Perfect immobility

Suppose you have a pain somewhere; the instinct (the instinct of the body, the instinct of the cells) is to shrink and to seek to reject—that is the worst thing, that increases it invariably.

Therefore, the first thing to teach the body is to remain immobile, to have no reaction; above all, no shrinking, not even a movement of rejection—a perfect immobility. That is bodily equality.

A perfect immobility.

After the perfect immobility comes the movement of inner aspiration, the surrender, that is to say, the spontaneous and total acceptance of the supreme Will (which one does not know).

Does the All-Will want things to go this way or that way, that is to say, towards the disintegration of some elements or towards…? And there also, there are infinite shades: there is the passage between two heights (I speak of cellular realisations, do not forget that); I mean one has a certain inner poise, a poise of movement, of life, and it is understood that while passing from one movement to a higher movement, almost always there occurs a descent and then an ascent—it is a transition.

Then, does the shock you receive push you downward to make you rise again or does it push you downward to abandon the old movements?—for there are cellular ways of being that should disappear in order to give place to other ways. There are others that tend to rise upward again with a higher harmony and organisation.

This is the second point. And one must wait and see, without postulating in advance what should be. Above all, there is the desire—the desire to be at ease, the desire to be in peace, all that—which must absolutely cease, disappear. One must be absolutely without reaction, like this (gesture with palms open, of motionless offering upward). And then, when one is like that (“one” means the cells), after a time comes the perception of the category to which the movement belongs, and one has only to follow in order to see whether it is something that has to disappear and be replaced by another thing (which is not known for the moment) or it is something that has to be transformed.

Ref: Notes on the Way