A Pure and Budding Wish…

This notion that thinking can be stopped, and in point of fact, that you benefit greatly from the cessation of thinking is, I suppose, a fairly radical idea. After all, the “self” that promotes itself as the who of you, is so deeply embedded in your thinking that no Silent self can even be conceived of, much less embraced.

And yet, the best and brightest among us do indeed claim that a Silent self not only lives inside you, but has access to much deeper, much broader, much more valuable levels of understanding than can even be approached by the “mind that thinks.”

I thought perhaps that hearing from someone other than a spiritual leader in our attempts to understand the notion of a Silent self might be beneficial, and thus I pull the following quotes from a treatise by David Bohm.

In the 1940’s Dr. Bohm became an assistant professor at Princeton University where he worked closely with Albert Einstein. Bohm then left for Brazil to take up a Chair in Physics at the University of São Paulo, and later was also at the Technion in Haifa, Israel, and at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is largely seen as one of the most important and influential quantum physicists of modern times. (1917 -1992).

Dr. Bohm is not a fluid writer, so I ask that you bear with him while moving through his description of thought as a dangerous form of hijacker…

He begins, “...the general tacit assumption in thought is that it's just telling you the way things are and that it's not doing anything - that 'you' are inside there, deciding what to do with the information. But you don't decide what to do with the information. Thought runs you. Thought, however, gives the false notion that you are running it, that you are the one who controls thought. Whereas actually thought is the one which controls each of us.”

“Thought is creating divisions out of itself and then saying that they are there naturally.”

“This is another major feature of thought: Thought doesn't know it is doing something and then it struggles against what it is doing. It doesn't want to know that it is doing it. (Creating artificial divisions.) And thought struggles against the results, trying to avoid those unpleasant results while keeping on with that way of thinking. That is what I call sustained incoherence". (Emphasis mine.)

My Teacher, in an effort to distinguish between the compulsive thinking that the eminent physicist Bohm described above, and the creative Thought that sources out of the Silence…named the two in this manner “thinking” - the repetitive, compulsive, dangerous, and largely useless production of mind, and the truly creative use of Mind he defined as “Thought”.

His intent was to cause us to look deeper at the recurring, habitual, and quite destructively neurotic patterns of what we often describe as the “self”. If you imagine that your thought patterns are somehow the gifted creative ones, while it is the crazy and the lunatic among us who are saddled with “thinking”, then you have just heard your thinking self provide you with a loophole by which it continues to elevate and preserve itself. Until Silence has taken root in your mind, the thinking self, can and does, produce all manner of misdirection to prevent you from discovering the Silence out of which you were born, and to which you belong.

Our thinking is for all intents and purposes an inherited phenomenon. Handed down to us by first our ancestors and parents, and then our education, mentors have a hand in it, and certainly society creates a great deal of our repetitive thinking, it is a kind of culturally induced coma that somehow passes itself off as the “self”…and in doing so, becomes lauded above all other idolatries.

As I have been graced with the slow unwinding of the thinking self inside me, I become more and more convinced that “thinking” is indeed Bohm’s “sustained incoherence”, or Mahatma Gandhi’s “devil in the mind” and most assuredly it is the “samsara” or field of suffering, that the Buddha worked so compassionately to help us overcome.

Alongside Bohm’s description of thinking as a “sustained incoherence”, the most striking thing to me - that he states so boldly -in the treatise from which I took his quote, is his assertion that “Thought runs you.”

One of the many benefits of the reclamation of Silence being a long and slow process, rather than a lighting bolt from the blue, is that prior to the capacity to stop thinking becomes truly accessible, thinking slows way, way down. It’s like a spool of thread unwinding… ever less dense, ever less compact, ever less imposing, ever less demanding, ever less binding, ever less threatening…until finally…in a soft thud it just quits altogether, and gives itself over to a much higher authority.

I have come to see that Silence is A Priori.

Silence is the Who of You, whereas thinking is a type of hostage taker that clings most ferociously to your psyche and therefore, to your freedom. I suppose part of our fascination with thinking as the source or origin of the “self” that so garners our attention, and so rules our existence, is that all of the West’s most treasured creation stories focus on the spoken word.

In John 1:1 “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”. And in Genesis 1:3, “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.” The thing most frequently missed about this glorification of the spoken word, is that the Word itself sources out of Silence…thus silence is indeed a priori.

Even the most cursory look at language will identify, that though it does convey a certain standard of meaning, it’s primary and most demanding feature is that it limits, as much - if not more, than it explains.

My Teacher would often describe adjectives as the very first form of lying. Imagine, he would say, Og and Bog happily formulating the very first language…Og decides to call that thing that stands on mountaintops and blows around in the wind, dropping leaves in the autumn and bearing fruit – good to eat – in the summer…a tree.

Bog shrugs and indicates that he has no strong objection to the tall thing being forever more called a tree, as long as he gets his fair share of fruit he doesn’t really mind what they call it…(Bog is just a wee bit less clever than his cousin Og, as you might have ascertained by now).

But then, some months later, Og comes to Bog and asserts that he has decided that trees have distinctions…that the ones over on the blue ridge are beautiful, and therefore more valuable, and that the ones at the bottom of the gulch are ugly, and therefore to be used as firewood and thus completely consumed. (Can you see that adjectives are in fact a form of perceptual lie, and worse, that they can indeed be dangerous…at the very least, to the trees at the bottom of the gulch…)?

So Bog argues with Og, as he is most fond of the trees at the bottom of the gulch and does not find them ugly in the least, it is after all his favorite napping spot - under the branches of those trees - and he is not going to allow them to be wantonly consumed just because stupid old Og has come up with some new modifying word he wants to attach to that stupid “tree” name…anyhow.

And in this self same fashion… Thinking became capable of running you…

Bog and Og eventually lose all sight of the truth of trees, and become lost in the labels they learned to apply to the miracle of treeness, and in the doing, build for themselves and all their progeny a prison of untold complexity, and untold losses, and untold agonies.

The thing about Silence is it transports you back to the most wonderful and wonder filled simplicity. A type of undivided wholeness that is wrapped in miracle, boundless in it’s invitation, open to all, available for the asking, eternally present… the very nature of creation.

The No Sound, Sound… just before the singing began…

…and as such… the Source, the a priori beginning, the breath before the Word was spoken, and before that word became the name of God, and before that name, became the ways and means behind which centuries of killing and atrocities were perpetrated on other human beings.

I humbly beg to differ that only the word was god…

God is the quiet, simple-as-in-pure, stable, eternally soundless and silent vessel, out of which the creative word issued forth, and to which the word will one day return.

To find the Silence in yourself is to remove the long reach of the origins of language, the confusion and despair that the upside down use of language can and does produce the world round…and to open yourself once more, and forevermore to the embrace of the Original One.

When language and its first born - thinking - once again fall under the rightful and honorable control of Silence…conflict ends, suffering halts, desire loses it hold on you, rejecting your circumstances becomes a thing of the past, and ease opens up vistas of untold beauty and beneficent experience in all that you see, all that you touch, all that touches you…

Language is the tool kit of the artificial divisions that Bohm tried so valiantly to describe; it hijacks the mind, gives birth to the “thinker” and imprisons the true self in a self-constructed, but somehow completely invisible and decidedly hellish prison.

Sogyal Rinpoche in the book, The Tibetan book of Living and Dying describes thinking/language in this most poetic of terms…

“Imagine an empty vase. The space inside is exactly the same as the space outside. Only the fragile walls of the vase separate one from the other. Our Buddha mind, (what I call the Silent mind), is enclosed within the walls of our ordinary mind. But when we become enlightened, it is as if that vase shatters into pieces. The space “inside” merges instantly into the space “outside.” They become one, there and then, we realize they were never separate or different; they were always the same.”

As I write this, I am five days away from the very first time I experienced a silent mind…March 13, 2001…I suppose in truth I should celebrate it as the day of my birth, as it surely was the first opportunity I had in which to truly live.

That it coincided with my mother’s last breath is no small occurrence. Her expanding profoundly physical silence, and my first experience of the spaciousness of a silent mind will be forever bound together as the reward we, somehow both received, for having crossed the finish line in dealing with our shared sexual and physical, violence and abuse. I feel in my heart, that the Silence that was for the very first split seconds, available to me, as she slowly breathed out her last breath went with her, traveling into the deeper Silence that is our shared source. With the very hand that she had once beaten me with, with the very hand that she had once left me unprotected against a darkly confused uncle…with that same hand, she helped me create that first moment of Silence.

Our hard journey has provided me this doorway into the simple, the sweet, and the breathtaking Silence.

I don’t know how to convey to you… how much, how truly, how honestly, I would wish for Silence to unveil itself to you as well…

The motivation behind these essays, more and more truly becomes, this pure and budding wish…that you find the self that existed in you before thinking hijacked your mind, and stole your freedom. That you bloom into who you were before language began in your mind, that you introduce yourself to your original innocence, and that you find your way home…

Adayre R. Miller

3/8/11

photo courtesy of padawan xava du and flickr photo sharing, to see more of this artist’s work please follow this link… /www.flickr.com/photos/7933170@N03/2928420223/