" True silence is the rest of the mind, and is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment. "
William Penn
Be silent.
It sounds easy enough but then why is it so hard to achieve?
Almost every culture, religion and philosophy has stories and practices about the power of silence.
Psychology is mapping the benefits of meditation, Christian monasticism has their silence vows, it is an important ritual in Sufism, a cornerstone in almost every Eastern religion and also practiced among many tribal populations around the world.
There are endless special techniques and rituals that one can learn and practice, thousands of books, videos and guru’s that will guide you on their path to your inner peace.
So why should I even write about it then?
Because for me nothing I ever tried worked,
Sure, I could stay quiet for a while but to be honest then I was just having another conversation, with myself inside my head. I still love those conversations today and it never gets boring up there.
So in fact I never saw my thinking as a problem, I really love to figure things out mentally or just make stuff up for the pure joy of having this infinite imagination.
So my search for silence did not start because I saw thinking as burden at all , no thinking had been almost always a pleasure, it was rather because I discovered a new challenge, a skill I did not possess yet.
I tried really hard to be silent but that didn’t really work because of course I was thinking how to be silent.
“I command myself to be silent !” I even shouted it very loud: “ I AM SILENCE!”
Ok haha, so maybe I should do some research instead and so I googled page after page, watching video after video, trying technique after technique and as a result I was thinking even more instead of less.
Sometimes I even really felt stupid because I just could not create silence in my own head, my brain always kept generating stuff forever and ever.
" Silence is the language of God, all else is poor translation. " Rumi
How could I ever be like these masters of silence and meditation?
Was this even real?
It was just impossible for me to achieve and nothing I did gave me even the slightest hint that progress was being made and this was worth pursuing further.
Eventually I gave up and forgot about it.
Years had passed and I was not doing anything related to meditation but one night while lying in bed suddenly and completely unexpected I did notice something, a small gap between my thoughts.
It was very short and almost unnoticeable among all that chaos of endless words being generated but it was there and it kept returning every time again and again.
a space, a little void between my thinking.
The more I focused on the spaces between my thoughts instead of the words, the longer the gaps started to become. I was intrigued and started to practice this every night before I falling asleep and slowly I got better.
I also started to practice it during the day: first while hiking in nature or sitting in bad but after also while standing on the bus, while doing the dishes, during my conversations with people. I started to notice more little things like the smell of someone passing by, the sounds of a newspaper swirling in the wind, thousands of different greens in one grass field, I can go on forever but It made me realize how much I had been distracted by my own thoughts.
This fueled my dedication and I practiced even harder, thoughts became like clouds that pass by in my personal sky and I can just look at them without touching or disturbing them.
I was really excited with my new skill and I tried to share my experience with some friends but most were very skeptical and didn’t believe me at all.
I was a bit disappointed because some of them used to be my spiritual heroes.
Anyway I was too excited to care and little did I knew that the real ride had not even started yet, this was just the my engines warming up and doing test-runs.
So there I was again observing thoughts passing by and focusing on the spaces in between.
I felt like this fearless King seated on his throne observing his kingdom but at the same time it was also a bit like watching TV without using the remote control to zap the parts I didn’t like.
A cloud faded out of existence, my inner night-sky was now completely empty and dark, I don’t know how long that moment lasted but I still get the goosebumps typing this right now.
It was dark and there were no words, no images, no body, nothing except me and that vivid crazy feeling, like I was an electromagnetic thunderstorm instead of a body made out of matter.
I was here, there, whatever but there were no thoughts at all, I was completely still but felt like moving in every direction back and forth, vibrating and oscillating. It was one of very weird experiences but luckily everything was to exhilarating to even have time to become afraid.
What my logical self later concluded from this experience was that those thoughts we produce are not us alone, they never were and they never will be.
Somehow we all exist beyond thought. It is our brain that gives a meaning to those patterns that it recognizes based on how it has copied those interpretations from other people during its existence.
We can interact with them whenever we want but those thoughts are not ours alone and they are certainly not telling us who and what we really are.
I don’t want to deviate to much from the original reason for this post which was an alternative way of discovering silence because I think it has approved my life in big way and it is an experience everyone can have with a little effort and practice. The techniques I tried didn’t work at all. Maybe this will work for you also.
