Can thought make stillness happen?

Q: Can the mind make itself still? Is it possible for thought to be quiet? Can thought make stillness happen? Or is thought what disturbs the stillness in the first place? 

Is stillness something you can make happen? Or is it something that happens the instant we see the insanity of what thought has done?

A: Nothing can disturb stillness, as it already is, always. Thoughts themselves appear in stillness, and focus our attention on movement. But the more we deepen our understanding that stillness is always here, the less we get lost in thoughts. Stillness allows all movement created within it. As such, thoughts are not "an enemy" to fight against or to try and quieten. It is enough to simply recognise that the mind never actually disturbed stillness.

Q: Interesting. I'm curious... would you say recognition happens in memory, in thought? Or is recognition something beyond thought? And if so, who is it that recognises?

A: Recognition doesn't happen in memory - as you say, memory itself is thought. That would imply that the mind is doing the recognition, or in other words that the mind is aware. In our experience, it is the other way around - we are aware of the mind. 

Recognition is simply 'turning back' towards Awareness itself. But it is not the mind that 'turns back', it is Awareness recognising its own presence here now. And even that is not entirely true, since Awareness itself is always aware. So, a more precise way of putting it would be that Awareness has focused itself and taken on the appearance of being a mind, and then de-focuses from that appearance to recognise that it never actually focused in that way.

A: So would you say that it’s the understanding that works it’s magic and allows us (Consciousness) to witness, occasionally (ever increasingly) the peace within?

Yes, it's an interesting paradox: on the one hand, Consciousness knows only itself (i.e. there is no deepening of an understanding, no glimpses of what's true, no appearance of forms). On the other hand, there is the relative reality in which thought labels things and there is the appearance of a journey "back to" Consciousness. In this relative reality, the body/mind is being re-aligned with the understanding that Peace is who we are, which is (seemingly) an ever-deepening process.