Eight Insights into True Silence

Once we realize that what we need cannot be spoken of then we will stop the incessant eternal talking. Everything we have tried to do and create for ourselves has not brought us peace or alleviated our suffering. Nothing we have done has made our mind quiet. What good is life without peace? It is truly possible to know peace.

Peace is wherever we are, under any circumstances or it is not real peace, it is a conditional peace. Peace is not a sensation. We seek peace that is a product of a pleasurable condition. While this may be a quality of peace this is not the real thing. To know peace, we have to understand the nature of it. Peace is a field that is developed by an extension of silence. It cannot be a pursuit on our part. To understand silence, we have to put ourselves in the right place. We have to understand the unseen barriers that prohibit us from knowing peace.

In life everything grows or goes. It becomes more of the essential growth or it dies away. A condition is always greater than what grows in it. That which grows has to be nourished by the conditions if it is to mature. Human beings want love, peace and wisdom to grow in them but silence can't grow inside us. Conditions have to be greater than what sustains it. We are not the ground of peace, strength and goodness. The only thing a human being grows inside of them is delusion. It is not silence that grows in us; we were created to grow in it. We are the lesser and it is the greater.

What is it that prohibits peace? The mind is its own creator. It gets a hold of an idea or experience, names what is, gets a sensation out of it, tucks it away and the mind refers to its content to quantify its experience. And each time it revisits the experience it strengthens the relationship between the mind and its own content.

Peace, silence is not a sensation but we call the sensations we feel peace and silence. Every time in the mind has a body. Each body of time is a self-contained unit associated pattern that has an emotional quality to it. It calls up an image and a sensation comes with it. We take sensation connected to the image as a reality. It is not. All sensation is a self-generated experience. We are identified with the sensation of peace. But anything can steal our attention from it. We are irritated because someone wreaked our peace.

Thought is a silence blocker. What is so appealing about it is we don't think without sensation. There is no internal consideration without sensation. This is what is so alluring. Sensation is the validation of self and what makes us feel real. It gives our lives meaning. It is perpetual mentation for self-stimulation. Each movement says, "I am real." Stimulation fills human beings and this is what blocks silence.

To understand silence, it has to be on its terms. If we want to grow in silence, we have to understand it not develop it inside of us. And the only way to do this is through recognizing all the conditions that stop it. It is not something we can take into ourselves.

- True silence bears all things and integrates everything brought into it. 
- Silence is interior expressions not an exterior circumstance.
- It cannot be cultivated but we can understand the conditions that prohibit it.
- It is empty of content but fills without contradiction.
- It does not have cause; it is whole because it has no content it has all.
- It is without preference neither rejects nor resists any condition.
- It is the heart and soul of compassion.
- It is intelligence.

This silence can be courted but it can't be compelled. We can enter into its life, grow in it. It is the ground. It is the greater. Be responsible to your part in the relationship. Let it makes its presence known to you.