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Knock on the sky and listen to the sound!
ZEN SAYING
I once witnessed a spectacle
of silence in the Berkeley Community Theater. Every one of the 3,491 seats
was occupied. On stage sat Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk.
Next to him sat a young woman.
The monk spoke about mindfulness,
about awareness, about respect for each other and all living things. He
spoke slowly and quietly. From time to time he would fall silent, and
the woman would pick up and ring a bell that rested on the floor in front
of her. The reverberations of the bell could be heard throughout the auditorium
and felt within each person's brain, stimulating perceptions of intuitive
subtlety.
Thich Nhat Hanh's talk was
less about information than experience. The words were like a tour bus
carrying the audience to ancient sites of meaning and depth and beauty.
Though the bus was still and unmoving, we traveled far and saw much. Anyone
could have dropped a tack or a nail file, even a piece of paper, and the
noise would have seemed loud because the silence was so great.
After some time, I felt the
audience breathe in unison, a meditative breathing, a breathing that connected
us together and to the awareness of which the monk was speaking. I thought
I was sitting in the mountains at twilight, when life itself begins to
creep from its hiding places like a deer come to drink from a lake of
pentagrams and stars.
Even when speaking, the monk
was silent, was silence. In order to hear his words of silence and the
silence within his words, the audience had to be silent and become silence.
It was a spectacle. We were embraced by silence and thus set free from
agitation, from separation, from duality. It would have been impossible
for any anger or cruelty to arise in that community. It would have been
impossible for anyone to harm another in any way. We were transported
to reality.
Silence cannot be explained.
It cannot be known or experienced in a way that might be familiar to us,
as we are used to experiencing other events in our life. However, when
we say beauty or love, and when we are meeting those two in a pure and
honest place, then we can say that silence has come into our life.
We can only use words to point
in the direction of silence, such that if one actually goes into the distance
towards which the words point, one will eventually come upon silence as
a fact. When silence is beheld as a fact, all speculation, argument, and
belief about that to which the word silence refers ends instantly and
forever.
Silence is that in which everything
exists, from which everything comes, and into which everything returns.
It is the unutterable context in which the cosmos occurs, a playground
of pure consciousness.
Silence is oneness. Silence
refers to a state of fundamental unified existence, a condition of being
in which all conflict, fear, doubt, projection, memory, delusions-all
subjectivity and objectivity-are dissolved and thus resolved. Silence
is an instantaneous recognition of that which is out of time and unconditioned
by cause and effect. If one were a religious person, one could say that
silence is the soul of God, or perhaps the God of God.
If this sounds abstract, vague,
or esoteric, it only sounds so because we cannot say exactly what silence
is. Some things are so very beyond the reach of words and metaphors, symbols
and images, beliefs and concepts that all attempts to describe them are
foolish. And yet, even as we speak foolishly and impertinently of that
which cannot be said, something within us will smile knowingly. It is
this intuitive resonance which words can stimulate. This is the direction
we can point to and go toward, walking or running, in order for the recognition
of the wordless to become real. But even as silence becomes indomitably
real, as taut and tense and thrilling as a tidal wave crashing upon us,
crushing us beyond recognition-even as this happens, we cannot speak its
truth.
Any disciplined practice that
involves focusing the mind will eventually lead to silence. Spiritual
methods such as meditation techniques, chanting mantras, yoga, tai chi-all
of these will lead to silence. Self-inquiry will lead to silence. So will
martial arts, and dance, and art. So will rock climbing and sky-diving.
So will cooking and eating. So will playing and loving. Everything will
lead to silence, because silence is the life force behind everything.
It is the oxygen without which everything would fall over dead, flash
frozen. Since all things lead to silence, we must follow the echoes of
silence, inward, to the source of all things within us.
Being led to silence might
imply that silence is somewhere else. This is only a figure of speech.
Silence is always the first thing and the last thing. It is always present,
but very subtle, so we must therefore learn to recognize it. The direction
of silence is any direction. There is no place that silence is not, although
we cannot apprehend it with our senses or with our minds.
Still, let me suggest a fool-proof
way of coming into silence quickly, so that silence becomes a fact for
us. First, we must develop the ability to distinguish one thought from
another. When we can do this, we must then develop the ability to see
clearly the space between two thoughts. When that space becomes large
and stable enough for us to drive a truck through it, we will know silence
as a fact.
In the very center of universal
manifestation, one finds swirling gusts of silence, vast galactic streamers
millions of light years long. If we try to understand this silence through
our mind, we'll never understand it. Silence is realized in a moment of
communion, in a moment of losing our separation from life. The underlying
truth of existence is silence.
Silence embraces everything
and cannot be known because to know silence, we would have to be separate
from silence, and silence would then be an object of our perception and
of our knowing. Silence refers to that which is beyond this dualism of
knower and known. Silence becomes a fact when we and life become an inseparable
whole. Even though we are trying to define it, no definition of silence
is accurate. We don't want to think that by defining it, we can know it.
Silence is knowable only to itself, and we come into that knowing through
an alchemy of self-transcendence.
We can only create a definition
that points to silence. The truth of reality is silent. It is undisturbed.
It is causeless. It is out of time, out of space, non-dual. Silence is
the preeminent nothingness in which the universe dances in spectacular
and mysterious ways.
If silence is the United States,
then intuition is Ellis Island, the first stop of immigrants seeking asylum.
Intuition is the first hint, the first experience of the far greater country
of silence. Intuition is not a tool, but rather an intelligence that uses
us. We might not see this right away. Intuition is willing to be used,
but only for a time. One day, it will require that we suspend our goals
and objectives, our plans and aspirations, for a fuller recognition of
what intuition is, what it represents. We will come to see that intuition
is the ambassador of silence, and we must serve that silence, for it is
the soul of the world.
In the instant of intuitive
perception, we are taken wholly into that power of knowing which is beyond
the mind. In going beyond the mind, we go beyond all notions of self and
identity, of thought and belief, of perceiver and perceived. A photograph
of the intuitive flash would show only light. There would be no other
image, only light. The light of intuition is the light of consciousness.
Intuition is Ellis Island, the gateway to freedom. In order to be free,
we must want freedom, we must be willing to leave behind the old countries
of control and manipulation from which we have come. We cannot come to
this new country with ideas of exploitation, as gangsters. We have to
come as servants of the new freedom. We have to learn new ways of living.
We have to become students of silence and freedom in order to learn how
to live without fear, without violence, without cruelty.
Robert
Rabbin is a contemporary mystic
and catalyst for clarity;
a speaker and writer who presents Radical Sages programs
throughout the world. He is a leading exponent of Silence and
self-inquiry as a way of revealing our authentic being and of
living an inspired life.
www.radicalsages.com
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