Into the Depths of Silence

Sometimes when we tell our friends or family that we're off to Devon to take part in a silent retreat, sometimes they react with glee, and even jealousy: "Oh, fantastic -- quiet!" Other times, it just doesn't compute or register as a thing that one would want to do. I remember some of my family members, when I was coming here for long retreats, and they seemed to pick up the idea that it was about the silence itself, like how long one could go without speaking -- that it was some kind of competition or a yogic feat to come here for a week or a month or whatever it is, as if similar to coming here for a month and trying not to go to the toilet for a month or something. [laughter] As if that was the whole point.

But when we look at different spiritual traditions -- particularly the more mystical ones, the deeper contemplative traditions -- very, very often there is this love of silence that's very much at the beating heart, almost, of the contemplative practice. And perhaps the contemplative journey is a journey, we could say, on one level, one aspect, it's a journey into the depths and the dimensions of silence. We could say that. And I know quite a few traditions, contemplative traditions, that actually don't have the wealth of precision of teaching around meditative technique that we have in this tradition. Very precise, and I as a teacher like to be very clear about instructions, etc. But there are traditions, there are many traditions that just don't have that whole aspect. And yet they have this aspect of silence, and a person, monks or nuns spending years in monastery in this climate, this atmosphere of silence, and just deepening in that, ripening, opening in that. And seen some really quite remarkable transformation, just coming out of the power of silence.

We might have, as practitioners and being here, we might have different responses to the silence. Sometimes, and people do report, walking in the front door here -- and there's a long history of silence in this building, not just from when we have been here, but before that it was a convent for nuns -- walking in the front door, and almost being struck by this awesomeness of the silence. It's actually something in the air, in the walls. And I remember at my first retreat at a centre in America, and just really being struck by the strength of it, the depth of it. And we could actually have the other response. I was reading an article recently by someone who came here for retreat, and she said she was driving here terrified -- first retreat, terrified at the prospect of silence. Can be a very unfamiliar environment of silence, or we might feel we might lose our bearings in the silence, or that in some way, the silence would unmask us, render us naked in some way. There's an immensity to the silence that we can also get a taste of. And we can have all those responses.

Oftentimes, though, on retreat, and particularly on longer retreats, which is quite interesting, we can take the silence for granted. It's just like, "Oh, it's just a rule. We're supposed to be quiet because, I don't know, that's just the rule," and there's something about it we just take it for granted. It's very easy to slip into that. This is a sort of secondhand story, but I had a friend in the States, and she has a friend who went on retreat to one of the big retreat centres there, and the retreat went by, and at the end of the retreat they were all having lunch and talking. And she said to another woman, "I feel a bit guilty. On some day I walked all the way into town, two or three miles, and bought a coffee, and I felt a bit guilty." And the other woman said to her, "Oh, honey, that's nothing. On the third night, a bunch of us went out for Mexican food and to see Titanic at the movies!" [laughter] And I, like you, laughed quite hard at that.

But then I also thought, well, you know -- I mean, it's very nice and everything, but I also thought, what are they missing? What is someone missing by actually not giving themselves to the silence in that way? Mexican food you can get at any time. Titanic, you know, get the DVD, whatever. It's like that story that Rumi tells, the Sufi poet, of two frogs. One is a frog that lives in the great ocean, and he has the whole ocean to swim in, the depths, and the vastness, the immensity of the ocean. And he decides to visit land. He's walking around. He meets another frog who lives in a little puddle. And the frog who lives in the little puddle says, "Check out my puddle! Isn't it pretty amazing?" And the frog from the ocean says, "Well, yeah, but I just can't explain ... something else." So what are we missing? What are we perhaps missing in thinking that in our puddle we have something pretty amazing?

Of course, now we have both the blessing and the curse of the mobile phone. So it's quite possible to be on retreat and texting away, or in the fields and making calls, etc. And I know there's a monastery just over the other side of Exeter, Hartridge Monastery, and they decided to ban mobile phones for one retreat. What a hoo-ha it caused! Sometimes it can be quite addictive, this thing. What are we missing, perhaps? For me, it's really not about good yogi/bad yogi, and trying to be a good yogi, or trying to keep the rules. I, for one, am totally not interested in that at all, being a 'good yogi.' But there does seem to be a real correlation, a real correspondence, between those who devote themselves to silence, give themselves to silence -- that seems to correlate with those who are transformed deeply by practice, through practice, in practice. It's not just a random thing, how we are relating to the silence.

What I want to go into tonight is not so much the rule of silence, but actually silence as something very central to our practice. As I said, we can have all these attitudes to silence, but silence is something that we can turn to. We can actually sometimes drop the technique and turn to the silence, listen to the silence and, in a way, let that embrace us. This is what I want to go into a little bit tonight, the power involved in that, turning to the silence and listening to the silence. Some of you, I know, like to get up very early. It's very, very quiet here in the early hours of the morning. Or if you've got the other biorhythm like I have and you like to stay up late, it gets very, very quiet here. There's such a stillness and a beauty. The night-time is a beautiful time to practise. Nothing much else going on.

And it doesn't have to confine itself, of course, to retreat. I remember living in the city, in a suburb, and walking late at night. No one on the street, everyone in bed. And just the breeze moving through the trees. There's tremendous energy in the silence. It's full of this potential energy, full of energy, something very pregnant in it. Thomas Merton, a wonderful Trappist monk, died in the late sixties, said, "My life" -- his life as a monk, decades as a monk, much of it in silence -- "is a listening [in silence]. My life is a listening [in silence]."^[1] Beautiful. [10:09] And not a listening for something. He wasn't listening even for guidance from God or for information about this or that in the universe or something. It's just listening to the silence.

I should say right here: what I want to go into tonight, if I ever get to it, is not what's sometimes called 'the sound of silence.' That's a whole different thing where a person picks up on a sort of high-pitched sound, humming, in the ear -- it's actually the central nervous system -- and then meditates on that, uses that in the meditation. That's something else. I want to point to more how the silence itself, the absence, the silence, can take us into something else actually beyond objects. So listening to a high-pitched sound in the ear is actually a kind of object. I want to point in a different direction tonight.

One of the gifts of silence is that it can allow to percolate up, to rise up in the being, our sense of what's really important to us, our sense of priority. So oftentimes, because of busyness and because of distraction and all that, we're actually quite caught up in our life with what is not really so deeply important to us, or what can seem deeply important -- caught up in issues about money, or living situation, or career, or what I could have done for a career, or romance, whatever it is -- and it seems to be really important. We come to the silence, and in a way, all that relatively trivial stuff can just descend, can settle, like sediment at the bottom of a lake. Something else begins to reveal itself, to show itself in the being: our sense of what's really important to us, our real sense of priority in our life, priorities. This is so important, to be in touch with that. Not to be consumed and distracted by what's less important. That's one of the functions, the gifts of silence.

Sometimes in the silence, in environments like this, we remember events from the past or situations from the past, and something is painful there. Oftentimes something of remorse comes up. We remember, "Oh, this thing that I did or didn't do, didn't say or did say. I didn't tell this person that I love them. Or I acted meanly. Or I acted unkindly." And in the silence, in the openness of the silence, it comes up, and the heart feels it, and it's painful. In a way, that, too, is one of the gifts of silence. It's not an easy one. There's a real difference here in how we're going to respond to that. If we respond by making it guilt -- guilt is about me, I'm terrible, I'm making a mess, I, I, I; guilt is when the self wraps around it. Or can it be -- I don't know if this is right dictionary definitions, but -- more about remorse? It's just telling me something about how I want to act in the future. It's open-ended. It's future. It's creative. It's telling me about action. It's not defining the self. So guilt versus remorse. But that does happen in the silence. We do remember things that we wish we would have acted differently.

In the silence, we face ourselves. In a way, there's nowhere to hide if we give ourselves to the silence. There's nowhere to hide. This is a beautiful gift. Again, sometimes a difficult one. But a beautiful one. We can face those places that we've turned away from, that we've ignored, that we've pushed away inside ourself. We face those and embrace them. Sometimes, too, in the silence, a person comes and they're on retreat, and some major life choice seems to be pressing: "I need to decide. Should I do this or should I do that? What shall I do?" And make a choice. The tendency to want to think it and figure it out with the thinking mind. Sometimes that really does have its place and its efficacy, but what is it to trust the silence, trust the simplicity, let things settle, and see what comes out of that, see what comes out of the silence?

So certainly coming into an environment like this -- and some of you are very used to it, and some of you are less used to it -- as social situations go, it's a pretty odd one. Here we are, forty or fifty people, not really talking to each other, and yet living together and spending a lot of time even in the same room and eating together, and not talking. It's pretty rare. You could look at it from the outside and -- I know the neighbours think it's pretty odd. But it is an unusual social situation. It can seem, at first, to be kind of loveless or cold: "Why aren't people connecting to each other?" And can be for us that in the silence, not talking, not knowing so much about each other, that judgment comes in. How easily judgment comes in. We don't know someone. "Why are they wearing that? Why are they breathing like that? Why are they eating like that? Why are they this, da-da-da-da-da?" And not knowing, the judgment comes in. Of course this can happen outside of retreat.

I remember years ago when I lived in America, one beautiful, beautiful summer day, I just on a whim decided to go to the ocean. There was a lovely beach a train ride away. I went there and I arrived, and after some time I saw an old man walking on the beach with a metal detector. My immediate thought, my immediate assumption, was, "How ridiculous. How can you be so" -- this is what went through my mind -- "petty-minded and small-minded to be going around looking, seeing if you can find a rare coin that you can sell for a few dollars? There's this glory of ocean and sky, and you're doing that." Immediately that thought came. [laughs]

Luckily, he talked to me -- because I was stuck in this very stupid perception or assumption. It turned out this very old man -- it turned out he was 84, 85 -- was actually using this metal detector, he was all alone, trying to find bits of sharp metal that had been left on the beach so that people wouldn't hurt themselves, they wouldn't cut themselves. Completely the opposite. Yet in the non-speaking, this assumption comes in, this judgment comes in, without knowing. We might judge someone here. We have no idea what's going on for them, no idea, in terms of health, in terms of life situation, in terms of a piece of news they've just heard. Yet we just come in with a judgment, and we don't know.

I got talking to this old man, and he told me he used to be a fisherman. His wife got cancer. This is a story from many years ago, and this was many years before that. His wife got cancer in America. He was a self-employed fisherman, and he didn't have health insurance. This is the scheme in America, as I'm sure some of you are aware. They don't have that infrastructure. So he had to sell his whole fishing business to pay for his wife's treatment over some years. He lost everything, and then she died anyway. Now he was completely alone and a very old man, and just wanting to take care of people on the beach in this way. Everyone was ignoring him. It was just like an old man doing his -- everyone else was ignoring him. And he said to me, after we had talked for some time, "Thank you for talking to me." It was actually me that felt completely blessed by the interaction. Just such a lesson there.

[19:25] This silence here, even in the non-talking, actually has love in it. If we can turn to it, if we can open to it, let go in it, we actually can begin to feel the love in the silence. Many of you, again, I know will be aware, we're so used to connecting through words, through talking. When we let that go quiet, it can be that it's like another kind of sensitivity opens out in the being, and we begin to connect with each other through this other depth of sensitivity. Something very, very beautiful there. I know people who have spent a long time in the Hermitage know that really impacts. Sitting, walking, eating with someone, practising with someone for a while, and then they leave. The time comes their retreat's over and they go. And it's a real -- there's a real sadness there. One has really connected despite hardly having spoken to them. One can become very sensitive to the point where one's in the meditation hall, you know, 20 yards away from someone, someone comes in, all we hear is the door, and we know who it is. There's some vibration or sense of each other that's permeating through the silence, an appreciation and connection flowing through that. So this journey into silence, this contemplative journey into silence, is also, I would say, a journey into love. It's not different.

So one is on retreat and been here. I know some of you have really just arrived in the last couple of days. But one is on retreat and, generally speaking, in a very non-linear way, the stillness -- which is very related to silence -- the stillness of body, stillness of mind, stillness of being, begins to settle. It's non-linear. It's definitely not linear. Despite all the difficulties, and the body being difficult, and the mind not behaving, generally speaking there's a gradual settling of the being into stillness. This is not something that we force. It's not some macho thing. It's as if there's a kind of invitation, a gentle invitation, into the stillness. We can follow that, be called by that. As the stillness begins to settle in the being, and the being begins to settle into the stillness, a sensitivity is born of that, or sensitivities are born of that. One of them is actually a sensitivity to stillness and silence.

We begin to be, in a very natural and caring way, not coming out of pressure, we begin to be sensitive to the vibrations that we're putting out there in this environment. Sensitive to how we're walking down the hall, how we're opening and closing doors, and just not wanting to cause too many ripples. It's not coming out of fear, and it's not coming out of 'should.' It's actually coming out of this care, love, sensitivity. The stillness is actually permeating the body and emanating from the body. We also are respectful of the stillness of others, wanting to take care of that, wanting to take care of the whole climate of stillness and silence here.

And again, nothing to do with being a good yogi. Nothing to do with 'should.' It's an allowing. It's actually coming out of love. Somehow in the stillness, sensitivities are born in the being, or begin to unfold, to blossom in the being. And also receptivities. We begin to be, as the stillness and silence settles, the being can begin to become receptive to a whole other sense of things, in the silence, with the silence, through the silence. A receptivity emerging in the being. There's a beautiful poem by a Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda. I think some of you will know it. But it's about this. It's about the receptivity that's born out of silence and also the sense of silence having within it a kind of unitive sense. In the silence, somehow it's drawing the sense of us all together. This is something we can go into and feel. This poem is called "Keeping Quiet."^[2]

[24:46 -- 26:21, poem]

One way in is to begin actually with listening, to begin with listening. There are plenty of ways in. But one way in is to begin with listening, giving attention to sounds. And actually sounds are quite interesting. Because they come from lots of different directions and distances, a sense of space can open up just being open to sounds, open to listening. An expansive awareness can come. One is just listening, grounded in the body, in the sensations of the body, and letting that be part of the space. What do we notice? What do we hear? We hear sounds. And actually, right now, there are sounds, and there's the space between sounds. What remains in the space? What's there? If we get a sense of silence, as you can often here at night or any time, where is this silence? Where is it? Right now, if you listen to the sound, there is the voice and there's the quiet hum of the heating. Just listen to the bare sound, open to the bare sound. As we sustain that kind of meditation, it can be that the sense of silence begins to permeate the sound itself, begins to permeate the sound. So it feels like, can seem like, the sound actually is the same substance as the silence. Can you hear it right now? The voice? Just the same as silence.

So when we go deeper into silence, it's not so much that we're talking about the absence of sound. Now, of course that helps, and that's why Gaia House is here and not runway 5 at Heathrow or whatever. But it's not so much the absence of sound, nor is it actually about the absence of thought. We do find ourselves with thought coming and going in practice, and sometimes very thickly, or we're obsessing about something. Sometimes when there's obsessive thought, it can be really helpful to look in the body, centre in the body, and see, is there an emotion that's driving this thought going round and round and round? Actually connect with the physicality of the emotion, bring the energy down, help it lose its momentum, its energy.

[29:38] Other times, we're just caught in a whirlpool of obsessive thought because we believe that something is going to make a difference. We're thinking, "It should be like this, or it should be this or this," or whatever it is that we're obsessing about, and at some level we believe that it really makes a difference. What am I believing makes a difference? And is that enough to keep the thought spiralling round and round? Then there are times when there's just the sort of flotsam and jetsam of thought. It's nothing particular, but it's just a little bit of thought coming in and out of the mind. That's fine. It's not about the absence of sound, it's not about the absence of thought. It's more about the relationship with sound and the relationship with thought. This is so, so crucial. Can we work with a relationship with sound and a relationship with thought that we are letting go and relaxing the pushing away of what we don't like, and relaxing the pulling, grasping on, of what we want and want to keep? We let that push and pull just die down. We just keep relaxing it, keep relaxing it. Hugely significant.

As we do that, as the push and pull that we usually have with experience all day long, as that begins to settle and relax -- I don't know quite how to put it, but -- something begins to unfold. Things start to happen. They happen together. It's not so linear, cause and effect. I want to go into this a little bit. One of the things that can begin to happen is what seemed irrelevant -- the touch of the foot on the earth, the touch of the foot on the carpet, something we tend to think of as so irrelevant and insignificant, that begins to become more relevant, more significant, more alive for us. And what had seemed so significant begins to fade. This simple touch of things is our life. We tend to think of our life as me and what I've done, and what I'm going to do, and how I define myself, and the whole realm of the personal world. Something can happen, so precious. Something can happen in the silence, in the relaxing of this push and pull. The whole sense of the significance of the personal world can quieten. We get the sense in the silence that the whole sense of the personal world is not really what it's all about. It's not really what it's all about. What seemed irrelevant begins to take prominence.

We see this personal world, which I tend to think is so significant, is actually built up by memory, by mind, by a lot of basically mental huffing and puffing. We build up the sense of the personal world, and it seems to have such significance. In the silence, we begin to see: maybe it doesn't. Maybe the things that we completely overlook begin to stand out with another kind of pristine significance, pristine beauty. So what I do, what I did, what I'm going to do, how I define myself -- all that seems dwarfed in the face of the mystery of things.

There can be this sense of silence. We can practise in this way, just letting go of the push and the pull that we have with experience. Sometimes what can happen is a person has a sense of perhaps silence, but perhaps also space. A sense of space opens up, expansive awareness. So a person might relate to a sense of silence or a sense of space or a sense of kind of the awareness, the spacious awareness, in which everything seems to happen. Whatever it is, however way we might relate to it -- any of those ways: the silence, the awareness, the space, the space of awareness, whatever it is -- can begin to feel like it embraces everything. Everything that happens, happens within the embrace of this vast silence, vast space, vast awareness. It accommodates everything. And we can let everything be accommodated by the silence. Everything belongs to the silence. Let everything belong to the silence. So this silence or this space, the birth of anything -- a sensation, a feeling, a thought, a sound, whatever it is -- it's born out of the silence, it has its life in the silence, and it dies back into the silence, into the space, into the awareness, whatever you want to call it, however you want to see it.

We can literally tune into this sense of silence, and everything fading into the silence. Again, right now with the voice -- sound is just fading into the silence. Everything is just fading into the silence. The body sensations arise and they fade into the silence. Seeing this, the more we let go of this struggle with experience, this pushing away what we don't like and pulling towards us what we do like, the more this sense of space, sense of silence, begins to be prominent, to stand out to consciousness, and the more the sense of silence, somehow the easier to let go. Just let everything belong to the silence, let everything belong to the silence. The more we do that, the less suffering there is. It's actually quite simple. This is something we can really see. I don't know, maybe some people are listening and it may sound a little abstract; I'm not sure. I hope not. I'm talking about very practical things. This is something we can see. We let go of the push and pull, and less suffering.

There's something else too. We let go of the push and the pull, the struggle with experience, we let it all belong to the silence, and the things and the events, the experiences, begin to be less prominent to consciousness. They begin to fade a little bit. This is quite remarkable. We can actually notice, the more we let things belong to the silence, the more they quieten, recede. We can begin to get a very real sense for the texture of the silence itself, the actual almost palpable texture of silence. There's something -- the air is resonant with silence. It's almost thick with silence. The sense of the texture of that space. Wordsworth -- many years ago, the poet Wordsworth -- a sense of something "far more deeply interfused, a sense of something sublime." I'm misquoting Wordsworth! Terrible! "A sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused." Something begins to show itself to consciousness, something very beautiful, very sublime. And again, like what I was talking about with the sounds, they seem to be the same fabric, they seem to be the same substance as silence. It can begin to be that all experiences seem to be like that -- the body sensations, the sounds, the thoughts, the emotions, all of it seems to be the same. It is silence, it is space, it is awareness -- however we're relating to that.

If this seems really abstract now, I really apologize. I hope that you can just hear it as a possibility. Maybe for some people it's talking about what's actually going on right now. If not, just hear it as a possibility, as some avenue of possible practice. What I'm talking about is not something totally alien and totally impossible.

[39:50] This sense of silence, of space, can seem to surround and permeate all experience, everything shot through with silence. In that, the being, we, begin to lose our preoccupation with objects, with things, with events. We lose, we let go of, our preoccupation with objects, and things, and events. That's the default state of consciousness, is to be preoccupied with things that are going on, internally or externally (so-called). We're preoccupied. We like, we don't like, we want more, we want less. We're preoccupied with objects. What I'm wanting to point to is a way of practising that can open out beyond the preoccupation with objects.

And a person can, in that, begin to ask themselves: what is real here? What is real? What am I giving significance and substance to by struggling, by the push and the pull? I'm actually building things up by entanglement, by involvement. I'm giving substance and solidity and significance to things, to events. We can see this process, and then one begins to just not get involved in that or get involved less and less, and the substance, the solidity, the significance, goes out of things correspondingly. One begins to wonder, what is real then? Who am I? Who am I when there's not a lot happening in the silence? When I'm not giving significance and substance to things, who am I? And the self has nothing to build on. We tend to think of ourselves as involved in some kind of becoming from the past, through the present, into the future, becoming something. In the silence and letting go of this preoccupation, am I this becoming that I usually define myself as? Am I this becoming?

In this whole -- I don't really know what to call it -- movement into silence that happens together, the whole tendency for self-definition, the whole way we have of binding ourselves and imprisoning ourselves with self-definition -- "I'm like this. I'm like that. I did this so it means I'm like that" -- just begins to be loosened, not defining oneself. We define ourselves less and less. Less and less self-concern. All this dies down, and then what? And then what? So this may seem, when we're listening to it, "Okay, very well, but I just want a little less suffering in my life." But to understand suffering, we actually have to understand this process of how we're giving significance and substance and solidity to things, how that process works, and how the self gets built up as well.

Zen master Dōgen, very famous quote: "To study the Buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things." It doesn't stop there. "To be enlightened by all things is to drop body and mind."^[3] To drop body and mind means to drop the concern with body and mind. Like I said, typical state of consciousness -- this is nothing to judge here; it's just what consciousness does -- is to be preoccupied with objects, events, things, particularly the state of body and mind and how body and mind is doing. Drop body/mind, drop body/mind, drop the concern with body/mind. We can begin to get a sense that actually maybe our experiences don't define us. Actually maybe our experiences don't have any inherent power to imprison us or constrict us in any real way. They just don't have that power. We give them that. Perhaps our true nature is undefinable. We begin to get a sense that the experiences of our life, they're almost just like ripples on the surface of this great silence.

The 'somethings' of life with which we are typically concerned, the somethings, the this and the that, begin to recede. And the nothing, the nothingness, begins to stand out. We don't usually give much attention to nothingness. Maybe our freedom and happiness and our well-being in life, maybe depend more on these moments of stillness and of silence than on this event or getting this or this happening or whatever -- which is where we usually look for a sense of fulfilment. Then we get tired of all that and we want to turn the world off, had enough, want to go to sleep, want to get away from the world.

Perhaps it begins to dawn on us: maybe at one level this whole effort, continuous effort that we seem to be engaged in, to find a kind of comfort with somethings, with a place ("I want to be there. I'm here, but I want to be there. It was better over there"), or with time ("It'll be better when ..." or "It was better when ..."), or with self, we want to get ourself just so, and the personality just so -- maybe the whole effort for finding comfort with somethings, if we put too much energy into that, maybe we're missing the mystery of what is not a something. A mystery of some otherness, something else that's not actually in life how we usually think of life. It's very hard to relate to the spiritual practice in terms of, "Well, of course I want it to be about life, and I want something in life," but maybe there's something beyond that. In the Christian mystical tradition they talk about the via positiva and the via negativa. Beautiful concepts. The via negativa is about this letting go of somethings, letting go of looking for fulfilment in somethings, in our life and in the moment and, in a way, opening to the nothing.

So we can practise in this way, and we can begin to get, through the listening and as I described, we can begin to get a real feel for silence, really to feel it, feel ourselves in the silence and embraced by it, feel it impinge on the being, feel it touch the heart, become really familiar with the texture and the fabric of silence. Rumi said, "Live in the nothing which you came from." Live in the nothing which you came from. Sometimes you get a glimpse -- what freedom that would be to actually be nothing and to have nothing. It can sound horrific. But one can get a sense of the beauty of that, to be nothing and to have nothing, not to define oneself, not to conceive of one's life and always be referencing events in terms of self, not to give the usual stuff significance. How does this sound? How does it sound? Does it sound dreadful and dire and bleak? Or can we hear the beauty in it? Not to be infatuated with things and objects, or even less, to define the world.

[49:45] In that, we begin to get a sense of the self and the usual way we bind the self in definition, and constricted with that, and the world, defining the world -- that begins to be unbound, unbound. And we can get a sense, an intuitive sense, of something other, something not of self, not of the world, not of time. That can begin to shine through. And you know, we do tend to think of our fulfilment lying in experiences and things and events and situations, but there's something other. No experience can get near it. No experience comes close to it.

Sometimes getting familiar with the silence and the feel of it, there's actually -- it has qualities, or it can seem to have qualities. Sometimes a person opens to this and it actually feels like it has love in it. It really has a sense of love in the silence, through the silence. And it's not me loving you, or you loving me. It's something almost impersonal, universal. One just feels oneself to be in love, literally. And not to hurry through that kind of opening. But in a way where all this is going is not so much to make a thing even out of the silence, because when we make a thing out of something, then we make suffering in relation to it. So eventually it even goes beyond the sense of space or the sense of silence being a thing, or the sense of awareness, the space of awareness. All that is in the realm of perception. And the movement is to even let go of that. But no hurry. No hurry with that. If we can, in the very simple way I described, begin listening, begin listening to silence and opening to silence, it will reveal its qualities to us, and one of those qualities is love, a universal love, an infinite kind of love. Not to hurry through that and say, "Oh, that's just a perception too." It is, but to let that do its work on the being.

The movement, as I said, is eventually to go beyond. We're drawn into this something other. Opened out, unbound into something other. Thomas Merton has this beautiful phrase, "The palace of Nowhere."^[4] The palace of Nowhere. And actually, language can't really go there. Language can't go there.

So when we speak about mindfulness -- and we speak about mindfulness a lot in this tradition, as you know -- mindfulness is actually of objects, in relation to objects. We're mindful of breathing, we're mindful of body sensations, etc., feelings, emotions. Mindfulness is of objects. But eventually we go beyond objects and perceptions, eventually, and let go of our infatuation with objects. We can even be infatuated with the sense of space or a sense of the awareness in which it all happens. So that's not to put that down -- sometimes we are interested in this objectless meditation, moving into that; other times, we're very interested in objects, and mindfulness to objects, and the things and the experiences and the events of our life. So both make up practice. And it's a very beautiful thing, as I know you know, to give attention, very caring, lovely attention to things, to the things that make up our world, that make up our life. What is it in the silence here, we get up in the morning, and to dress, the simple act of dressing which we do every day, and to do that with a real care of attention? Attention to things, attention to drinking a cup of tea. What is it to really be present to that? The sound of the wind. The textures of our life. The experiences, the things of our life.

So it's not only that we're interested in going beyond objects and letting that go. This otherness, this otherness -- can get a sense of it also through objects, also through things. But we can only sense that in things when our relationship to them has nothing to do with their pleasantness or their unpleasantness. We can only sense this otherness shining through things when we've let go of our entanglement, our involvement, our infatuation, our reactivity to the pleasantness or the unpleasantness of things. In theistic language, we could say we can only sense God through the senses when we're not caught up in senses as a source of pleasant and unpleasant. Then something else can begin to shine through.

Just finally. Sāriputta was the disciple of the Buddha chief in wisdom, foremost in wisdom, the Buddha described Sāriputta. He said once, "Greed, aversion, and delusion" -- what's called the three kilesas, these seeds that we keep producing -- "are makers of measurement and makers of signs."^[5] It's a strange thing to say, but really worth meditating on. Something very profound here. This involvement that we have through delusion with greed for what's pleasant and aversion to what's unpleasant, it makes us measure things more or less -- we want more of this, less of that. It makes things actually stand out as being this or that. It makes the this and that, the dualities of life, stand out to consciousness. So greed, aversion, and delusion is a maker of measurement. It's a maker of significance. Through wanting the pleasant, wanting to grab hold of it, wanting to push away the unpleasant, things gain their significance. We start measuring things: I don't like this, I want more of it, I want less of it. They begin to stand out in consciousness. They begin to become prominent. Greed, aversion, delusion are makers of appearance. They are makers of appearance.

When we understand this, really go into it and understand it in the heart, and can see it working, we begin to let go. We can begin to practise letting go, letting go. And in that letting go that comes out of the understanding of this, what is immeasurable, what is truly immeasurable, begins to be revealed. We're not cutting things into boxes, measuring. We're not drawing this out, drawing that out, pushing that away. Something else that is not of things. Not of self, not of the world, not of time. Something that is immeasurable begins to shine through.