S01/E11: “I Am Stillness” – What Remains When I Cease to React

Introduction

There is a place in you that’s never moved. Not once.

It watched you learn to walk. It witnessed your first heartbreak. It was present through every triumph and collapse you’ve experienced. It saw you discover your innate gifts and make your mistakes. It remained steady through every identity you tried on, and discarded.

Right now, it’s receiving these words, unchanged by any of it.

It’s stillness itself, and there’s a tenderness to this stillness. A subtle weight. It’s not just calm and quiet, it’s home. The place you return to when the noise finally stops, when the endless commentary falls silent, when you discover that what you’ve been seeking has been seeking you all along.

This isn’t metaphor. It’s the most precise fact about you. More constant than your heartbeat. More reliable than your breathing. More fundamental than your name.

Welcome back to the Martfotai podcast.

Through shadow, attention, intention, and the Observer, we’ve built the foundation of conscious living. We’ve learned to see our fragmented selves, to direct our awareness, to align our energy, and to witness without interference.

But each of these still contains a subtle doing. Shadow work. Attention training. Intention setting. Observer consciousness maintenance.

Today we discover what remains when all doing stops.

It’s what’s called ‘the cessation of inner considering’ – a coming home to what never left.

You see, there’s something profound that happens when you finally stop trying to be present, stop working to be aware, stop trying so hard to be still. In that cessation, fullness emerges. The most intimate presence you’ve ever known.

This episode isn’t about learning stillness. You don’t practice stillness any more than you practice existing. You don’t develop it any more than you develop your capacity to see. Stillness isn’t a state you achieve, it’s what you are when you stop achieving anything.

Right now, as you listen to these words, something in you is completely at peace. Not trying to understand. Not working to remember. Just naturally, effortlessly present. That’s not a special moment, that’s your ground state, temporarily remembered.

The question we’ll explore today is this: What if the part of you that gets reactive, defensive, anxious, or upset isn’t actually you? What if it’s just old programming running on automatic, while the real you, the still you, watches it all with perfect equanimity?

And what if recognising this difference changes everything?

We’ll discover how reactivity is nothing more than a false signature claiming to be you. How stillness broadcasts a frequency that transforms not just your inner world, but your entire reality. We’ll explore the profound teaching about what’s called ‘Real I’ – the identity that emerges when the machinery of self-concern finally stops.

We’ll uncover the paradox of effortless presence, why every attempt to be still makes you less still, and how the deepest peace arises not through practice but through recognition.

And we’ll see how your stillness isn’t just personal transformation, it’s how you serve a reactive world simply by being what you actually are.

This isn’t another technique to master or another state to maintain. This is the recognition of what has been here all along, patiently waiting beneath every story, every reaction, every search.

The stillness you are seeking is the very stillness receiving these words.

Let’s discover what remains when you cease to react.

Section 1: The Machinery of Disturbance

Every reaction carries a signature that says “I am the one who…” gets frustrated by delay, wounded by criticism, or threatened by chaos, and these are just a few of many examples.

But what if those signatures are forgeries?

Watch any of your reactions closely. Someone speaks sharply to you. Instantly, the cascade begins: muscles contract, breath shortens, inner commentary explodes. The whole system mobilises as if under attack.

But what’s actually being threatened?

Not you. A story about you.

The story that says you should be respected. The story that says life should go smoothly. The story that says you’re the kind of person who doesn’t deserve this kind of treatment.

These stories feel so real, so obviously true, that we never question them. We defend them as if our life depended on it. But they’re just old programming, childhood conclusions running unchecked in an adult body.

Here’s what’s really happening: reality is simply unfolding as it does, while you carry invisible expectations about how it should unfold. When reality doesn’t match these expectations, the gap creates the reaction. But reality was never the problem – it was always just as it is. The expectations are what’s subjective, programmed so subtly you don’t even see them operating until you learn to look.

Your sophisticated mind spins elaborate justifications, but the root is simple: an ancient alert system firing off false emergencies whenever the world refuses to match your unconscious script.

Notice how much energy this consumes. So much of our vitality is lost in unnecessary inner motion: doubt, commentary, second-guessing, defending positions that don’t actually need defence. The constant mental rehearsal of conversations that may never happen. The endless calculation of how others see us. This internal turbulence is exhausting because we’re generating it.

Here’s what’s remarkable: even in your most reactive moments, something in you remains perfectly still. Not detached, intimately present but unmoved. It watches the storm without becoming weather.

Underneath every push and pull, every argument in the mind, is a calmness that has never been touched by any of it. While the surface churns with reactivity, something deeper remains undisturbed, like the ocean floor beneath a hurricane.

This isn’t a spiritual achievement you develop. It’s your ground state, temporarily forgotten.

The anger has no substance without someone to claim it. The anxiety dissolves when no one picks it up. Fear loses its grip when it finds no one home to frighten.

You’ve probably touched this before. In moments of crisis when time slowed and you watched events unfold with crystal clarity. In deep conversation when words flowed without your direction. Or walking a trail in nature when the sense of “you” dissolved into simple presence.

That wasn’t a special state. That was you, minus the machinery of disturbance.

The machinery isn’t wrong, it was designed to protect a vulnerable organism. But most threats it responds to don’t actually exist. Your nervous system reacts to a colleague’s tone as if facing a predator. Your mind creates elaborate defences against imaginary attacks.

Meanwhile, the real you, the still you, remains untouched.

You don’t need to fix your reactivity. You need to recognise what’s reacting isn’t you. The moment you see this clearly, the signature changes. The false claim dissolves.

What remains is what was always here: simple, undefended presence. Not working to be calm. Not trying to be wise. Just naturally, effortlessly still.

That stillness doesn’t overcome disturbance. It reveals that disturbance has no one to disturb.

Section 2: The Frequency of Calm

Your inner state transmits a frequency, and life responds with matching circumstances. George I. Gurdjieff teaches us that a “being attracts its own life.”

Reactivity broadcasts “disturb me” and gets disturbed. Stillness broadcasts “I am undisturbable” and finds peace even in chaos.

This isn’t mystical theory. It’s observable physics.

Watch a confident person enter a room versus an anxious one. Same room, same people, entirely different reality unfolds. The external world reorganises itself around your internal frequency.

But there’s something deeper at work here, something you can actually feel when it happens. There is a center within you that does not move. When awareness settles there, when you stop broadcasting from scattered thoughts and reactions, a new gravity takes over. It pulls you downward into a grounded presence that others immediately sense.

This isn’t metaphorical. You can feel it in your body when you drop into this center. Your breathing naturally deepens. Your shoulders release. Something in you lands, and that landing changes everything about how you show up in the world.

When you truly settle into this unmovable center, you might sense something else: a quiet pulse beneath all the surface activity. Not a heartbeat, but the rhythm of existence itself, steady, wordless, infinitely patient. This pulse is what you’re actually broadcasting from when you’re genuinely still.

People sense what you’re broadcasting before you speak. Others feel your inner weather instantly. Children mirror your state before you utter a single word. Frazzled energy spreads; calm settles. When you’re genuinely settled, they settle. When you’re broadcasting anxiety, they absorb and amplify it. Your presence is their weather.

When you’re broadcasting calm, others unconsciously match it. Conversations that could become arguments simply don’t ignite. Traffic flows smoother. Lines move faster. Difficult people become reasonable without knowing why.

You’ve experienced this. Days when everything flows effortlessly. Strangers smile. Green lights appear. Problems solve themselves. You attributed it to luck, but something in you was transmitting ease, and the world reflected it back.

The reverse is equally true. Inner turbulence creates outer friction. When you’re internally scattered, the external world becomes chaotic. People become irritating. Technology malfunctions. Simple tasks become complicated.

Most people try to change their circumstances to feel better. But the frequency works the opposite way: change your inner state, and the circumstances reshape themselves around it.

From stillness, delay becomes spaciousness. Criticism becomes information. Chaos becomes interesting rather than threatening. Same events, completely different universe, because you’re broadcasting from a different station.

Here’s what’s fascinating: you can’t fake this frequency. People immediately sense authentic calm versus performed peace. The nervous system doesn’t lie. Your presence either emanates genuine stillness or it doesn’t.

But when it does, when you’re genuinely resting in your natural state, you become a gravitational center of calm. Others are drawn to your energy without understanding why. They leave conversations with you feeling somehow restored.

The transformation isn’t always immediate. Initially, others may intensify their drama, unconsciously testing whether you’ll engage. But sustained non-reactivity creates a vacuum that draws forth something new. Watch what happens in a family when one person genuinely stops reacting, the whole system eventually recalibrates around your calm center.

This is stillness as active non-participation. Every moment of genuine stillness withdraws support from the machinery of reactivity that dominates human culture. You stop feeding the beast of collective anxiety simply by refusing to join it.

Your presence becomes a form of silent teaching. Without preaching or performing, you demonstrate what’s possible. Others see that it’s feasible to remain calm in chaos, responsive without being reactive, engaged without being entangled.

And it multiplies exponentially. Each person touched by authentic stillness becomes a transmitter of that frequency. You influence your family, who carry that energy to their workplaces, schools, communities. The effect ripples outward through networks you’ll never know, touching lives you’ll never meet.

You stop being a victim of circumstances and become a creator of atmosphere by simply being what you actually are: an undisturbed presence in a disturbed world.

Section 3: Living Time

Maurice Nicoll was a Scottish psychiatrist who studied under Carl Jung before encountering the profound teachings of George Gurdjieff. For over twenty years, he taught groups throughout England, developing his own psychological insights about consciousness and time. In his masterwork “Living Time,” he explored how our ordinary sense of time creates the very prison from which we seek escape.

Nicoll discovered something profound: we live in a “narrow reality, partly conditioned by our form of perception and partly made by opinions that we have borrowed.” This borrowed reality traps us in what he called “passing-time” – the relentless forward rush that makes integration impossible.

In passing-time, Nicoll observed, “each one of us is made up of ten thousand different and successive states, a scrap-heap of units, a mob of individuals.” Under this illusion, we can have no unity, no coherence, no lasting sense of ourselves.

But there exists another dimension of time entirely – what Nicoll termed “Living Time.”

In Living Time, the linear sequence dissolves. Your entire life surrounds you like a landscape you can survey from a mountain peak. Past and future become accessible dimensions rather than lost territories. The crushing weight of temporal sequence lifts.

“We labour in the permanent field of our own lives,” Nicoll wrote. This is stillness as conscious inhabitation of your total existence. Nothing has been lost. Nothing merely “passes away.” Everything that has ever happened to you exists now in the eternal dimension of your being.

This shift requires what Nicoll called a complete change in the “time-sense.” Instead of being dragged forward by the current of passing moments, you learn to rest in the “now” that contains all moments. Not the narrow sliver of present we usually experience, but the vast, eternal present in which your whole life unfolds.

From this perspective, Nicoll taught, “the mystery of time is in ourselves.” The transformation isn’t achieved by manipulating external circumstances, but by discovering the timeless dimension already present within consciousness itself.

This is stillness as the recognition of Living Time – not as escape from your life, but as full arrival in it. When you touch this dimension, even briefly, the frantic urgency of passing-time ceases. You realise you already have all the time that ever was or will be. The wholeness you seek was always already here.

Section 4: The Paradox of Effortless Presence

Here’s the impossible catch: every method to become still requires someone to practice it. But what you truly are needs no improvement.

It’s like trying to find your glasses while wearing them. The seeker is the very thing preventing what’s sought.

You cannot practice being what you already are. You can only stop practicing being what you’re not.

This creates a maddening paradox for anyone serious about transformation. The harder you work at presence, the more you reinforce the illusion of someone who lacks it. The more you try to cultivate stillness, the more you energise the restless one who thinks it’s missing.

Most spiritual practices unknowingly feed this loop. “Sit quietly and observe your breath.” But who’s doing the observing? “Watch your thoughts without judgment.” But who’s the watcher? These methods assume a meditator separate from the meditation, which is precisely the illusion that needs dissolving.

True stillness is what remains when doing stops. When effort ceases and the compulsion to manage your experience finally exhausts itself, what’s left is everything you were trying to achieve through effort.

The recognition practice is different. Instead of trying to become still, you recognise that something already is still. Right now. Just naturally at rest.

Like realising you’ve been searching for your heartbeat while it’s been quietly pulsing all along.

Stillness lives in the gaps, between breaths, between thoughts, between heartbeats. You don’t create these pauses; they’re already there, woven into existence itself. Stillness is the presence that makes all motion possible.

When you’re caught in reaction, the old habit says: “Try to be calm.”

The new recognition asks: “What’s already calm right now?”

That question doesn’t lead you forward. It takes you home to what never moved.

This isn’t philosophical wordplay. It’s the difference between swimming against the current and discovering you’re already on shore.

The gentle return happens when you stop trying to return anywhere. Stillness doesn’t arrive, the seeker dissolves. Peace doesn’t come, the one who needed peace disappears.

In a moment of real inner quiet, something remarkable happens: the impulse to act disappears entirely. You no longer want to chase, fix, improve, or explain. The urge to do something with the stillness, to use it, share it, build upon it, simply evaporates. The silence itself becomes sufficient, whole, deeply satisfying in a way that no action could match.

What remains is what you are beneath every state, before every technique, prior to every practice.

Eventually, even the gentlest approaches must be abandoned. If you’re “doing stillness,” you’ve missed it entirely. The ultimate non-practice is recognising you are what you seek.

As immediate, undeniable fact.

The moment this recognition stabilises as identity, the paradox resolves itself. You stop being someone who practices presence and start being presence itself, naturally expressing through whatever form it takes.

Section 5: When Stillness Lives Your Life

There comes a point where the tables turn completely.

You stop trying to access stillness, and stillness starts living through you. You’re no longer someone who practices presence, presence is expressing itself as you. The artificial division between your spiritual practice and your ordinary life simply disappears.

This isn’t a graduation you earn or a level you achieve. It’s more like water finally finding its natural course after years of being dammed up by effort and technique.

But understand: stillness cannot be stolen or faked. It must be bought, through effort, sincerity, letting go. The more you pay in genuine attention, the more it stays. When it comes, it is alive, sacred, worth everything you invested to find it.

From this ground, everything flows differently. Your words arise from silence instead of strategy. Your actions emerge from rest rather than restlessness. Even in the middle of intense activity, something in you remains perfectly motionless, like the still center of a spinning wheel.

People notice, though they can’t always name what they’re sensing. You haven’t become otherworldly or detached. If anything, you’re more present, more responsive, more available. But there’s a quality to your availability that’s unmistakable, the unmistakable signature of someone who has found their center.

The old pattern was: situation arises, you react, then you try to manage your reaction. Now the pattern dissolves entirely. Situations arise and you simply respond from whatever the moment actually calls for.

This shift reveals something profound about how the world operates. The same cycle that trapped you personally – problem, reaction, solution – is how entire societies are managed and manipulated. Crisis emerges, mass reaction is amplified through media and messaging, then predetermined solutions are offered as salvation. The reaction was always the real target.

When you’re no longer caught in automatic reactivity, you see through this pattern everywhere. You notice how problems are inflated, emotions are harvested, and responses are channelled toward outcomes that serve those who orchestrated the cycle. Your stillness becomes a form of resistance to collective manipulation.

This is what Nicoll meant when he wrote about the cessation of inner considering. The internal committee that used to debate every response has disbanded. The voice that worried about how you’re coming across has gone quiet. What remains is immediate, unfiltered responsiveness.

You discover you can feel anger without becoming angry, sadness without becoming sad, joy without grasping it. Emotions move through you like wind through an open window, present without possessing, acknowledged without owning.

This points to what Gurdjieff may have meant in his enigmatic instruction: “Do not love art with your feelings.” When you love art – or anything – with your feelings, you’re loving your own reaction more than the thing itself. You become identified with your response rather than present to what’s actually there. True appreciation arises from a deeper place, uncoloured by emotional attachment or the need to possess the experience.

The need to maintain any particular state evaporates. Calmness and centeredness are simply what you are when you’re no longer pretending to be someone else.

Yet there’s something you learn to protect, the conditions that allow stillness to flourish. After a glimpse of genuine quiet, the impulse is to rush forward, to use it, share it, speak about it immediately. But stillness asks something different: that you remain quiet, just a little longer. That you hold the flame instead of waving it around.

Your presence becomes healing without your intention. Agitated people settle in your vicinity. Confused people find clarity. Reactive people remember their own stillness because your being calls forth their being.

This is the ultimate integration: when your natural state serves life effortlessly, when your very existence becomes a blessing to whatever it touches, when stillness lives through your eyes, speaks through your voice, and moves through your actions without your management.

You’ve stopped being someone who has moments of peace and become peace itself, temporarily wearing the costume of a person.

Section 6: Recognition Markers

How do you know when you’ve touched genuine stillness? What are the unmistakable signs that you’ve found your center rather than just achieved temporary calm?

The markers aren’t dramatic. They’re subtle, intimate, unmistakable once experienced.

There’s a kind of smile that comes from deep peace. It doesn’t reach the lips, and it isn’t for show. It’s a soft glow inside, a knowing that nothing needs to be different. This inner smile appears without your direction, like sunlight breaking through clouds. Contentment is simply what remains when the struggle stops.

Sometimes, when the mind quiets, it feels as though you are being watched by the deeper part of you, seeing clearly at last. This isn’t the anxious self-monitoring of ego, constantly checking how you’re coming across. It’s something vast and kind observing from a place of complete acceptance. You become both the watcher and the watched, dissolved into a single aware presence.

The recognition goes deeper still. Stillness reveals itself as perception. It watches without needing to intervene. Beneath every thought, every sensation, every fleeting emotion, there is something seeing. And when you fall into that seeing, when you recognise yourself as the awareness rather than the contents of awareness, you no longer need to be anything. You just are.

These markers can’t be forced or manufactured. They arise naturally when the seeking mind finally exhausts itself. Stillness emerges from the moment struggle ends and the performer steps aside.

The beauty of these recognition markers is their simplicity. No fireworks, no mystical experiences, no special states to maintain. Just a quiet returning to what you are beneath all the noise, aware, present, still.

When these markers appear, trust them. They’re glimpses of your natural condition, temporary clearings in the fog of identification. They point you home to what never left.

Conclusion: The Return That Never Left

You’ve always been still. Everything else was just weather passing through.

The arguments, the anxieties, the endless internal negotiations, all movement on the surface of what remains forever unchanged. You are the space through which storms pass.

This recognition isn’t the end of difficulty. Life will continue to bring challenges, losses, unexpected turns. But your relationship to these experiences transforms completely. Instead of being tossed by every wave, you discover you are the ocean itself, vast, deep, undisturbed by whatever moves across your surface.

The old story was about someone seeking peace. The new reality is peace recognizing itself through the temporary form you call “me.” Enlightenment has always been your nature, temporarily forgotten.

This completes our Integration Arc. We began with scattered attention, learned to unify intention, discovered witness consciousness, and now rest in the stillness that needs no witness. Each episode has dissolved another layer of what you’re not, revealing more clearly what you are.

In our next arc – “Expansion” – we’ll explore what becomes possible when stillness is your ground. How the boundaries of the personal self dissolve. How what you are extends infinitely beyond what you thought possible. How the individual opens into the universal without losing its unique expression.

But for now, rest in the recognition that has emerged through these episodes. You are the stillness in which all experiences arise and fade.

That stillness is receiving these words right now. It’s never been absent. It needs no practice or improvement. It simply is.

Look at your hand. Something is aware of it. That awareness has no colour, no texture, no weight. It cannot be located in space or time. Yet it’s more intimate than your breath, more constant than your heartbeat, more fundamental than your name.

That awareness is what you are. And that awareness, whether it’s looking at your hand, listening to these words, or experiencing any moment of your life, is always perfectly, naturally still.

When you rest as this stillness, life becomes vivid, immediate, unfiltered. You’re meeting each moment freshly, directly.

This is what remains when you cease to react: what you have always been. The aware stillness that is your deepest identity.

From here, the spiritual search ends because you’ve recognised you were never actually lost. The one who was seeking was a mirage. What you truly are was always here, patiently waiting to be acknowledged.

The paradox resolves: seeking ends when the seeker dissolves. Effort ceases when you recognise effortlessness as your nature. Practice completes itself when you realise you are what you were practicing to become.

What remains when you cease to react is what you have always been, pure, undisturbed presence expressing itself as this life, this body, this moment, this breath.

When all the inner dialogue stops, you might hear something else: the pulse of life itself. A rhythm. A quiet awareness that has always been there, beneath everything you ever thought.

If something in you opened today, let it stay open. You can subscribe at martfotai.com for our weekly newsletter, reflections, guided practices, and upcoming access to the full premium series. A deeper guided version of today’s practices will also be released.

This isn’t a journey outward. It’s a return to the centre of yourself.

Next episode: I Am Emptiness – The Spacious Self Beneath All Form.

Until then, remember: You are the silence between every sound, the stillness that makes all movement possible, the pulse beneath everything.

That’s what and where you’ve always been.

I’m Gary Eggleton, and this is Martfotai.