.... The problem with silence from our noise making POV is that it seems too much like the void. And the void seems to be what's on the other side of the grave judging from the total lack of party noise emanating therefrom.
Silence is an inner thing. Forget about seeing it, you can't even hear it. And everything 'inner' in our culture is diminished and marginalized as imaginary, fantastical, hallucinatory, delusional or occasionally so problematical that it has to be surgically removed. This proves to be an unfortunate state of affairs when one encounters one's own death with eyes wide open. The inner suddenly looms larger than all outdoors and one begins sorely to wish one had spent a tad more time dying before death, one of the great gifts bequeathed by meditation, inner work and kindness to others. Meditation master, Kirpal Singh, use to wryly suggest to his students that they make out their wills before meditating.
Yet, party killer that it is, silence appears to serve an infinitely kind function. It is the precondition for all sounds to form true without interference or distortion. Silence provides perfect support for every bleat, honk, sonnet and symphony, while remaining invisible, unheralded and unacknowledged -- like a loving mother who has baked the goodies for the party goers.
Perhaps there are two kinds of silence: the scary kind that the mind deems too quiet for comfort and the loving kind from which all sound springs true. About 15 centuries ago, Neo-Platonist, Dionysos the Areopagite, wrote: "There are two kinds of darkness and one is caused by an excess of light." More recently, a pair of meditation adepts from Tibet published a book with the odd title, 'Roaring Silence!' Opposites have a funny way of showing their mutual transparency.
"There is no ego in nirvana, hence the dynamics of infinite,unconditional love embody and empower our life in every moment, choicelessly so!"
-- Jackson Peterson
"The technique simply consists in making no effort to concentrate the attention on anything in particular, and in maintaining in regard to all that one hears the same measure of calm, quiet, attentiveness—of 'evenly hovering attention'...One has simply to listen and not to trouble to keep in mind anything in particular." -- Sigmund Freud
" The non-dual mode of ' knowing ' does not take as its 'contents' any ideas or symbols, but rather 'reality ' itself, a reality that is everywhere and everywhere 'identical' , so that this mode of knowing itself results in " a single philosophical consensus of universal extent," an understanding of reality that " has been held by men and women who report the same insight and teach the same essential doctrine whether living today or six thousand years ago." -- Ken Wilber (thanks to Forrest Soma for drawing my attention to this Wilber quote).
Wonderful teaching, Forrest. I like Michael Kosok's observation in "The Singularity of Awareness" that one of the truly extraordinary features of this 'reality that is everywhere and everywhere 'identical'" is that it is also what Kosok calls 'once only'. It is always new, fresh, unique. Simply amazing.
Wonderful teaching, Forrest. I like Michael Kosok's observation in "The Singularity of Awareness" that one of the truly extraordinary features of this 'reality that is everywhere and everywhere 'identical'" is that it is also what Kosok calls 'once only'. It is always new, fresh, unique. Simply amazing.
