Scott Kiloby's Boston visit

When I started reading present-day reports of spiritual awakenings, Scott Kiloby’s book Love’s Quiet Revolution was the first thing I came across. He came to the Boston area in May 2011 and spent a few hours talking about this stuff. I took a few notes as he talked. He offered a great little exercise.

Stop your thoughts and be silent for a few seconds, and look to see, are you OK, even though you haven’t fulfilled all the goals and desires and ambitions that crowd your thoughts and your conversations? There is a space of completeness or contentment there, where it isn’t a problem that these things aren’t yet accomplished. If you do this repeatedly, you’ll find that this contentment is constantly available, all day and night, throughout your entire life. Access to the space is neither helped nor hindered by your thoughts or your life circumstances. In the space there is no work to do, nothing to acquire or become. You can visit the space when the world around is noisy and distracting.

Your sense of yourself is a construction of thoughts. Many are the stuff of unhappy childhoods: I’m not lovable, I'm not attractive, I’m not good enough, I’m bad at sports, I'm bad at math, people will abandon me, etc. This construction is responsible for all your problems, worries, concerns, frustrations, issues, etc. Briefly stopping all those thoughts will bring a moment of freedom from all those problems.

The space of contentment is the same awareness that underpins your subjective experience of life. If you’re able to ask the question “does awareness exist right now?” then it does, because you can’t ask questions without it.

As you visit the space more often, it will eventually spontaneously occur that the thoughts and concerns and issues will be seen to be empty. They will begin to lose their emotional hold on you. As they do, your constructed self will gradually (or maybe not so gradually) unravel.

The mind objectifies: it classifies reality into objects, each described as tersely as possible. This is great for survival and for accomplishing goals, but it's a hindrance to happiness. It becomes impossible to see life in all its richness, and easy to fall into oversimplified ideas about your relationships to the people and things around you. Very early in life we learn that objects are constant over time, so you get a rude shock every time your body doesn't function as smoothly as it did when you were younger.