VIRTUES OF SILENCE

We live in a cluttered world! Cities are cluttered, towns are cluttered, markets are cluttered… So is our mind. “Too much to do, too much to think about, too much to keep track of and up with, and very little time…” has almost become like a universal phenomenon, creating stress in almost everyone’s life. Even when one is on leave from work, the mind gets no rest because habitual rest-less-ness has become so ingrained that we've forgotten what real armistice feels like. From the moment it wakes up till the time it goes to sleep, the mind is always engaged in defending something it considers “important”. If our minds (both of them) were vehicles and we were the driver, the cars are driving the driver along routes and to destinations that seem to be totally at odds with where we, the driver, expected to be (“Are we there yet?”)

 As it’s almost impossible to reduce the workload and increase the time, the only option left is to increase the energy level within us and work harder, look harder, listen harder, try harder.... In this area of anxiety over not being “enough” is where the snake-oil purveyors of energy drinks, naturopathic, complementary and psychotropic medicines, junk supplements, healing religions, way-out “spiritual” practices and junk food make their killing. In a desperate attempt to avoid sliding out of place, we'll try anything to feel anchored in something, no matter how flaky it really is.

When we have, by whatever means -- prayer, PT or guarana, cranked up enough energy and enthusiasm, we feel able and ready to handle any challenge. But like everything that has to be pumped up to look good, it is an illusion. It may even be that the more we crank ourselves up, the less effective we become and the closer we get to chronic exhaustion and that condition of dread and paralysis we call “chronic dismay”, where we feel our courage and will have been snatched or leached away from us. We sag into faint of spiritual, mental, and psychological fatigue.

And we fight it. That makes things worse. I'm always open to the option that sometimes the wisest response to an overwhelming emotion or situation may well be to fall down and stay there, at least until you get some of your marbles back, obtain a more realistic assessment of just where you are, and find a fresh set of bearings. In short, I recommend you do nothing and allow your self to fall silent.

The Silent Energy

The question is how to increase our avail-ability to energy? Our upbringing has afforded us with a myriad of ways, means and examples of people energising themselves by stealing energy off others. We get caught in a closed cycle of energetic parasitism.

For the more enlightened ones, spiritual practices like meditation, yoga and pranayama do just that. They all lead one to a space of silence, which is charged with energy. That space of silence is the mother of all rest, the mother of all creating.

Inner Silence is the mother of all create-ivity, the wellspring of intuition. It is in the zone of silent no-thing that all some-things, including the great scientific discoveries were made, path-breaking inventions created, wonderful poems and grand symphonies emerged.

Not about just a shut mouth

Silence is not about just keeping your mouth shut. It’s more about withdrawing your senses from outward activities and turning them inward.  Deliberately not allowing the perpetually over-talking mind to get involved in any of the five senses brings a certain amount of quietness inside. Let your senses report instead to a space of quiet, internal Awareness. This encourages a state of no-mind -- contentment. 

As I began training myself to break old habits and be-come more sensitive and aware, I found something quite annoying about contentment --- it didn't hang around for long. Just when the two of us are getting cosy, some battered old piece of past business gets into the "Quiet Zone" whispering "notice me", and contentment sneaks away, leaving me to handle the irritations and itches alone. What the....?

Be prepared for it. this is part of the business of transmuting our lost baggage into -- yes, nothing. More space

And later, when I least expect it, contentment softly and tenderly returns – barefoot and mysterious, to lie beside and beguile me yet again with the knowing that, briefly at least, life is just-so and perfect – again. 

Attempts to lasso contentment and tether it to me don't work. They have the opposite effect. So what is the answer?

To me it came though a surrender to Silence.

 Create a cure-all Whole-ding space.......

From being a source of enlightenment to a balm that heals an estranged relationship, Silence can be also be deployed as a panacea for many a worldly problem. Often, if we can just STOP, cease, desist, discontinue, drop, relax and let go, staunch, interrupt or just “knock it off” for 5 minutes............ and release whatever irks you to Silence.

Be kind and patient with yourself. Changing a habit of a life time can sometimes take time.

Silence is the ultimate answer to everything – the journey's-end for every question. If an answer does not silence the mind, from its carping at some-thing, to no-thing, it is no answer. Such Clayton's answers only pose more questions.

Silence gets you off the endless Treadmill of Doing and into a space of obseving and Be-ing. Silence allows you to witness more plainly the thoughts that you grab from the conga-line and entertain in your belfry. Silence makes thinking-about more coherent and conscious. Silence is intelligence itself. A person who does not practice silence cannot be intelligent at all. What a noisy talker talks about makes little or no sense. If you want to make sense, it has to come from silence.

This is why so little of what passes for "communication" out there makes sense – gossip, social chattery, political doublepseak, criticising, editorialising,  psychobabble, pontifical moralising, academic expert theory and opinion – it's all just blather, bubbling out of chaotic minds that are obsessed with being “right” and imposing that rectitude on others. Tidal waves of noise and fury signifying a global obfuscation and terror of having, eventually, to enter the Pearly Gates of Uncertainty.

Well, that's just how minds are. “Words, words, words.” Don't expect minds to be any other way. Your Mind will not get you to heaven. OK? Got it? That's why most people end up wrapped in their own little Hell -- they will not pay the ticket-price to Heaven -- Uncertainty. They will not give up being Right, not even for Happiness.

If we want silence, we have to find the gaps in the traffic, those open spaces between each thought and each word. Get off your obsession with what you're thinking about, how brilliant you think it is, and what you'd like to say next - if only all the others would shut up for 5 seconds. Drop all that noise and go for the space. At first it seems that you couldn't get the thickness of a ricepaper between the traffic. Persevere gently. Notice something -- just notice it, without following the noticing with an essay on what you've noticed. Allow the space to open up to you. As you surrender to silence and space, wherever and however you find it , you will enter a vast universe (I'm reminded of Dr. Who's tardis – on the outside, a poky booth; on the inside, infinite space to travel.

 Beyond Words

All of us have experienced at one time or the other, an amazing phenomenon. Whether in one-to-one communication, or in addressing a huge audience, something intangible moves people more than just the the words, the sincerity and the emotion. We try to rationalise the phenomenon by attributing it to charm, charisma, presence, body language, etc. Yes, these all do play a role, but the essence of all that lies in a shared Inner Silence.

Silence is not “dead air”: silence charged with Awareness is electrifying.

I once saw a film of a master communicator as he rose to speak at a huge outdoor rally attended by over 150,000 people. The crowd fell silent. For 2 whole minutes (an eternity when most people get tetchy after 7 seconds of nothing) he uttered not a word. In silence he waited. He didn't even move. I could hear the breeze rustling through cloth banners and flags. The silence was deafening, the atmosphere electrifying. Only when everything was aligned did he begin to speak. Why haven't more of us seen such a powerful display of the communicative power of focused silence? Why don't the self-improvement gurus show it? Because the silent man in question was Adolf Hitler. As Albert Windsor (soon to be George VI) observed “I don't know what he's saying, but he seems to be saying it rather well.”

Real communication is beyond the limitations of words. If you are firmly established in the zone of silence, if your mind is calm, you will find yourself suddenly being able to influence individuals, groups, and masses, in a groove where a single glance can convey what a thousand conversations cannot. Why? Because speaker and listener have commune-ited in that Great Silence.

The sound of intelligence

When we go deep into silence, we experience a form of communication without thoughts. This is when all the questions in one’s mind disappear, and the answers no longer matter. The highest intelligence within starts speaking. If one could only be totally in silence and eliminate all the distractive noises of the mind, that intelligence will never fail to reveal the universal truth of the situation and best solution even to the most critical problems.  

 Get on the mat

For short periods of time every day, go to silence. The more you practice this, the faster you will get to it. When you reach that space of switched-on-ness through surrendered silence, you will be prompted as to what needs to be done. Silence enhances one’s inner strength, gives voice to your in-tuition and sharpens intellect; Silence keeps one in a happy frame of mind and invokes joy.

The amount of energy that one gets in meditation is much more than in sleep. I could not have survived drama school without it: I was working 5 nights a week from 10pm to 6am, coming home for breakfast, then off to university until 6pm. A quick tea, then 2 hours of sleep, then I was on my way back to work. I found that twenty minutes of meditation, here and there, can equal to eight hours of good sleep. This formula could easily solve one of the most common problem working people face - working long hours and not getting enough quality sleep.

The Himalayas Within

People often think that “successful” cannot be without “stressful”. We have been encouraged to believe that there is no nirvana without quitting the world. But Indian spirituality offers plenty of ways of rejuvenating oneself without quitting the world! The body dropping you is death; and you dropping the body is meditation.

The good news is there is no one, single, unique way of achieving it (which is bad news for those who like to lay claim to having “The Answer”, set up perimeter fences and gateways and charge for admission. I found countless ways to learn and invent the art of dropping the world for a few minutes every day before it drops us. Do some research, do some experimenting (searches for silence are not going to harm you, unless they involve ingesting foreign substances or hitting yourself with a hammer.) Even if you never “get there”, the rejuvenating effect of any intentional, willful journey into Silence can, and will make us better, and happier players in the world in particular and the Game of Living in general!