Silence is very much part of my universe now, an awareness of silence.
My universe involves using silence and not waiting for something to happen, because the silence is what’s happening, because you and I come here seeking truth and the best I can understand it is that truth is not conceptual, that what you can think about isn’t the ultimate truth. That’s why God has no name, and that’s that process of getting to the place behind the form where discriminative things have merged or are unified.
If you and I come here to search for truth and then ignore the silence, it’s as if you flip it around and see the words arising up out of the silence, then you don’t see silence as absence of words because you’re resting in the silence rather than in the words. In fact a lot of my training of myself is to rest in the silence during the words because that quality of equanimity comes from being at rest, at peace. And that’s in there and at the same moment is all of the passion about life, that’s here. The difference is that those are really two different planes of consciousness, and the interesting question that I ask myself is as I understand the game of awakening better, the strategy, the whole thing about it, I’m aware it has to do with something
I learned from William James’ writing years and years ago:
“Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness… No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question…At any rate, they forbid our premature closing of accounts with reality.”
-Ram Dass, taken from a lecture in 1994, called “An Experiment in Awareness” at the Mile High Church, Denver, CO
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