Silence Can Never Be Lost...

I passed along The Power of Now, a well-read and well loved book to a good friend of mine, who walks with me in the early mornings and talks with me about the only thing I value in life…the understanding of the invisible in us…

He is a Christian, and deeply committed. His mind is clear, piercing, and wonderfully open. His love of Jesus, and the Christ’s role as savior is one that is central to his well being, and is central to the focus of his reverence. A position I not only understand, but one in which I spent a good many years as well.

Unlike a fair number of Christians, he has the capacity to engage in other ways of viewing and/or discussing, the same need for touching the Mysterious that motivates my every waking moment.

He explains that he is on page 25 of the book, has some questions, and tongue-in-cheek, assures me that I will be graded on the answers. What a delight!!!

His questions are the central focus of my attention at this time in my life and thus, with what I hope will be my friends blessing, I answer those questions, to the best of my humble ability, in the form of this essay…in the hope that you might join our discussion and benefit for yourself in some way.

My friend writes…

“How was Eckhart able to write the book if he didn't use thoughts? In other words, he is telling us that the state we are in when we spend our time thinking is inferior to the state we are in when we stop thinking. He said that all real creativity comes to us from this state of "not thinking". Yet didn't he have to use his mind and thoughts in order to write the book? The only alternative I can think of would be for him to claim that all the words of the book just came to him spontaneously while he was not thinking, and then he just wrote them down as some kind of dictation. Does he make this claim later in the book? Because if he doesn’t, then doesn’t the fact that he had to use his mind to write the book invalidate his claim that a cessation of thoughts is a “superior” way to exist?” (You see how piercing his mind is….)

Let’s start with Eckhart’s most basic message, distilled down to just a few words…everything I have ever heard him say, in person, by book, or on tape can be found in this one slim quote.

“Being must be felt it cannot be thought.” (Which by the way is a perspective my Teacher, and all the Teachers of Being I have ever encountered agree with…)

Now, the first thing the mind will want to do with this simple but profound idea is to conceptualize it and/or reduce it to an emotional level and decide that “feeling” Being is the same thing as emoting, and the never ending cycles of pleasure and pain, that so trap the mind and enslave the senses.

The “feeling” that Eckhart is describing can only be discovered, or more accurately uncovered in the Silence of Mind that is the source of this feeling state. A Silent mind, is a mind that has come into direct contact with its source, the source thus contacted no longer needs to be named. It could be called God, Holy Spirit, Buddha-mind, Home, Welcome, Ease, Peace, Harmony With All That Is…I could think of dozens of names none of which adequately, or even remotely, describe the direct experience of discovering your living Being in the vast Silence, out of which all things source. A scientist might even define it as the silence of the vast reaches of outer space, the silence in which galaxies are born, live, and die…it is, after all, the same thing…

My friend says…” In other words, he is telling us that the state we are in when we spend our time thinking is inferior to the state we are in when we stop thinking. He said that all real creativity comes to us from this state of ‘not thinking’. Yet didn't he have to use his mind and thoughts in order to write the book?”

To define thinking as “inferior” is in some ways accurate, but it engages the mind in the way the mind most favors, that of comparison and judgment, both of which begin to dissolve with greater and greater speed when an individual mind is released from the bondage of thinking as its only way of knowing itself. Thinking is only inferior when experienced as the only means by which we can recognize ourselves.

Here again in Eckhart’s words…the mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly — you usually don’t use it at all. It uses you. This is the disease. You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion. The instrument has taken you over. What a liberation to realize that the “voice in my head” is not who I am. Who am I then? The one who sees that.

Knowing yourself only, as the “voice in your head”, is a dreadful type of prison. With dedication, commitment, time, and shear force of will, it is possible to modify the voice in the head and relieve some of the burden of a deeply troubled and broken childhood. I know, I accomplished that…

In my twenties, I was in a physician’s office selling the medical products by which I was making my living. I was good at my job, very successful – monetarily speaking – and looked for all intents and purposes, on the outside only, like a successful and thriving professional woman.

In this particular visit, the Doctor was intently listening to the protocols I was explaining, which were necessary to integrate those products into his practice. Nearby, on a small rolling metal table - that most Doctors then used - to set their various instruments and small equipment on, was an open scalpel. It had been, no doubt, used on the last patient in some way and had not yet been placed in the sharps container.

My entire visit with the Doctor was a drama of unfolding difficulty. While using a portion of my mind to describe how best to integrate this new modality into his practice, the remainder of my mind was terribly fixated upon that scalpel. If it had been a movie the director would have had the camera entirely focused on the razor sharp scalpel, laying innocently - yet somehow menacingly, against the silver edge of the table, while the Doctor and his sales person were mere blobs of fuzzy color and echoing words.

My mind, as it did almost every day, spoke to me in mesmerizing and seductive ways about the need to pick up that scalpel and drive it straight into my right eye, past the socket and into the brain…ending as it did so… the terrible suffering that beset my every waking moment, and flooded my nighttime with terror.

I did battle with these types of thoughts on a daily basis. Sometimes it was driving my car off a cliff, as I made my travels to the various physicians who lived in my state. Sometimes it was holding the 22 pistol my father had given me, from his days as a police officer, against my temple as I sat on the edge of my bed. The various tools by which I plotted my demise were creative and nearly constant, but the truth was always…that my mind was not a safe place for me to live.

I know a great deal about Eckhart’s assertion that….” Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly — you usually don’t use it at all. It uses you. This is the disease.

In those days, my mind did indeed use me. It used me to exact punishment for being an unlovable and worthless child. A child that a mother could beat for incorrectly cleaning the baseboards under the bed, and a child that an uncle could use for sexual gratification… a child unworthy…

That lack of worthiness formed the core of an acquired mental construct that eventually became a personality. Over many years and with very strong and capable help, I modified that personality enough that my physical safety was no longer an issue.

But this relative safety, in time, turned into disillusionment and a kind of sad realization…saving my life for the purposes of pursuing outer accomplishment, began to seem like a kind of bad joke. Here a new cycle of letting go began to formulate, a new level of understanding developed, a new willingness to put aside what was learned, in favor of what cannot be known…

Again from Eckhart…"Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to ‘die before you die’ --- and find that there is no death." In the process of saving myself, I had begun the “dying before you die” that Eckhart and the Bible encourages us each to allow.

And here begins the mystery of transcending thinking, as the only means of knowing yourself and those around you.

My individual life came down to one very clear, and amazingly simple mandate…”evolve or die”… the same precipice that our shared humanity is also rapidly approaching. Our world, just like my small life, can be saved and celebrated by becoming willing to die to the small self that inhabits the thinking mind only, and to open ourselves to the shared Silence out of which that mind sources.

How does Eckhart write a book that is more than the thinking mind can conceive of?... By first discovering and uncovering the Silence, in himself, and allowing that silence to guide and develop and attempt to communicate with words, what is well beyond mere words…

All truly creative activity comes out of silence, in the arts that is a well know and deeply revered state, musicians often define the silence in their music as more important than the notes, dancers will say that stillness informs and elevates their every move, even highly skilled athletes reference the Silence…but they call it the “zone”. The place where the body takes over, and thinking no longer directs or controls the actions, of a supremely well-developed and trained physicality.

Einstein directly attributed the non-thinking portion of his mind as the source of his theories and profound scientific discoveries.

The Bible describes it in this passage from the Old Testament:

Proverbs 3:5-6

⁵ Trust in the LORD with all your heart
and lean not on your own understanding;
⁶ in all your ways submit to him,
and he will make your paths straight. ^[a]

I would make only this small modification to the wisdom of the direction Proverbs hands down to us from the ages…Trust in the (Silence) with all your heart, and lean not on your own (thinking), in all ways submit to the Silence and it will make your path straight, (true, and valuable beyond measure).

If you are willing to die to the thinking mind in favor of directly meeting the Silence out of which you came, and to which, you will return… then the promises that are made by all those who have ever touched that Silence will apply to your personal life as well. Here are some of the promises that Eckhart Tolle has made in his work…

"All the things that truly matter, beauty, love, creativity, joy and inner peace arise from beyond the mind."

"You can only lose something that you have, but you cannot lose something that you are."

"You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level."

"Being spiritual has nothing to do with what you believe and everything to do with your state of consciousness."

I am not wise like Mr. Tolle, or my Teacher, or the writers of Proverbs…but I am someone who has passed from the hell of a mind using me, into the heaven of a mind so entirely at rest… that it can lay itself aside and bask in the Silence of the unknowable.

That Silence is recognized as my original home, and that recognition grows in my heart and mind each and every day, fully liberating me, fully restoring me, fully engaging me…and as Mr. Tolle so rightfully promises, once touched…Silence can never be lost…

Adayre R. Miller

3/1/11

photo courtesy of magic fly paula and flickr photo sharing, to see more of this artist’s work please follow this link www.flickr.com/photos/magic_fly/45299829/