Silence Is Not A Practice

 

Trying to practice silence, imposing stillness on the mind, is not meditation, but a subtle form of violence.

To control thoughts, force them out of the mind, or concentrate on one thought to the exclusion of others, is not meditation but oppression. And to repeat an affirmation over and over again is not truth: it is control and denial. The affirmation tries to will away a feared condition by drilling down into a description of its opposite. But behind the affirmation is the fear that the opposite is true, and this fear tacitly empowers what it fears.

We pride ourselves in our techniques of "self-discipline." But self-discipline is the inward idol of the authoritarian mind. Who is the self that disciplines the mind? Who disciplines that self? An infinite regression of selves to be disciplined, until one finally surrenders...

True meditation is the weary traveler who lets go of the quest, takes off her clothes, leaves the path, and slips naked into a forest pool. She washes the journey from her glistening brown body.

 Just so, the mind slips off one veil of thought after another, sinking deeper into more luminous layers of silence, until the dark effervescent stillness beyond thought immerses her. It is a stillness that can only be discovered, never imposed. No thought can produce the vast tranquility that lies between thoughts, just as no star, however bright, can contain the vast night around it. In this divine darkness, she joyfully drowns....

True meditation doesn't require hours of sitting. For just a few minutes, one dives into the secret pool of eternity, then emerges totally refreshed, re-created, reborn from the womb of amazement.

 

'Young Martyr' by Paul Delarouche, Louvre, 1855