How Silence Isn’t the Way

I’ve decided to put my website up again just to have a place for my writing since that’s the thing that mostly happens here on a regular basis and it’s the one consistent aspect of my life for which I am most grateful and to which I basically owe my life now.

If I had to name my least favorable idea in all the world it would be that you should quiet your thoughts in order to become enlightened.

The idea that silence itself is superior to all other forms of expression is a lie to which countless individuals have succumbed. They’ve basically taken it on the words of others that there’s some Truth to this, and even though almost no one ever achieves this quiet ideal, this one idea has probably silenced more people than any other one in the quest to knowing yourself and what you’re really all about.

Why on earth would you ever want to stop listening to yourself is a question no one asks — not because they can’t ask it, but because they’ve relegated their search for Truth to others who don’t know what the hell they are talking about.

So I’ll just say it here and now: there is no virtue to being silent.

The Lie of Silence

I for one would never in a million years want to ever suggest that a single human being on earth should restrict their own unique expression for anyone or anything — and yet this has happened to so many that usually the voices who really have something to share are never heard.

It’s not even so much a problem of being heard by others, although sometimes that’s a wonderful thing, but to not know how to hear yourself is a terrible affliction that too many now suffer from.

Basically, people are cast into the shadows of their own minds this way — never to reemerge with any sort of useful understanding of what their life was all about.

They never discover what might have been said, even if it was only in their own minds to themselves, had they had the foresight to really listen.

The Cult of Quiet

I always think if you really wanted to lead someone astray or just totally put them off in a totally opposite direction of Truth — because for some strange reason you don’t want them to find it — then this is what you’d do.

You’d tell them not to think anymore. You’d tell them that their own thoughts and the ideas that come out of those thoughts are utterly useless.

This is really akin to telling a person that their life is a useless aberration that was never meant to do anything better than sit in some quiet meditation letting go of the life that they really are as it passed them by.

No one is born that I know of that is nothing, that has no value whatsoever to the totality of awareness.

Having anyone just quietly tuck themselves away in dark rooms searching for some sublime experience that they may or may not get is most cruel.

The Real Work

I understand that one must learn to detect the false movement of thoughts that one has learned to continuously think about repeatedly — without the volition of purposely thinking them — thoughts that were imprinted on us through our emotional upbringing and the cultures we hail from.

But as far as I know, you’d never be able to do that by just trying to deny that you’re even having them.

The first and most important step in detecting the lies you’ve been led to believe about life starts with finding out what you do think — not erasing all of it, not denying what’s there, not destroying the ability to think and substituting it with silence.

What kind of life do you think that will produce anyway?

Who comes to life just to sit around trying to escape from it?

Because that’s what it always amounts to — some sort of escape where you try to silence yourself because you can’t handle what’s really going on inside of you.

In fact, you’d rather not even acknowledge that something inside you seeks expression and probably feels like it’s been held down or away from it its entire life.

Listening to Yourself

You don’t need more silence if you ask me. Most people have lived their entire lives never once expressing how they really feel about things — just to save face and protect themselves from seeming or looking too weird.

They imagine that no one will get them if they do, so they go along with stuff that they don’t even know about. They’re even too afraid to ask questions like, “Why are we doing this?”

Most people already don’t speak their minds.

If they did, they’d find out what a wonderful thing it is to do so — regardless of what you believe in.

Beyond the Noise

Of course, in this day and age, those who speak the loudest are usually the ones to get heard and go on to influence the beliefs of others.

That’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m not talking about talking for the sake of talking or because you have some agenda you want others to get on board with you on.

I’m simply saying that a person needs to listen to themselves — not silence themselves like so many traditions love to proclaim will do you much good.

This writing is often actually how I listen to myself now. I know what’s going on inside of me by what comes out on the empty page that was here before I started.

Right now this is what’s on my mind.

Knowing What You Think

Out in public, I might be very talkative on occasions and other times I’m just looking and there’s no need in me to utter a single syllable.

There are certainly times when I know it’s in my best interests to keep my mouth shut lest I get dragged into an unpleasant pointless conversation I’d rather not be in — because I know what I think now and I don’t need to share it.

I don’t have much interest in what anyone else thinks about since, from what I can tell, there’s naught any reason to unless I’m in a personal relationship with said person.

I have been known to listen to my kids at all hours of the night or day but publicly, you’d probably find me sitting by myself enjoying my own thoughts and my own company since if truth be told, I am my favorite person these days.

I think I’m as cool as they come, so much so that listening to my own inner dialog is but one more thing to enjoy about being alive.

I’ve said this before, but it’s not that we think that’s the issue — it’s only ever what we think that seems to cause so much havoc not only on ourselves but on our own lives.

The Inner Critic

Most people have an inner critic that they have never gone to bat with.

They’ve never actually taken on this inner voice that often humiliates and shames them so mercilessly — to task, to battle with that and win — is quite the thing to do.

That’s the real reason that just silencing your mind, if you’re even able to do so, does nothing but postpone the inevitable face-to-face with this inner demon that we’ve all learned to accept and live with.

What if you could find out what that was, and by the finding out destroy it once and for all, so that you’d never need to silence your thoughts again — because now you like them, you like thinking?

The Lies We Live

Let’s be honest now — we all know that we live in a world of lies that we learned and wouldn’t have chosen in a million years as something to live by.

No life is perfect, but there’s a reason that few people actually live enjoyable lives while most don’t.

A simple exercise of actually watching people for a little while in some public space will confirm that most are burdened — you can read it in the lines of their faces and the gaits of their walks, as if they weren’t living beings but long letters of woe.

I used to be one of them.

I once hated my life so much that I simply couldn’t stand it anymore.

I only think now, thank God I did, or I’d never have been drawn to investigate myself in the manner that I did.

The Turning Point

I’d never have known what drove me to such a lonely state of mind if I had not looked into it — not in therapy but on my own, for my own sake.

It wasn’t that some things weren’t adding up — in my case nothing did or even could.

It was a total utter disaster, this thinking mechanism I had somehow grown into.

I look back now in wonder at how I ever held my life together at all on any level — and now I don’t have to.

I don’t have to hold it together.

The very idea makes my skin crawl, as if avoidance and resistance had ever done me any favors.

I was never holding anything together — I was holding it all in.

Entering the Thought

I thought in my mind that I could never face what was going on inside of me.

The past was just too awful, and yet I felt that past without thinking about it anyway.

These days my past, if there was one (which there wasn’t), has basically vanished into the thin circus air that it was — just a thought pattern I’d learned to believe in.

But it wasn’t by silencing my thoughts that it went away — it was by entering them fully so I could see what had really transpired there.

How I’d been fooled, even brainwashed into believing in things that would never make me happy or free.

The Real Reason for Silence

Do you know the real reason for all this silence, for somehow equating silence with the Truth itself?

People believe there either is no Truth or that Truth is some unknowable thing that is most difficult to discern.

In fact, they believe almost no one can see it — it’s invisible maybe, or it must be divinely given, perhaps, and being quiet equates with a type of obedience that this divine power reveres and rewards.

They believe it’s not something you might seek out and just find because you are interested in finding it.

The power of deception — these lies proliferate — and out of that you get groups of people sitting quietly like dead people, searching for an eternal thread that might bring them back to life.

The Conclusion

Of course, if any of it worked — if any of that was true — the planet would be swarming with Truth tellers by now, and it isn’t.

Instead, human beings become more robotic, more obedient to any authority they think will help them thrive and become slaves to that without the slightest clue of how it is all happening.

Then they lose the will to live, or they align their will with some other purpose that will never fully satisfy them, since nothing satisfies but Truth — that is just the way it is.

It’s simple really: if you aren’t in possession of the Truth, then you’re in possession of lies — and those lies will continue to corrupt your very being as all lies do.

Humans were not meant to live with lies.

We weren’t made to blindly accept and believe in just anything we hear or are told.

We have an internal bullshit system that balks at such things — which is exactly how we become angry or disillusioned.

We know when we are being lied to, and unless we actively work to silence this function, our irritation grows.

So people fool themselves again and again by looking for someone to tell them the Truth — all to avoid going on the only journey that can give it to them.

“Seek and ye shall find” means you have to seek — not just believe what somebody tells you to believe in.

On this journey, you cannot believe anybody, because it’s not about believing.

Belief is just a child’s game — here we either know and confirm things for ourselves, or we don’t know it.