It was very silent, but really the silence wasn’t the absence of noise. Pico Iyer: I got out of my car at this monastery, and the air was pulsing. In this intimate conversation, we explore the “art of stillness” he practices - not in order to enrich the mountaintop, he writes, “but to bring calm into the motion of the world.” But he also experiences a remote Benedictine hermitage as his second home, retreating there many times each year. As a journalist and novelist, he travels the globe from Ethiopia to North Korea, and he lives in Japan. But he has become one of our most beloved and eloquent translators of the modern rediscovery of inner life. Krista Tippett, host: Pico Iyer is not a spiritual teacher or even, he says, a spiritual person per se. It is true, but the person becomes bigger than the problem, if a distance can be created between the observed and the observed.This episode originally aired on June 4, 2015. Sceptics will say, problems do not go away if one stays away. Chanting mantra is nothing but staying in the present and keeping a distance from daily activities, good or bad, for a while. In all religious disciplines, there is advice to spend time in front of resident deity in the morning and evening. Without being preachy, the author points towards immense resource that is within us, yet a capacity that remains untapped. “The Art of Stillness” is a powerful book.
The real feast that is available within this activity.” Yet, when asked for reason, he responded “ what would I be rather doing? Would I be starting a new marriage with a young woman and raising another family? Finding new drugs and buy more expensive wine?” Cohen, by his own admission, had found “ real profound and voluptuous and delicious entertainment. Cohen had access to all pleasures that life can offer. An US marine talks about beneficial effect of meditation on job alertness.Ĭelebrity singer and music director Leonard Cohen spends day and night sitting still in a Zen Buddhist monastry up on San Gabriel mountain in California.
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Modern internet companies like Google encourages yoga and meditation for new ideas and advices e-mail, mobile phone and internet free weekends. In six essays in his book, author describes how more and more people are paying attention to staying still. It appeared such a slowing down gave him a new perspective on life and made him happy. The author did not describe what he did in Japan. So he was not driven like most others like him.
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By his own admission, author did not own a car or a TV and accessed e-mail once daily. To discover and be in touch with his own self, Pico Iyer quit his job with Time Magazine in New York and stayed in Kyoto, Japan for two years.
In this fast paced world of information revolution, where a person is always in touch with external world through mobile phone, e-mail and internet, an individual is moving away from his own self. But the topic, the art of staying still and watch life flow by, he dealt in his book is extraordinary. Pico Iyer, the author, was an ordinary looking gentleman. This was not a fiction or a crime thriller. I stood in a queue to get a signed copy of “The Art of Stillness”.
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