Where would you go to be alive? Fully alive? Completely removed from the things that keep you from being alive? Completely immersed in the things that bring you to life? What brings you to life? What prevents you from being fully alive?
Our work is to be fully alive. When we are fully alive, we are at the place Hindus call Satori. Translated into English as “Awakening,” “Enlightenment.” The Buddha called this state of being as “Peaceful abiding, here, now.” The Taoists would have said it is being “At one with the Tao.”
Our work is to help this state into being by separating ourselves from all the things that prevent it from being. What is keeping us from being fully alive? What can we do to move away from that into a life that is fully alive? How can we stop devoting ourselves to the things that are keeping us from being fully alive? And start devoting ourselves to that which is life itself?
I suggest that we understand silence/emptiness/stillness as the transition experience between “death” and LIFE (With “death” being the things that keep us from being fully alive). Start there, with silence/emptiness/stillness, and see what occurs to you, what realizations occur to you, and what changes you make in the way you are living that help you transition from “death” to LIFE.
Jim Dollar's Photography and Philosophy 