die. You cannot say: ‘But wait a minute, I was eating healthy! Something went wrong here.’ These are our concepts. You think you eat healthy, this is why you live long. No. You eat healthy means you eat healthy, that's all.
Death is important, and I just give you the words of the Master. For Western people, yes, death is important and it is important to have a long life. And it is most important that you die tomorrow, not today. For Western people, when you die is important. And when you die is clear: it is later. You die later, not today.
But nobody ever died later. Everybody died today.
So, death is important. And the importance of death is not when you die, because there is nothing you can do and you don't even know when you die. What do you know? That you die. And if you want to know a little more: it is today.
You never die tomorrow. You never die yesterday. You always die today.
You want to take that into your meditation.
You die today. So in death it is not important when you die but how you die. You understand that? Now, that is something you can do. There is nothing you can do about when you die, but if you realise that you die today you will already come to what is up to you, that is care for how you die. That is a big task.
Things of importance: love
Now, love, obviously.
I don't want to go too much into that.
We talk about love, but not romantic stuff and everything you see in television and Hollywood and so on. It has not much to do with love.
In the end, people hate each other. Because of love. They kill each other because of love.
That is impossible.
So again, that would be a big thing to take into your meditation.
What is love?
And the best would be that you don't know so much.
Because most of what we know about love is pretty corrupted.
So: birth, death, love…
...and the weather.
Things of importance: the weather
That is usually a surprise. Like what? What? But it is important.
It is probably the most important. Because weather stands for nature and its cycles. Which is life, death, and love. It stands for spontaneity and for the uncertain. Which is life, death, and love. They are uncertain. But we want guarantees. We want the guarantee for life. We want the guarantee for love. We want the guarantee that we will not die.
And then there is the weather. It is just changing. And it is never the way that you thought it would be and should be and will be. This just shows how much we have disconnected from nature. So we don't know anything any longer about the uncertainty of nature and natural processes. However, this is very important because the processes that we start within the practice, we try to let them become very natural.
This is why there are good days and there are bad days.
Sometimes it works out.
Sometimes it seems not to work at all.
And it's all needed.
That is why you don't force nor avoid anything.
The more you want it, the more you push, the more corrupted, the more strange things become.
As it is with birth, death, love and the weather.
There are sunny days. There are rainy days.
You practice.
