"Let us be silent, that we may hear the whispers of the gods," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, echoing a great many philosophers, poets and mystics throughout history who have espoused the virtues of silence. Yet, in our modern lives, we make very little time for quiet.
Question: Why don't you spend more time in silence?
Answer: Because you are addicted to thinking.
On average, your waking mind thinks roughly 60,000 thoughts per day. Much of this thinking is relatively inconsequential chatter - "I hope it doesn't rain this weekend...has the mail come yet?...my knee hurts...I don't like this shirt...Hey, that guy just changed lanes without signaling...shoot, I forgot to call Mary...I'm running late again...what if I can't find a parking spot?" Your consciousness is flooded with the incessant prattling of the mind.
Many of you are aware of this merciless monologue. For others, the monologue is so familiar, so imbedded in the background noise of your experience, that you've never really noticed it. Take a moment to notice now. If you close your eyes and witness the activity of your mind for one minute, you'll observe the myriad thoughts it generates. If you are like most, your mind will distract you from the exercise before the minute is through.
Encountering the untrained mind is a bit like encountering a neighbor's barking dog. It is the nature of the dog to bark. While the racket might annoy or anger you, your emotional reaction will have little bearing on the dog's behavior. Similarly, it is the nature of the mind to think thoughts. Training and practice can quiet the barking mind for a time, but ultimately you must go a step further. Surrender your attachment to thinking altogether. This doesn't mean you'll never have another thought, but you won't be unnecessarily identified with it. You are not your thoughts. You are eternal, witnessing presence. You are the conscious awareness beyond thought -- infinite, universal, timeless.
The Tibetan Buddhists have a beautiful expression for this: "Thoughts are your guests. They check in and check out." Thoughts are transient. You are eternal. Break your addiction to identifying your limited thoughts as "you". Even if the mind barks, you need not be fooled or disturbed.
In many traditions, this identification with the thinking mind is recognized as a primary source of human suffering. Why? Because each thought is finite - an incomplete packet of information, by its very nature not infinite. The process of defining makes you finite. Absorption in the process of thinking takes you out of the infinite realm and drops you into finite experience with its struggles and hardships.
The Old Testament describes the root of this condition in the story of "The Fall". Adam and Eve were instructed not to eat the fruit of knowledge. Once they ate, "they knew" -- they fell from a field of omniscient divinity, to the realm of limited, incomplete perception. Before knowing, they experienced divine union and unbounded joy. After knowing, they experienced division and discontent.
Oh, how I wish the instructions could have been clearer, "If you eat the fruit of knowledge, your powers of understanding will become finite. You will initiate the intellection process. Your experience will shift from unity to separation and suffering." A little more explicit warning could have been helpful!
With "the Fall" began this human experience of duality, the severance of the knower from the known, the perceiver from the perceived, the subject from the object. After eating the fruit of knowledge, Adam and Eve fell, embarrassed and self-conscious, from a unity experience into the human experience of parceled knowledge and separate self.
And so our ages-old addiction began...
Now, for those of you who identify with the power of your intellect, you may be feeling a bit nervous right now. You may quite like your addiction! But consider that your attachment to thought as your identity keeps you in bondage. By claiming a finite identity, you are unable to experience your infinite identity, the vast, immortal splendor of the Self.
"Once the attention of an individual lifetime is mysteriously and sacredly turned toward reunion with God or Self or Source, the mind is only in the way," says author and spiritual teacher Gangagi. "The only obstacle to realizing the truth of who you are is thinking who you are."
Your mission here, if you choose to accept it, is to return from the human experience of unconscious mind chatter back to the divine experience of cosmic intelligence. By moving from thinking into silence, whether through prayer, meditation, yoga or other practices, you transcend the innate, perceptual limitations of the thinking mind, collapsing duality and opening to universal omniscience.
"This is not a dead zone, but a zone of intense energy where whatever needs to be done expresses itself as a complete visualization," says Paramahamsa Nithyananda. It is the realm of instantaneous, holistic understanding - quite different from the linear, logic-based system which is the basis for the intellect.
So where do we go from here?
As any good 12-step program will tell you, the first step toward recovery is to acknowledge your problem. As a culture, we are far from admitting our attachment to the habituated activity of the logical mind...and even farther still from surrendering our much-loved addiction.
However, many, many of you, in your quiet moments, have experienced the intense, vibrant energy of the inner realms, of Source or Self. The mission is not only possible, but potentially instantaneous. I honor your work and encourage your continued journey into the silence.
Check back every Monday for more from Stacey Lawson.
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Posted December 10, 2007 | 06:49 AM (EST)