In the Silence is where all the power is. In the Silence is where all the answers are. – Robert Adams
There are times when I stand on a hillside or deep in the woods or sitting quietly on my porch, when the Great Truth that is at the core of all great spiritual teachings is, I’m certain of it, right there.
And because I, like all humans, am accustomed to using my mind to navigate the world, off it goes in an effort to pull back the curtain and, well, the Truth vanishes like a desert mirage.
These days this mind at least is aware of this habit as well as the impossibility – the absurdity, really – of chasing after It, because It and mind are mutually exclusive. Cest la vie.
All is not lost, however, because what remains in its wake is a temporary sense of tranquility, a snippet of peace in a lifetime of anxiety and fear. It doesn’t last long. Like pixie dust, it falls away as I return to this thing called life.
What seems rather clear these days is that my anxiety is the world’s anxiety, regardless of the form it takes. For some it is the relentless push for money and things and the security they are expected to deliver; for others it is achievement and fame and success; for still others it is a religious or political crusade; for still others, a cause of one kind or another. Doesn’t matter, it’s all the same, a restlessness of the mind.
What is equally clear is that the direction in which each of us goes looking to solve these problems is wrong. Totally, irrevocably, incontrovertibly wrong.
But you don’t need me to tell you that. Just look at the evidence. It’s in the history books and scattered all around you. And in you.
As have so many other spiritual teachers before and since, the late-Robert Adams used to counsel his students to go into silence as often as possible because it is only in silence that Truth can be found. I never much cared for that particular nugget of advice. Like Luke Walker eschewing The Force for the technology around him, there was no place in silence for my mind to find a home.
And oh boy does the mind need a home. Where would you be without your mind? Indeed, WHO would you be without your mind?
Which helps explain why the sages urge us to silence. Thoughts arise out of – and return to – silence. Music, words, all of the notes of life exist only because of the silence around them. We are in and of silence. Yet we invest the whole of our lives in the cacophony of the mind and its endless products.
Consider, for a moment, how much time in a given day or week or year you spend in silence.
Mind you, this is not silence with earbuds in or the television on in the background. And this most definitely is not the brand of silence where your mind is whirring and thrumming with an endless stream of thoughts, so much so that when you snap out of it you ask, “Where did the time go?” You know, because you were lost in thought. And this is not the silence of hipster yoga where your thoughts are on executing the right pose so that your chakras are aligned or your kundalini energy or chai can do whatever the heck it’s supposed to do. Nor is it the silence of meditation where your mind is keying on a mantra or chat or object or putting positive energy into the universe.
No, this is conscious silence, the silence of the heart, where thoughts aren’t resisted but instead allowed to rise up and out of the silence and simply go their way. And when you catch yourself running off with one of them – “What am I going to have for dinner tonight?” – you make no judgments but simply decouple from that thought and return to conscious silence.
What seems rather clear, now, is that the ‘solution’ to my anxiety lies not in the instrument behind it – the mind that essentially created that problem in the first place. Nor will your mind ever come up with the answer to your depression or insecurity or fear and neither will the ‘best and brightest’ minds solve whatever it is that’s ailing the world at any given time.
Being of this world how can the mind possible overcome it?
What, then, is left? Silence.