What is "True Silence?"

"There is an instant in which you can recognize the impulse to go unconscious and escape into a pattern of pain and suffering.  Instead you back away from this impulse to disassociate.  You "Just Stop."  You don't go there anymore.  Instead you surrender this most addictive "power," the "power" of lying to yourself and others.  In that moment, just before going unconscious, you say ‘no’ to the escape and ‘yes’ to facing what it is you run away from.

Instead of running away, you penetrate to the center of what you have been avoiding and the pain dissolves, the story collapses and you are free.  You discover that you have been choosing to suffer rather than experience  freedom and happiness, which is our innate nature.  That moment of truth, that moment of choice is the most supreme power of mind."

Following the impulses and strategies of the mind to escape or deny uncomfortable emotions may seem to be choiceless.  However, there is, in fact, a brief moment of choice where one can decide to back away from, rather than follow our habituated conditioning.

There is a true peace of mind for which we all long.  A place where we are at peace wherever we are, either the peace is innate and moves with us, or by accident or by choice we have entered into a peaceable condition, or the peace we enjoy is the result of a particular condition over which we have attained some temporary command.

These states, though largely unconscious to us, are known to be conditional. This is evidenced by the hard work required to keep the present peaceful circumstance in place, we suffer through this hard work and do whatever it takes.  The proof of this uneasy "truce" with our troubles-held-at-bay is the resistance we bring to any change that runs contrary to the current life conditions or setup.

Such a qualified peace is not true peace at all, if for no other reason than this order of peace lives in league with our unseen need to fight with anything that threatens its existence!   Any sense of peace, found through resisting that which causes a disturbance, passes, as soon as our equally false sense of control over whatever the commotion or disturbance.

True peace is not a sensation, neither is it anything the mind can imagine or hold as a concept.  Emotions and dreams are of the finite, temporary world.  True peace is the outpouring of a timeless "Silence" whose reality sits beyond the opposites at play in time and space.  Excitement and disappointment are the polarized results of inflated and deflated ego states—temporal pleasures bound to the rational mind.  In other words, any peace subject to changing conditions is, at best a temporary and collapsible pleasure.

To know the peace "beyond all understanding" we must realize the nature of that "True Silence" from out of which it arises.  Our innate happiness and perfection, in truth, is of this stillness.  And even though true peace retreats simultaneously and directly as the acquisitiveness of the rational mind approaches, in its longing for comfort, this relationship with our true nature is what we search for, often for a lifetime.  So then, how is one to approach and apprehend the "unapproachable?"

"True Silence" may be called upon, but it is without agent or cause, which means it appears on its own and remains with one only as long as it pleases its own secret purpose.  Nevertheless, one may court this sovereign stillness through a quiet intention to understand life within one's own realm.  But, as with all things of the spirit, definite rules govern the higher realms of this reality.

"True Silence" cannot be possessed, it is neither a thing to hold, nor some condition to be controlled.  Yet, as it cannot be "gained," neither can it be lost, which means that whomever it embraces lives in a world free of fear.  What does this mean to those who seek the life of peace?  How does one proceed to enter into this "inexpressible being?"

This does not begin with some imagined nature of silence and the pleasurable sensations of peace that accompany such dreams, but through approaching and penetrating those unseen barriers within us that prohibit this natural grace and its goodness from being our constant companion.

One of the main obstacles barring the entrance to the path of "True Silence" is that this realm cannot be entered by thought.  This fact has far-reaching implications for those willing to investigate it seriously.

For one thing, this means that the true path of peace can be known only through the process of facing, penetrating, and the dissolution of thought—the discovery and realization within oneself of what is whole and true by seeing through what is divided and false.  "True Silence" cannot be found in one's future or past, or in any such imagined condition yet to come.

This is why movement therapy is at the core of my work.  It is an experiential process and gets you out of your head.  Movement therapy is a wonderful diagnostic and therapeutic tool, because you can’t do it in your head.  It is immediately evident whether or not you’re in your head or you are in feeling.  It is immediately evident whether you are lying to yourself or you are in alignment with your inner-truth.

Why this is true.

The very idea of silence that we fashion for ourselves, regardless of its time frame, produces and binds us to a "Me-Story," at the moment of its conception, there is born a kind of "noise"—a certain emotional numbness and chattering—a blindness that we grow insensitive to due to our continual immersion within it. The story is so tightly wrapped around us, that we can’t see it.  In a sense, we can’t see the forest for the trees.  This noise is that familiar and pleasing inflated sensation we feel when we imagine some silence soon to be our own, as a result of some acquisition, whether it be emotional, mental or material.

The exhilaration of this pleasing sensation comes from the knowledge that an adrenalin rush is about to ensue with pain and deflation equal in value to the false happiness of the preceding inflated psychological state.  This is how addiction works.  The inflated and deflated states perpetuate suffering.  The pleasing inflated sensation is really the excitement about the unconscious awareness that an amount of pain equal to the inflated state, will soon follow. These are antipodal states and one state creates the other.

It isn’t about the excitement of the good feeling it is really about the excitement of the addiction to the impending bad feeling.  There are two components to this addictive suffering, avoiding what we don’t want and desiring what we want, both variations practiced in the name of achieving inner silence.

Ironic isn't it, the very silence that we hope for in earnest is "disturbed" and kept at bay by our own desire for its presence!  What we avoid we create and what we desire we push away.  And yet, within this very knowledge is a glimmer of light, some truth to take us further if we embrace what is seen.

When we realize that our own desire—that longing that is always at work dreaming up a more peaceable tomorrow—is actually the agent of that which disturbs our peace in the present moment—then we begin to break free of this unconscious force—the nature that always craves what it does not have in order to become what it hopes to be!  Therefore "observing" the machinations and actions born of desire can set us free.

As long as our time is spent in any form of an imagined peace or contrived self-silence, regardless of how we achieve this pleasure for ourselves, such quietude is not real stillness at all, but only the sensation of it.  These sensations always fade away, leaving us feeling betrayed and hungry for more! We become addicted to sensation.  Peace is beyond any physical sensation bound to the temporal and the body.  Peace is beyond any polarity held within the mind or the emotions, it lives in "an infinite intelligence" within the realm of spirit.

Notice that all the wars fought on the planet are in search of this illusive peace. The "thought" driving this—if not for you or your actions then I would be at peace.

The conscious realization of this mistaken identity—where we have communed with what is little more than a form of psychic noise, calling this state of self the celestial quiet we long for leads us directly to the threshold of the realization of the true silence our heart longs for.

Gradually, but definitely, we realize what must be done—we must let go of our thought-self, the "Me-Story."  We must die to its endless desire to become what it isn't by imagining what it will be.  So that instead of living from this ultimately empty sense of one's "becoming," we do the real silently-seeing work of facing and being what we are in the moment.  You just stop.  You change by doing nothing.  This silent kind of seeing frees us.

You face what you don’t want, penetrate the story and in the act of facing the story release the addictive pattern.  You just stop, and face either the avoidance or the desire, and penetrate the thoughts that drive the suffering, then there is an immediate dissolution of pain.  A lesser state is included in a greater field of intelligence.  Eventually you just don’t go there anymore.  You back away from both types of suffering and over time, this begins to rewire the brain.  You get pleasure from peace and wisdom, rather than from the adrenalin, suffering and the pain of addictions.

For this reason, our moment-to-moment meditation, the "Observer State," the part that objectively observes our level of awake-ness to life, experiences a revelation when we open ourselves to what is and see what it reveals.

With these truths in mind, I present the following insights.  Allow their understanding to become your own.  Quietly turn them over and over in your mind and you will hear what cannot be told.

• Just as true emptiness holds all things, "True Silence" bears and supports all things.
• Whatever is brought into this "Silence," whatever it touches, is gradually silenced . . . yet not by an act of domination, but through a peaceful penetration and integration of a lesser into a greater.
• True Silence is an interior "presence" and not an exterior circumstance.  It has no opposite and is not created, which means nothing can act against it or any cause serve to enhance its existence.
• True Silence cannot be cultivated or practiced, but the conditions that prohibit its presence, the addiction to suffering and desire may be faced and understood.
• True Silence is perfectly empty of content and completely full without contradiction.
• True Silence is without preference and neither rejects nor resists any condition.
• True Silence is the heart and soul of compassion.
• True Silence doesn't have intelligence—it is "Intelligence" of an order that a divided mind cannot comprehend.

If we wish the presence and peace of "True Silence," then the necessity of solitude is as evident to us as realizing that a seedling must be left undisturbed if it is ever to break out of its dark ground and live in the light.

As the knowing and understanding of these truths grows within us, and we look at our life through its eyes, we come to realize that this new silent seeing is itself a part of the contentment we seek.

The absence of division between the seer and seen is the negation of desire. And when the stress and pressure of longing to possess whatever it may be are at last negated by this higher self-awareness, it takes with them all painful conflict that must occur whenever there exists a sense of separation between ourselves and our hoped for peace of mind.

Then what about the story that arises about a lifetime of suffering to this point in time.  That is faced and penetrated too.  The suffering is included in a greater experience of self, it becomes our foundation and history.  Then it is the basis from which we move forward as we begin a new way of living.

As challenging as this sounds, be encouraged.  Truth itself is on our side.  In this life everything is either growing or it goes the other way.  What is true must change and that which changes is true.  To this rule there are no exceptions.  To positively comply we need only be willing to face and to grow in the truth of ourselves, and act from what is seen as true.  In this way the contradictions in our consciousness are cancelled.

Here is a last thought to use daily to help guide the way to living in "True Silence"—once we realize that what we must understand, if we are to be quietly free, cannot be spoken, imagined, practiced, or otherwise fashioned by thought, only then will we stop talking to ourselves about what we need.  We don’t need anything, we have choice.

Suffering requires practice and is infinitely difficult.  Peace requires no practice and is infinitely easy!!! "True Silence" awaits the one who will see this truth and be still.

Click here for the Intensive Life Training Schedule for 2007

Contact us for more info