One of the joys of living on Martha’s Vineyard is feeling the spaciousness defined by bare oak trees.

The slow-to-arrive spring and lack of leaves (even in early May) gives me opportunities to notice the space between the trees as much as I notice the trees themselves.

Observing the space between trees triggers awareness of spacious stillness within me –– another example of what I call “resonant stillness”. The external spacious stillness of the oak trees causes the internal spacious stillness of consciousness to awaken. And from there, it’s just a short hop to remember that spacious stillness is within us, and always available to us wherever we are. In my case, right now, the reminder of this appears in the space between oak trees.

We loose touch with our spacious stillness, our “peace of mind” when our egoic mind pursues and becomes attached to form. The ego tends to obscure the simple obviousness of our innate spacious stillness with the drama and chaos of its strivings.

But our essential self is never at risk of being permanently obscured because it was created from eternal, spacious stillness –– this consciousness IS us, while our ego was created by our mind’s thought-form obsession and identification with such. And, as we’ve seen time and time again, all forms are limited (by definition) and impermanent. No wonder the poor egoic mind is always unsatisfied and grasping.

The N.O.W. Moment

There is a state of awareness that occurs while listening to the N.O.W. Tone Therapy System that I call the “N.O.W. Moment”. This a period in which the mind stops thinking long enough to become aware of a new insight or feeling-state, not directly related to the mental state, quandary or life challenge experienced just prior to the listening session –– a state of grace is experienced.

N.O.W. simply works like a bare oak tree forest –– it articulates an external, spacious stillness that our inner, spacious stillness can resonate to. The egoic mind doesn’t suspect it is being stilled because N.O.W. does not engage it with word forms or concepts the ego (which is thought-form based) can react to.

This is why the simplest usage instruction for N.O.W. is –– “just listen” (and let spacious stillness arise).