The End of Performance: Why Your Guided moments of stillness is Already Here

Smetti di performare. Stop the performance. We live in a world of hyper-connectivity that leaves us feeling utterly hollowed out, trapped in a cycle of remote work burnout and the constant pressure to appear productive, intelligent, or "spiritual." We are like waves in the ocean, exhausted from trying to become the water, forgetting that a wave is nothing but the ocean in motion. You might be sitting there, screen glowing, feeling the weight of a separate self that needs to achieve something, even if that "something" is a state of Wu Wei or effortless action. But who is this one who needs to achieve? Who is the one that feels disconnected? When we talk about a guided moments of stillness, we often treat it like a ladder. We think that if we follow the right steps or listen to the right voice, we will eventually reach the exit of Plato’s cave. We imagine a future point where we will finally taste freedom. But this is the great trick of the separate self. The separate self is essentially a resistance to the "now." It lives in the terror that if it stops doing, if it stops seeking, it will simply vanish. So, it turns even silence into a task. It turns meditation into a performance. You might feel better after a session—and that is perfectly fine—but feeling better is just a temporary state of the body-mind. It is not the absolute. The truth is that there is no path to where you already are. Think about when you were two years old. Not a single cell in your body is the same today as it was then. Your thoughts, your memories, and your entire personality have shifted a thousand times over. Yet, when you say "I," there is a sense of continuity. What is that? The body changes, the mind changes even faster, but the simple fact of being—the conscious presence—remains. This aware presence doesn't have a border. If you try to find the edge of your consciousness, any boundary you perceive would have to appear *within* that consciousness. Therefore, the boundary cannot belong to the consciousness itself. We are often looking for an experience, something tangible we can hold onto. We want a sign or an indicator that we are "on the right track." But any experience that has a beginning will inevitably have an end. If you "attain" a state of peace through a guided moments of stillness, that state will eventually fade, because everything that appears in time must disappear in time. This is why searching for results is a trap. It’s like looking for water in a mirage. Once you realize it’s a mirage, the image doesn’t necessarily vanish, but you stop running toward it. You stop expecting it to quench your thirst. The absolute, or the totality, is not a destination. It is the space in which every object appears. Just as you cannot see space because it is the prerequisite for seeing anything at all, you cannot "see" your own aware presence as an object. It is too close. It is the very ground from which your gaze opens upon the world.