Was I Being Lazy or Resting in Being?

Most people would think I was just incredibly lazy because I love doing nothing. On tour with a quartet, while everyone else played chess or did crossword puzzles, I would sit by the window for hours, just watching – wonderful thoughts of jumping off the train into a village in India, wanting to enter the lives of the people I saw. But then I felt apart from everything, observing, observing, observing. Was this simply laziness? Or was I in fact experiencing an unloading of self – was ‘not trying to do anything’ actually a losing of ego? Rupert says: ‘By filling this emptiness with thoughts and activities, they perpetuate the sense of being a separate self. In your case, that was not the case. On the contrary, there was very little impulse to perpetuate the separate self and its train of thinking and doing, and therefore you found yourself just open and empty, and you spontaneously placed yourself in the position of the witness, the observer . . . I would suggest that it was because you were able to go to that place in yourself, and to stand as the witness, as the observer in yourself, to stand in your being, in other words, I would suggest that your work as a musician, as a cellist, that the depth and beauty of your work was very closely connected to your ability to go deeply into your being.’

From event 12 - 14 December, 2025 The Shining of Being – Online Weekend Retreat at Home, 12–14 December

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