Tara Brach - The Gift of Silence - (from 2007)

Episode Date: August 18, 2013

2007-09-26 - The Gift of Silence - Through all spiritual traditions, there is a valuing of silence and stillness. When the mind has quieted, it becomes possible to see into the truth of what we are. Yet quieting can turn into a battle with the process of the thinking mind. This talk explores practices that allow us to settle in a natural way, the presence which is silence itself, and the wisdom and love that flows freely when we live from that silence. Please support the continuation of this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Thank you for your generosity.

In most meditation instructions that you'll hear here and in most places, the assumption is that we're learning to quiet our mind, amongst other things, that that's kind of a part of the deal. And there's usually a shared value to quietness and to stillness. And retreats are on silence, and there's a slowing down in a sense that that's, you know, that's kind of where it's at. And, you know, we see the statues of the Buddha. And in those statues, the Buddha is not talking.

He's quiet. He's not moving. We don't see Buddha action figures, right? And there's this kind of vibe of still, still. And I know for myself, no matter what is going on in my life, no matter what it is, when my mind begins to quiet, when I kind of settle a little, when I pause, there is a sense of coming back to what I value. There's some sense of coming home to a quality of presence, awakeness, heart that I value and it comes when my mind quiets. So I'm going to talk

about quietness tonight and it's a little bit weird to talk about quietness, but it's not really. And I'll start with a poem many of you know that I just would like to as kind of a setting of the field here, which is Pablo Naruda's poem. He says, now we will count to 12 and we will all keep still. For once on the face of the earth, let's not speak in any language. Let's stop for a second and not move our arms so much. It would be an exotic moment without rush, without engines. We would all be together in a sudden strangeness.

fishermen in the cold sea would not harm whales and the man-gathering salt would not look at his hurt hands those who prepare green wars wars with gas wars with fire victories with no survivors would put on clean clothes and walk about with their brothers in the shade doing nothing what I want should not be confused with total inactivity life is what it is about

If we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving and for once could do nothing, perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves and of threatening ourselves with death. Perhaps the earth can teach us as when everything seems dead in winter and later proves to be alive.

Now I'll count up to 12 and you keep quiet and I will go. So Naruto points to a kind of inner freedom that comes, a kind of natural quietness and that it's both for the peace of mind and heart of our own being. But it's also, and this is what I love about the poem, it's the space from which our friendship arises and healing becomes possible and peace.

So we have that, and yet in the meditation culture, along with value in quietness, it goes kind of hand in hand off, and we end up turning the busy mind into an enemy. It's like, okay, we all get it, yeah, quietness is so sweet. And then what's the reality? We all know it. Our minds are just like yab-y-y-yab-y-y-ab-right? So we end up in some way having a sense of I'm not there yet. something's wrong with how this body mind is working. I'm not real spiritual.

Quietness is out there. It's another place, something we're trying to attain. When really what we'll be exploring tonight is how our nature is silence. It's not something we attain as much as a coming home. And it's not in any way in conflict with sound. Sounds are an expression of silence. but I'm getting ahead of myself. What I see in the meditation cultures is that because of valuing quietness,

a lot of the instructions seem to have a kind of an undercurrent of saying, if you're thinking get rid of the thoughts and thoughts are bad. And that's just not true. We're not trying to get rid of thoughts and thoughts aren't bad. Because otherwise it would be, like a condemnation of how we are.

And what happens is that because those instructions seem to be there, that we're trying to get rid of thoughts, there's a kind of controlling that goes on, and it backfires. And it backfires in several ways. Either we come to the conclusion that we're not cut out for meditating. You know, I think I'll go Sufi dancing or do, you know, some sort of a hut yoga or, you know, something else, but meditating, sitting still doesn't work for me because my mind's always busy,

so I'm a failure, so I should try another thing. So either we give up because we have this idea we're failing at something, or we work real hard concentrating and our mind temporarily gets quieted. Concentration works to create a state of temporary quietness. It's not true silence. It's a kind of forged, manipulated quietness. And then what happens is a kind of forged, manipulated quietness. and then what happens? We get up out of our meditation and all hell breaks loose. We go back to every single neurotic thought

we were pushing away. And with vengeance it comes out. I have to say I've been to many, many retreats where I was operating under this notion that I was supposed to try to quiet my mind and keep my mind fixed on the breath. And what happened, I had some delicious states,

not a whole lot of insight, a kind of a narrow, quiet state. But then I'd leave. and it was so depressing because all the same junk was there. So if we're at war with our mind, if we're trying to make our mind different, we're going to always be at war.

I like this description by one of the Zoke Chen Tibetan masters. He says, if you're training for the purpose of bringing, thinking, and experience to a halt, you must have somebody knock you out. If you prefer, you could also do it by yourself. You don't need to have somebody else knock you out.

Every time you wake up, take hold of an iron bar, if that's your training, and just knock yourself out. You can get quite good at it a while. He says, this is quite easy to accomplish. As soon as you regain your senses and start to have a thought immediately, hit yourself in the head. Your meditation aid would be the iron bar. Anyway, he goes on to say,

if you want to bring both sensations and thoughts to a halt, use this bar. It'll help you reach the ultimate stupidity. Anyway, he goes on, but the point is that that's not a wisdom tradition when we're trying to obliterate thoughts. A metaphor that I think is important is understanding that we know that thinking is natural. I often say that the mind secretes thoughts like the body secretes enzymes. the thoughts are necessary for surviving, for thriving, and they're also, when they're wholesome, a necessary part of spiritual awakening,

they incline us in a certain way, create a kind of inner atmosphere that inclines us towards openness or generosity or loving kindness. Thinking is part of the incredible wonder of being human. And as we know, we overthink and the content of our thoughts quite often end up bringing us down, keeping us in a kind of prison. So through the eons, mystics and shaman and sages have sought ways to do some quieting so that we could even know what's wholesome and what's an habitual trance that we get into.

through the ages there's been a kind of a search for like what's really a wise way to quiet I like the way Krishna Merti points to what's possible he says when the mind becomes more still, tranquil

not seeking any answer or solution neither resisting or avoiding it is only then that there can be a regeneration that something new is born because in that stillness, in that quietness, the mind is capable of perceiving that which is true and it is the truth that liberates, not our efforts to be free. So what I'd like to explore is both what I call the skillful means, that's just a Buddhist word,

for the kind of practices that help us to quiet some. and then what I really consider the most pure practice of presence that actually opens us into a very natural silence. But I want to re-emphasize, point to the misunderstandings on the way. And one is that in some way quietness is in juxtaposition to sound, that we can inhabit quietness and be aware of sounds. Quietness doesn't mean that the whole world has stopped having sounds. Sounds are the forms that arise out of silence.

When we inhabit what we are that silence, the sounds are part of it, but there's still a resting in some vastness. And then the second is that even when there's thoughts, there can still be a profound undercurrent, like an ocean of silence, of silence, and then you can have waves come and go, but not be lost in them. So what that brings us to is that that often isn't the case.

Rather than inhabiting that quietness and having the awareness of sounds, of thoughts, of experience, we're usually lost in the thoughts, lost in the busyness, and we have disconnected from presence. So I want to talk some about the suffering of the busy mind. And the way it's described is that we are the ocean of beingness and with the arising of waves we tend to get identified. We tend to think, oh, I'm that wave or that thought is truth. We believe the thoughts.

And we get caught in this familiar cocoon of thoughts that we think's reality. We think that's actually reality. going on in our minds. And anytime we think that's reality, we're not connected with the aliveness, the sounds, the presence that's right here. Not only do we get disconnected, but the trance we go into, and it is a trance, is often small-minded, and it's often got a quality of adversiveness, something's wrong or something's missing. So it's like living in a dream. It's like some people described it as we've gone to the movies and we're believing that the movie is the whole of reality. We've gotten lost in it. Thoughts are these mental constructions and whenever

they're going on there's a correlate of emotions in the body. So when the thoughts are blaming, when the thoughts are worrying, the body is having a biochemistry that matches it. So our thoughts drag us through all these worlds. Have you noticed what it's like when you go online and and you go from one email to the next and how your mood completely jumps all over the universe with each new... It's like you're entering this trance and that trance and this trance. It's all these worlds, and it happens really quickly,

so it's really obvious. This is one of my favorite little stories. Those of you that have been around a while might remember, a couple from Michigan decided to go to Florida to thaw out during a particularly icy winter. They plan to stay at the very same hotel where they spent their honeymoon 20 years earlier. Because of hectic schedules, it was difficult to coordinate their travel reservations,

so the husband left Michigan and flew to Florida on Thursday, and his wife flew down the following day. The husband checked into the hotel. There was a computer in the room, so he decided to send an email to his wife. However, he accidentally left out one letter in her email address, and without realizing his error, he sent out the email. Meanwhile, somewhere in Houston, a woman had just returned home from her husband's funeral. He was a minister for many years and had been called home to glory following a sudden

heart attack. The widow decided to check her email expecting messages from relatives and friends. After reading the first message, she fainted. The widow's son rushed into the room and found his mother on the floor and saw the computer screen, which read, To my loving wife. Subject, I've arrived. Date 20th of September, I know you're surprised to hear from me. They have computers here now and you're allowed to send emails to your loved ones. I've just arrived and been checked in.

I see that everything has been prepared for your arrival tomorrow. Looking forward to seeing you then, hope your journey is as uneventful as mine was. P.S. sure is hot down here. So our thoughts go into all these different worlds. and some of our thoughts are more or less accurate maps or representations. They are instructive. They point to things that are useful.

But how many moments are our minds on a channel that actually creates a sense of separation from others? It creates a sense of a future that something's around the corner that's going to be too much to handle, that interprets our own experience as, I shouldn't be feeling this, or something's wrong with me. So the suffering in the busy mind

is not that there are thoughts, but that we're believing them. We're taking what is just an image or a sound bite that's conditioned and taking it for real and leaving the aliveness that's here and the potential of seeing truth that's right here.

In the most basic way, living in thoughts, identified with thoughts keeps reinforcing a limited sense of who we are. There is no thought that can guide you into really experiencing

your wholeness, your vastness, your mystery. Thoughts are just this like little sliver of a representation. So we have these stories about ourselves and our lives and as long as we're running them we can't really open to the beauty and the sacredness of this being that we are.

The sorcerer Don Juan from the Carlos Kachanada book says, When the inner dialogue stops, our life changes. Our life is as it is only because we repeatedly tell ourselves who we are. It's true about others too. as long as we're telling ourselves stories about who the other is, as long as others are kind of an unreal other in our mental movie, we really can't sense the mystery and the awareness that's looking at us.

We're not there for it. So we're starting tonight with the basic understanding that there is a value to quieting, not to get rid of thoughts, but to not believe our thoughts, to have enough quietness so we can see it's a movie and not buy into the trance. A very good friend of mine is a poet, Dana Fawalds,

and she wrote this. She says, in the first stage of your journey, you learn to replace harmful beliefs with helpful ones. It was such a relief to let go of negativity that it became a temptation to stay there to make your home in these newly-acquired positive thoughts. But a positive self-image is still a mask. The next stage of your journey is

becoming comfortable with the unknown, that which is beyond any story of yourself. It involves being clear and courageous enough to rest in bare awareness without having to create another identity, without needing to tack yet another belief to the end of I am. Experience the expansion the silence and mystery that comes from resting in the truth of unknowing. It is uncomfortable, at least not now perhaps, but it is powerful and inherently creative. It's what your soul longs for. Use a sense of vertigo to leave behind the known

and let go of the need to tether your soul to anything solid or definable. Let yourself go over and over until it is second nature to be weightless. Be the stillness. Be the silence. So let's talk a little bit about how we begin to arrive in this quietness. And to begin with,

for me, the most powerful tool is a quality of listening attention. That listening is, brings a kind of receptivity and allowingness that actually naturally allows us to feel quiet. With listening, there's no fight, there's no controlling our experience.

So one of the most powerful gateways is our senses. If the believing our thoughts is what keeps us from really arriving in wholeness, in the mystery. In other words, if believing our thoughts keeps us in trance, it's the senses that wakes us up into reality.

So the intention is not to be lost in the future or the past, but to get the knack almost of realizing we've been off in thoughts and of pausing and arriving here. Some years ago, I was watching a magic show on TV, and it was on prime time TV, and it was an incredible magic show, magicians from all around the world. And in the middle of it, this was following this, a few of the acts where they had swords that were being plunged through sexy women and they were releasing 50 birds from seemingly

empty hands. They were doing all this stuff. A pair of sequined men got on stage and they were very slick and fast talking. And this is what they said. They said, we're going to teach you how to vanish. We're going to teach you how to vanish, how to disappear into the world. thin air. So that got me interested. And they said, are you ready? And they did all this hoopla. And then they got very quiet. And here's what they said. They said, don't think about the future.

Don't think about the past. Don't think about anything. Vush, you've made yourself vanish. And then the next stack came on with someone chewing a thousand pieces of gum and the show went on. It just went on and on. But really, Rumi says there's nothing ahead. I would bow to one who can realize that. The miracle of Jesus is himself, not what he said or did about the future. Forget the future. I'd worship someone who could do that. On the way you may want to look back or not, but if you can say there's nothing ahead, there will be nothing there. Let's just take them all. Let's explore this piece together, okay? So give yourself the gift of relaxing as you pause.

This quieting, this opening into silence, isn't trying to get anywhere or get rid of anything, but more of a relaxing into the stillness, the awakeness, the quietness that's here. When there's tension in the body, that's the way the body is resisting the present moment. So just relax. And if it's hard to relax, then just bring awareness to wherever there's tightness. It's always helpful to feel the hands with a soft attention.

Loose in the belly. So that you're very aware of the sitting posture and the sensations of sitting here, listening to the sounds that are here. listening not just with your ears but with your whole body's awareness as if you could listen to and feel the space in the room there's a kind of extending with that listen to the silence

inhabit the awareness that's listening the silence that's listening let go into that and then let go some more Being the quietness does not mean that there's no sounds or no thoughts. It means inhabiting that quiet awake space that's aware, sensing the life that's living through and arising out of that space. Mindfulness is the fullness of mind, edgeless space.

There's a stillness that's aware of this body. vibrant life, a silence that's listening. The mind goes off into thoughts, gets distracted, just to simply notice that and pausing, arrive again in the senses, in this listening presence. So this is the first part of practice. It's this the kind of training where we use the senses as a way to begin to quiet down and it helps to slow down

I was describing in here some of the research in science recently by quantum physicist on the atom where lasers have been used to basically cool down atoms to near absolute zero. And when they slow down, they change dramatically, like a total change of state. And their individual properties fade. And they become what's called a singularity. And what this basically is saying is that as we slow down, as the mind quiets down, rather than the properties that look for difference and create separation, and this is they found this in brain research, as the mind quiets,

we actually wake up out of that making separation and distance into a sense of oneness. It helps us to slow down. It helps us to quiet down. So, part one, using the senses to anchor us, slowing down. And yet the key is that if we're trying to chase quietness, trying to find it, it actually will keep us in a kind of controlling tense place. It's almost like a motorboat racing around a lake trying to get away from the waves and the noise to find a smooth spot.

It's going from, room, room, trying to find things. It's just creating more wake, more waves. more sound. What do we do? Throttle back. Throttle back. Turn off the key. And to me, this is the more radical practice of presence that I want to end the evening with, which has to do with stopping. Stopping means that there's a movement where making our lives move like Pablo and Arruda said, and it's a discontinuing the tensing. That's another way to put it. Discontinuing the striving. Throttle back, let go of the doing, and arrive here. Sometimes my only inner guidance, you know how when you're meditating there's a little coach in there that's telling you

do this, do that, you know? Sometimes mine is just saying, okay, stop, just stop. And it's not, it's very gentle and it's really a reminder to notice how much doing is going on and just to relax the grip. Just relax the grip. And as I mentioned, the listening is for me the easiest pathway to stopping because in listening there's a total receptivity. There's no sense of a self-controlling anything. The attitude in stopping is a quality of yes. When you stop, when you're listening, there's an agreeing to whatever life is moving through us. There's an agreeing to life. There's no longer a war.

There's no demand on the moment. There's no resistance to the moment. So one valuable practice is to begin to notice your attitude and notice if in some way there's a demand on the moment or some resistance of what's happening because even noticing that helps to get you back to yes. I know for myself when I'm really noticing my attitude, but I find is there some judgment going on

that my inner state isn't quite the state I want it to be and that I need to rig it into something a little more meditative? Are there some demand that it be different? And as soon as I see that attitude, the seeing releases the sense of identification, then that's just another wave and I'm back again in the silence. One woman described her experience at retreat. she said that she was meditating for about four or five days

and at one point kind of all hell broke loose and she set her mind and was like a kind of a sewage system where there was just like these demons and these angry faces and like all these little fragmented memories and her body was filled with rage and then fear and then and it was just like she was just turning and churning and her only mantra was okay let me let this be okay let this be

okay this you know okay let it be let it be and she said after some while and there was a lot of fear in that because there's a fear if I let this be it'll rip me apart and shred me to pieces and annihilate me

and there's a reason we don't say yes you know and by the way it's not always the right time for us to say yes if we've been traumatized we might need a little more support a little more of a gradual approach but eventually, yes, liberates.

So that's what she was doing. She was no matter what kind of just agreeing, okay, this too, let it be. And she said at some point, from her heart there came this enormous kind of current of a sense of kind of joyfulness. It's almost like she was discovering the space that made it okay that it didn't matter how much was going on. and the more she let go and let go, the more this was this incredible, alive, living, awake space.

She described it as like she was celebrating the pure energy of life itself and she wanted to dance and she wanted to sing. But instead of moving or dancing and singing, she just let that wanting to dance, wanting to sing feeling, she said, let this be. And that just became, again, another big explosion of into this vastness this vast, alive presence. And when she let that vastness and that aliveness be deeply,

she said she touched a piece she had never touched before. And it wasn't like she actually touched a piece, she said, I became it. It's like this whole world was playing like the surface of waves, but she was the body of the ocean. It's described, I think, in the Zen tradition, as a piece beyond all words. And when that piece is there, the aliveness is still springing from the depths

where there's freedom in that form. There's an enormous amount of liveliness, but there's a fundamental sense of peace. There is a way that we can silence our mind and we can notice emptiness of phenomena and it can be cold and dry. This is one element of Buddhism when Buddhism is misunderstood. There's no self here and it's just phenomena playing out

and there's this kind of what's called a kind of cold emptiness, a cold silence. But when the heart opens and we stay, it's emptiness dancing. It's filled with life. We are the silence. And yet this whole world is dancing from that essence of what we are. We're right now kind of talking about what I call the practice of pure presence, which is really noticing and letting be what's here.

and in that pure presence we become the silence. True quietness is brightness, awakeness, a sense of being alive. So I want to just practice another round with you and then we'll close this talk. What I want to do is a very short practice of just purely guiding into presence and then talk about the gifts of silence

as the closing. So as you did earlier, just pause and let your senses be awake. Relax with whatever you're noticing. Just relax. A listening attention, not controlling anything. Just listening to and feeling the life that's here as it is. Letting be and letting be as part of noticing you might notice and wonder who is listening right now, just turning towards awareness and just sensing from the neck down what's true,

the unknown, the mystery. Become the silence, that mystery that is listening. Quietness does not mean no sound. Sounds are the expression of silence. Often when it gets quiet, we're then waiting for something to happen. and this waiting keeps us on the periphery not letting go. When you're not waiting, there's a natural sinking and deepening into the source of your being, quieting, letting go into the depths of what's here.

When you'd like, you can open your eyes and we'll just end by just a little bit of a reflection on the gifts of silence of inhabiting this kind of fullness and quietness. And I began with Neruda saying it's not about inactivity. It's not about not speaking. He says if we're not so single-minded about turning and turning, when we begin to come home to this quietness, this alive, wakeful presence, the natural expression is reverence for life.

Everything is a part of that silence. We don't get quiet to get away from anything. There's nothing we can get away. from when we're quiet, it's all part of us. And there's a natural cherishing of the life that's here. The gift of inner silence is expressed as wisdom and love. I like this story about that when the poet Lord Byron was a student at Oxford in the 18th century, at the end of a class on the New Testament, all the students were given an examination. They were to write an essay on the topic of Christ's miracle

of turning water into wine. For nearly three hours the students wrote, except for Lord Byron, who sat quietly. Finally, the proctor came to him and noting that he had written nothing and the papers would be collected in a few minutes. He just said,

what's up, you know? Lord Byron dipped his pen and wrote one line. The water met its master and blushed. He received an A. I like that because wisdom does not arise from churning brains. It doesn't arise from figuring things out.

It doesn't arise from, you know, kind of striving and working with our brains. It actually comes, and by the way, it's good to have a sharp mind, an analytic mind, a precise mind, all these different kinds of minds are great. Yet to see the truth, that brightness needs to be guided by a vast, deep sense of the mystery. of inner silence. So what does the silence realize? What do we realize when we're in that silence? We realize that the ever-changing movement of life

is arising from the formless. It's not other than what we are, that this life is an expression of what we are. It's not like the sacred is the silence and that everything else is this other thing. It all arises from the silence. We realize that, that because there's nothing we're pushing away,

that it all belongs to us, that this whole world is part of us. Mary Oliver says, in a very short little poem, she describes it this way, she says, and then the wind, not thinking of you, just passes by, touching the ant, the mosquito, the leaf.

And you know what else? How blue is the sea? How blue is the sky? how blue and tiny and redeemable everything is even you. We get quiet and these personalities and bodies and minds and trees and mosquitoes and squirrels. We're all part of it. And there's a sense of the heart opening and caring about that. All experience belongs to our essence.

Srinar Sargadata wrote it this way. He says, When the mind is momentarily free from its preoccupied, patience, it naturally becomes quiet. If you do not disturb this quiet and inhabit it, stay in it, you find that it is permeated with a light in love you have never known, and yet you recognize it at once as your own nature. Once you have passed through this experience, you will never be the same person again. The unruly mind may break its peace and obliterate its vision, but it is bound to rerun, return, provided the intention of sincere until the day when all bonds are broken,

delusions and attachments end, and life becomes supremely absorbed in the sacredness of the present. So tonight I wanted to talk some about quietness because it's so much an assumption on every spiritual path. It's so misunderstood the way we try to like manipulate our minds to be quiet. It's really the nature of what we are. And the pathway is really simple. It's not easy, but it's simple. Let these senses be a home base. Notice what's happening and allow it. Say yes to this life. And in that noticing and allowing, there's a relaxing back into the fullness and beauty and mystery of who you are. So let's just take the last few moments,

just sitting quietly. We'll close with the words of Rumi. This is his poem called Quietness. Inside this new love, die. Your way begins on the other side. Become the sky. Walk out like someone suddenly born into color. Do it now.

You're covered with a thick cloud. Slide out the side. Die and be quiet. Quietness is the sure sign that you've died. Your old life was a frantic running from silence. The speechless full moon comes out now. Inside this new love, die. Namaste. The talk you just listened to has been freely offered. If you'd like to make a donation, learn more about my schedule or about programs offered by the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, please visit either my website, which is tarabrock.com, our IMCW site, which is IMCW.org. Thank you very much.