| |
Venerable
Ajahn Sumedho -
Silence and Space
From a
Sunday talk at Amaravati, given by Luang Por Sumedho, summer 1994.
In the ordinary way of life in the world, silence is something that's
not worth bothering with. It's more important to think, to create, and
to do things: to fill the silence with sound. Usually we think of
listening to sound, to music, to someone talking; with silence we think
there is nothing to listen to. And in those times when we meet and
neither party quite knows what to say to the other, we feel embarrassed
or ill-at-ease; the silence between us feels uncomfortable.
However concepts such as silence and emptiness are beginning to indicate
a direction to develop, something to pay attention to because one thing
about modern life is that we've managed to blast out silence and
demolish space. We've created a society where we are endlessly busy; we
don't know how to rest or relax or to just be. Our lives have a driven
quality in which our clever minds spend so much time developing a
technology to make life easy - and yet we find ourselves stressed out by
it. 'Time-saving devices' they were called, which would enable us to
just push buttons and whatever we wanted would manifest. Tedious tasks
would be turned over to robots and machinery. But what do we do with the
time that we have saved?
Somehow we need to have something to do, to keep busy; always having to
fill up silence with sound or space with forms. The emphasis is on
really being a personality, somebody who can prove their worth. This is
the rat race, the endless cycle that we feel stressed by. When we're
young and have a lot of energy we can enjoy the pleasures of youth, such
as good health and romance and adventures and all that. But yet, those
kind of experiences can be suddenly stopped: maybe through a disability;
or perhaps when we lose somebody that we are very attached to. What
happens to us can shake us so that the pleasures of the sense-realm,
good health and vigour, good looks and personality, and the praise of
the world no longer provide us with happiness. Or we can feel embittered
because somehow we've not been able to achieve the level of pleasure and
success that we imagine we should have as our right. So we're always
having to prove ourselves or be somebody, and we get intimidated by the
demands of our personalities.
The personality is conditioned into the mind. We're not born with a
personality. To become a personality we have to think, to conceive of
ourself as somebody. It can be good or bad; or a mixture of all kinds of
things. The personality depends on being able to remember, having a
history; having views or assumptions about ourself - whether we're
attractive or unattractive, loveable or not, clever or stupid - and
these can vary according to situations. But when we develop the
contemplative mind we see through this. We begin to experience the
original mind: the consciousness before it's conditioned by perception.
Now if we try to think about this original mind, we get caught up in our
analytical faculties, so we have to watch and listen-rather than trying
to figure out how to become somebody who's enlightened. To meditate in
order to become somebody who's enlightened doesn't work - because as
long as we're trying to do that we create our self as a person that is
unenlightened now. We tend to think of ourselves as not enlightened, or
people with a lot of problems - or even hopeless cases. Sometimes we
imagine that the worst thing that we can think about ourselves is the
truth. There's a kind of perversity that assumes real honesty lies in
admitting the worst possible things about oneself!
I'm not making judgements against personality but suggesting that you
get to know what it is, so that you're not operating from the delusion
you create and the assumptions you have of yourself as a person. And in
order to do that one learns to sit still and listen to the silence. Not
that this is going to make you enlightened, but it's going against the
momentum of habit; against restless energies of the body and emotions.
So you listen to the silence. You can hear my voice; you can hear the
sounds of things that happen, but behind all that is a kind of
high-pitch, almost electronic buzz. That's what I call 'the sound of
silence.' I find that a very helpful way of concentrating the mind
because when one begins to notice that - without regarding it as any
kind of attainment or achievement - it becomes a convenient method for
contemplation, in order to hear yourself think. Thinking itself is a
kind of sound, isn't it? When you're thinking you can hear yourself
thinking. So when I listen to myself thinking it's the same as listening
to somebody else talking. And so I listen to the thinking of the mind
and the sound of silence: when I'm with the sound of silence, then I
notice that I'm not thinking. There's a stillness there, so I note,
consciously note the stillness and that helps in recognising the
emptiness. The emptiness isn't a shutting off or a denial of anything
but a letting go of the habitual tendencies of restless activity or
obsessive thought.
You can actually stop the momentum of your habits and desires by
listening. And in that, with the sound of silence, there's
attentiveness. You don't have to close your eyes; you don't have to plug
up your ears or ask somebody to leave the room; you don't have to do it
in a special place - wherever you are it seems to work. It can be very
helpful in a communal or family situation where life gets habitual. That
is, in these situations, we get used to each other and then tend to
operate through assumptions and habits that we don't even know about.
Now the silence of the mind allows all these conditions to be what they
are. But the ability to reflect on them in terms of arising and ceasing
allows us to see that all the perceptions and ideas we have about
ourselves are conditions of the mind, and not what we really are. What
you think you are is not what you are.
So you say, 'What am I then?' But do you need to know what you are? You
just need to know what you're not, that's enough. The problem is that we
think we're all kinds of things that we're not and that's where we
suffer. We don't suffer from not-self, anatta, from not being anybody;
we suffer from being somebody all the time. That's where the suffering
is. So when we're not anybody it's not suffering, it's a relief, it's
like putting down a heavy burden of, self-consciousness, and fears of
what other people think. The whole lot that's connected to the sense of
our self, we can drop. We can just let it go. What a relief to not be
anybody! Or to not feel we're somebody that has got all kinds of
problems and 'I should practise more meditation'; 'I should come to
Amaravati more often'; 'I've got to get rid of all this and I can't do
it!' All this is thought, isn't it? It's making all kinds of assumptions
about yourself. It's the critical mind. It's the discriminative mind
that's always saying you're not good enough or you've got to be better.
So we can listen; this listening is available to us all the time. At
first maybe it's helpful to go to meditation retreats or situations
where you have reminders around you, where you're supported, where a
teacher is there to keep prodding you along, helping you to remember -
because it's easy to fall right back into the old habits. This is
especially the case with mental habits because they're subtle; and the
sound of silence doesn't seem like anything worth listening to. But even
if you listen to music, you can listen to the silence behind the music.
This doesn't destroy the music, but puts it in a perspective where
you're not carried away by the music or addicted to sound. You can
appreciate the sound and also the silence.
So the Middle Way that the Buddha talks about isn't an extreme of
annihilation. It's not saying 'Silence, emptiness, no self, this is what
we've all got to do. We've got to get rid of our desires, our
personalities, all the sense realm is an attack on silence. We've got to
destroy all the conditions; all music, all forms, we shouldn't have any
forms in this room, just have white walls.' To see the formed world
always as a threat, as an attack on emptiness; that's not it. It's not
taking sides for the conditioned or the unconditioned but rather
recognising their relationship - which is an on-going practice.
That's where mindfulness is the way because in the state we're in on
Planet Earth and with these human bodies, we have a very strong
conditioning to bear with. For the whole of our lifetime we have to live
within the limits and problems and difficulties of the human body. And
we have emotions. We feel everything and we remember all kinds of
things. We're in this state of pleasure and pain for our lifetime. But
we can see it in the right way - and this is the point the Buddha is
making too: to understand things as they really are, to be able to let
things be what they really are rather than create delusions around
things.
Out of ignorance we can create endless delusions around the things of
our life, around our own bodies, around our memories, around language,
around perceptions, views, opinions, the culture, the religious
conventions, so it becomes complicated, difficult and separative. The
alienation that modern people feel is this alienation that results from
self-obsession - where our sense of our self is of absolute importance.
It's been held up to us that this is what life is all about, so we can
become full of our own self-importance. Even the fact that we might
think we're a hopeless case: we still give that tremendous importance.
We can spend years going to psychiatrists to discuss the reasons for our
own hopelessness - because we are very important to ourselves. And that
is also quite a natural thing for us because we've got to be with
ourselves all the time. We can escape from other people but we are
always stuck with this.
So anatta or non-self: many people misinterpret that and say it's a
denial of self, a kind of put-down of the self as something we shouldn't
have. That's not how anatta works. Anatta or non-self is a suggestion to
the mind; it's a tool to begin to reflect on what we really are. And in
the long-run we don't have to see ourselves in any way as being
anything. If we take this reflection to its ultimate, then the body, the
emotions, the memories, the whole lot that seems so definitely, so
insistently ourselves, can be seen in terms of 'they arise, they cease.'
And when we're aware of the cessation of things, that appears more real
to us than the ephemeral conditions that we tend to grasp or be obsessed
with. It takes a while to be able to get over the hump of this
self-obsession, but you can do it. It's not something one can't do but
it does take a while because the habit tendencies are so strong.
Some psychologists and psychiatrists have commented that we need a self.
This is an important thing to consider, that a self is not something
that we shouldn't have but something we need to put in its proper place.
And that this self be based on the goodness of our lives rather than a
self that we create out of dwelling on the flaws and faults and negative
tendencies of the mind.
It's so easy to see oneself in very critical ways, particularly when one
compares oneself to other people or to images or to great figures in
history. But when we always compare ourselves with ideals, we can only
be critical with the way we are because life is like this; it's a flow,
it's change, it's feeling tired, it's having to deal with emotional
problems, with anger, jealousy, fears, all kinds of desires, all kinds
of strange things that we don't want to admit even to ourselves. But
that's a part of the process, and we have to recognise conditions and
observe their nature whether they're good or bad, perfect or imperfect:
they are impermanent, they arise, they cease. In this way we keep
learning and we find strength working through our own kammic
conditioning. Maybe we didn't get a very good deal at all in life. Maybe
we've got all kinds of physical problems, health problems and emotional
problems. But in terms of Dhamma, these are not obstacles because many
times it's these flaws and difficulties that force us to awaken to life.
And some part of us realises that trying to straighten up everything and
make everything nice, with everything ordered and life pleasant is not
the answer; we recognise that there is something more to life than just
controlling it and trying to get the best of the conditions.
And so as a way of letting go of our own position, the sense of our
self, our own convention, there is this recognition of silence. We can
be in the silence where there is unity. Like the space in this room,
it's the same for all of us. I can't say this space is mine. But space
is just that, it's space, it's where the forms come and go: but it's
also something we can notice, and we can contemplate. And what happens?
As we develop awareness of space then we begin to have a sense of
spaciousness, or of infinity - because space has no beginning or end. We
can build rooms and look at space as it exists in a room like this, but
we know that actually the building is in the space. So space is like
infinity, it has no boundaries. But within the limitations of our own
visual consciousness, boundaries help us see the space in a room because
space as infinity is too much. The space in a room is enough so we can
contemplate the relationship of the forms to the space. Then in your own
thoughts as you listen, the sound of silence has the same effect.
I used to deliberately think thoughts, neutral thoughts like, 'I am a
human being' - which is neutral, it doesn't arouse any emotional
feelings. And while listening to myself thinking that thought, the
intention would be to listen to the thought as thought and the silence
that it's in. This way I'm contemplating and recognising the
relationship of the thinking faculty to the silence, the natural silence
of the mind. And in that I'm establishing mindfulness, the ability as an
individual being to be a witness, to be the listener, to be that which
is awake. Now emotionally this can be very difficult.
We can get very negative about it sometimes, because we haven't resolved
a lot of our desires to have things, to feel things, to get high or to
get rid of things. So this is where we listen to our emotional
reactions. Just begin to notice when there is this silence, what happens
emotionally. It may be negativity: 'I don' t know what I'm doing,' or:
'This is a waste of time.' Doubting states will arise around this
practice. But listen also to those emotions: they're just habits of the
mind. And by admitting them and accepting them, then they cease also.
The emotional reactions will fall away more and more and you'll feel
confident in just being that which is aware.
Then you can establish your life with the intention to do good and
refrain from doing evil. Paradoxically we need that self-respect.
Meditation doesn't come from the idea that if we're just mindful we can
do anything we feel like, but it involves a respect for conditions: to
respect the body we have, our humanity, our intelligence and our ability
to do things. It doesn't mean to be attached or identified, but
meditation does allow us to recognise what we have: this is the way it
is, these conditions are this way. Even to respect our disabilities.
Self-respect or respect for the conditions means respect for whatever
state they're in. It doesn't mean liking that state, but it does mean
accepting it and learning to work with the limitations of it.
So for the enlightened mind it's not a matter of having the best, is it?
It's not that you need to have the best health and the best conditions,
the best of everything in order to really make it - because that feeds a
sense of yourself as being somebody who can only operate from having the
very best of everything. But when we begin to realise that the
disabilities, the flaws and the strange things that we each have are not
obstructions then we're seeing them in the right way. We can respect
them and be willing to accept and use them in order to get beyond our
attachment to them. If we practise like this, we can be free from
identifying and from being attached to those perceptions of ourselves as
being this or that. And this is the marvellous thing that we can do as
human beings: it allows us to use the whole of our lives, and it's an
on-going process.
Forest Sangha Newsletter: October 2001, Number 58
back |