It is only in silence that the true self emerges.
Silence helps us to evolve, enabling us to enjoy the
beauty of life even better. Creation is born of the
womb of meditative silence.
Spiritual theory and practice have a deep legacy of
silence. There is physiological silence and there
is selfstilled silence. Physiological silence, a function
of our body-mind complex, is the one experienced by
our auditory nerves when we place our palms over our
ears and shut out sound. It is a silence many of us
need desperately to be able to think clearly, or even
to to sleep. The rational mind can often play a role
in this silence, leading the process where one becomes
silent or shuts out sound. An illustration of the
minds play with physiological silence is the way we
can drift away even in a noisy environment, `shutting
out sound.
Selfstilled silence is the silence of being, as opposed
to becoming. It is not a silence to be experienced,
but the silence of the experiencer, the witness. It
is the silence of our unconditioned self, a silence
that exceeds the ego and reaches into the pure field
of consciousness. It exists all the time within us,
the answer of the Universe to all the sounds we generate.
It is in this silence that the world recedes into
the background or vanishes altogether and the Universe
within us emerges.
Self-stilled silence is rooted in being in the present,
in realising the pure potential of the moment. This
silence is the template of the interior, which, the
Bhagavad Gita says, Weapons cannot cut, fire cannot
burn, water cannot wet, nor wind wither. It is also
the mitier of the yogi who regards alike joy and sorrow,
success and failure, victory and defeat, the fount
of deep detachment. Self-stilled silence is the language
of communication with the Divine.
Consciously learning to withdraw from the world of
physical sound can be a start to access the silence
within. The idea of maunvrat or vow of silence is
extolled as a spiritual practice. M K Gandhi practiced
it and said that he found clarity of vision in silence.
But reaching self-stilled silence is more a discontinuous
leap, satori or a sudden experience of awareness that
is transformative. To taste this silence all it takes
is to acknowledge its existence. Becoming aware of
the need for silence inside helps us to better access
our own Self, to experience the bliss of spiritual
knowledge that can only come when we are free of the
cacophony.
- More articles on Meditation
Reference
Source 202
August 31, 2009
