Into the Depths of Silence

Listening to silence in our lives, opening to its embrace, reveals a profound and immense power to transform the heart. Deepening in the stillness of meditation, our practice involves mindfulness of all 'objects', but must eventually also go beyond objects to realize a truly boundless freedom -- of being nothing and having nothing.

First, I actually just wanted to express what a delight it has been for me so far to be with you here, and to listen to you in the interviews and hear about your practice, and really get a sense of the sincerity and dedication with which everyone is practising. It's really beautiful to be a part of. And at the same time, it's interesting just hearing from so many people and being aware of the diversity of kind of strands and avenues that different people are exploring in their practice, which is lovely, the breadth and the fullness of our practice -- sometimes that makes giving talks a little challenging, to try and address everyone. So hopefully, again, there will be something, at least a little something, for everyone.

In a way, tonight I wanted a little bit of a different flavour, a little bit of a different angle from last time, as a sort of complement to the approach I was talking about last time. What I actually want to talk about tonight is, funnily enough, the power and the transformative potential of silence in our practice. It's interesting, and you might have had this experience: you explain to friends or family that you're going off on retreat and they say, "Great!" And then you explain what it involves, that you're going to be silent and meditate a lot. And I've had this in a period where I was doing a lot of long retreats. My family -- who were not really that interested in meditation, but I love them, and they love me -- I got the sense that they kind of got the idea that the point of it was to be silent for as long as you could, as if you were sort of bursting to speak and you just try to be quiet for as long as you [can] -- like some kind of yogic feat, like not going to the toilet for a month or something.

But if you look at different spiritual traditions in the world and the more mystical-leaning traditions, there is this love of silence that's quite a common thread in the different traditions. We could say that there's something about the contemplative journey that is a journey into the depths and the dimensions of silence. There's something about that. And I know in my life I've met monks and nuns from other traditions where there isn't the richness of teaching of meditative technique at all. It's not really part of their tradition at all, and yet there is this devotion to silence. You see the transformative power that has over years in some individuals -- really profound.

And it's interesting. Everyone here has some experience of doing retreats. But if you remember your first responses to silence, walking into a silent retreat centre and this kind of environment. And I remember my first retreat in the eighties, up at the retreat centre at IMS, and the sense of the kind of awesomeness of it. I'd never really experienced that before, walking into this really strong atmosphere of silence. People often express that at Gaia House when they come. I live and teach mostly at Gaia House in England, and it was a convent before we took it over, so it has a long history of contemplation and silence there.

Sometimes when people initially come to this kind of environment, there's actually fear that comes up in relationship to the silence. Very human. People have told me they're terrified of it. Something in it starts them shaking. It can be very unfamiliar as well. Something about the unfamiliarity, something about the silence, it's almost like we can, or we intuit, that it's possible that we kind of lose our familiar bearings. Now, of course, that's a blessing. But it can bring up fear. We also might have an intuition in the initial stage of our practice there's something about silence that kind of has the power to unmask us as human beings. Sometimes a person can sense that, intuit it, without really even being clear what it is that they're intuiting. We might also have a sense of some kind of immensity present in the silence. Something is touching on or opening out into something immense.

And yet, like so much in life, we can get so used to silence. Everyone here has retreat experience and many of you quite a lot. It can almost be that the silence becomes -- we take it for granted, it's just you barely give it a second thought or think about it or pay it any attention. Some years ago I was with a friend. We met another friend of hers who I had never met before. She had just come back from a retreat at IMS, and she was sharing with us her experience of it. I think it was seven days or ten days. She said she felt a little guilty. She was sharing at the end of the retreat when people could talk to each other. She felt a little guilty. She told this woman that she was talking to, "I felt a little guilty," because on the third night I think she wandered into town and got a coffee. She felt a little guilty, and she was a little sheepish sharing that. The other woman said, "Oh, honey. That's nothing. On the third night a bunch of us went out and got Mexican food and then went to the movies to see Titanic." [laughter] I don't want to give anyone any ideas here, but.

So I laughed a lot when I heard that, but there was also part of me that thought, I don't think they know what they're missing. There's this sense that they're actually missing out on something, on the depth of potential in the silence. I don't know if it's the same here, but in England at Gaia House and some of the monasteries near there, there's a sense that people more and more are just coming into the silence and keeping their mobile phones on, or starting to text and stuff. There's something that one's closing the door to that's absolutely precious. You know, as human beings we get so used to our kind of little area of familiar joys and comforts, and it's quite circumscribed. We can just get kind of used to that and not question it and want to expand it further.

Some of you might know the story, I think it's from Rumi, about an ocean turtle that comes onto land to visit the land, and he meets another turtle. This second turtle lives in a puddle. The second turtle says to the first turtle, "Hey, check out my puddle. Isn't it great? It's fantastic, isn't it?" And the ocean turtle says, "Yeah, it's nice." And this puddle turtle says, "Where do you live? Is it as nice as mine?" He says, "I live in -- well, I can't really explain. You have to come and see it." Somehow we get used to this area of, you know, a limit on our happiness.

So none of this, just about this level of silence, about keeping the silence, it's not about being a good yogi and keeping the rules and stuff. But I do see, generally, there seems to be a correlation between devotion to silence, a devotion to this aspect of our practice -- there seems to be a correlation, generally speaking, between that and the depth of transformation that yogis kind of open themselves to. They're not disconnected.

[10:00] So what I want to talk about tonight is the fact that we can actually turn to that quality of silence and begin to kind of go on a journey into that silence, into the depths of that silence. It is really something. As much as we give mindfulness to objects and all that, we can also, in a way, turn the awareness to the silence and start listening to silence, as a very either small part of our practice or even a very central, very fundamental part of our practice, listening to silence. I want to explain what I mean by that.

It's actually not something that's confined only to retreat time. I remember -- I lived in Boston for fifteen years, and I would have lovely times of being quite a night person, late at night going for walks on the streets in the suburb where I lived. Just the houses kind of going to sleep, and the sense of stillness and power and beauty and majesty -- the silence was pregnant with it. The trees just still, and the power there coming through the nature and in the silence. Something very beautiful. Don't need to be on retreat, necessarily. Thomas Merton -- some of you will know him -- he was a Trappist monk and a poet and a beautiful person. He said, "My life" -- he lived most of his life in a monastery -- "My life is a listening.... [in] silence."^[1]

But the listening that I'm talking about is not so much a listening for guidance. Oftentimes people say, "I'm listening to know what to do, or to get some guidance from a higher power, or other beings, or even my deeper intuition." I'm not saying that's not appropriate at times, but that's not what I'm talking about tonight so much. I'm also not talking about -- some of you will know this practice -- what's come to be called in some circles "the sound of silence," which is listening to a kind of ringing sound in your ears and giving that attention, using that in different ways meditatively. That's actually not what I'm talking about. That would become an object for consciousness. In this talk, I want to talk a bit about going beyond objects. I'll explain what I mean. But let's start more at the beginning.

There are many things that are powerful about silence when we come into an environment like this. One of the deep potentialities of silence is that it has this capacity to sort of allow to rise to the surface what we deeply, deeply care about, our real deep priorities in life, and allow to settle, like mud settling in water to the bottom, those things that unfortunately we often just get caught up in in our life, the more trivial aspects. There's a sense of redressing the balance of where our attention and energy and heart feels called to. There's something about this redressing of priorities that's a capacity of silence. Just that is a gift, because oftentimes we do live our lives kind of out of contact with what we deeply, deeply care about. It's almost like life goes on, and time goes on, and the years go by, and the decades go by, and it's all just running along. We say, "I'm not even really sure that I care so much about all this stuff." One of the profound gifts of silence is it reverses that, if that's the case in our life.

Another factor, and you may have noticed this as well on retreat, is that in the silence and the kind of openness of the silence, memories can come up, and sometimes particularly memories of things that we've done or not done, or said or not said, where we've kind of hurt another being, another person. That's actually, I think, one of the fundamental healing qualities of practice and of silence. You remember, "Oh." I remember being on retreat and the memory of a friend visiting and just not really being that available to them, that kind to them. Now, here's a very key point in practice. Something like that can come up, a memory, and we can be stuck in it with guilt, okay? I want to distinguish between two words -- and I don't know even if this is correct English -- between 'guilt' on one side, and 'remorse' on the other.

I call 'guilt' when the memory comes up and all we're doing is spinning around and around and around, and it's all about the self and self-definition. It's all about, "I'm bad because I did that. I'm no good. I, I, I, I, me, me, me, me, me." That's what I call guilt. That selfing keeps it wrapped up and spinning round and round and round without an end, versus the quality of remorse, which is more focused on the action -- so being clear that this action that I did or didn't do, it led to suffering; it didn't lead to happiness, it didn't lead to peace. So I'm actually unhooking the self from the memory. It can then move forward into the future in a more creative way. In the future, I don't want to empower that kind of action. It's not about the self. It's about the action. There's something much lighter, much more freeing, much more creative about that. We might need a little help unhooking the self from it. Oftentimes it's about seeing in terms of conditions, not in terms of the self. But that remorse -- what I'm calling 'remorse' -- it may still involve some sadness: "Oh, yeah, I did do that. Oh, yeah, I didn't do that," or whatever it was. There can be some sadness and there might be some tears. That's part of the healing process. It's moving on. It's opening. It's not staying stuck.

That's very much a function of the silence. Generally speaking, this invitation, really, of the silence to face ourselves -- there's something about the silence that renders us kind of naked and we have to face ourselves. That's not saying we don't face ourselves in relationship, of course. There's something about silence that really opens that up for us. Sometimes, too, in the context of retreat, a person comes on retreat wanting to make a life choice: "Should I do this, or should I do that? What should I choose?" And often -- not always -- but oftentimes the best thing is really just to sink into the silence, and not really give that much attention, and let the whole thing settle, and trust the silence, that it will work its magic, it will work its power on the being.

If we reflect on this kind of situation for a minute, here we are, thirty-odd people, in a building together, and for the most part we're not talking, except Joseph and I go on at times. It's quite an odd social situation that we find ourselves in. Oftentimes at the beginnings of practice, some people fall in love with the silence right away. Other people tell me regularly that it feels loveless and it feels cold, it feels strange for all these people to be together and not communicating, as if there's no love there, no warmth, no connection. And it's interesting, too, and I'm sure everyone's noticed this, that in the silence, because we're not communicating with each other verbally, we actually know very little about what's going on for each other. Very little. And in that vacuum of knowing the particulars of another person's history or situation, how easily the judging mind comes in. We see them doing or not doing something, and very quickly the judging mind jumps in. Of course, this can happen off retreat, as well.

I remember -- I was trying to remember when it was; I think it was in the early nineties, so fifteen, seventeen years ago, I don't know when exactly -- when I used to live in Boston. One beautiful, beautiful summer's day, I decided to go to the ocean, up to the North Shore. Beautiful beach there. I arrived, and it was magnificent, the whole day. I was just really enjoying being there, a real sense of openness and the vastness of the sky and the ocean, really just kind of enjoying that. Then I noticed there was an old man with a metal detector. He was walking around the beach with this metal detector. Very quickly the mind came in with this assumption and judgment: "How can you be so small-minded to be shuffling around looking for coins that you might make a few dollars with, when there's this richness of sky and earth and ocean?" Immediately that was the judgment. Luckily for me, he approached me -- maybe it was because I was on my own; I don't know. He approached me and we got talking. He told me that what he was actually doing was he was trying to clear the beach of little bits of scrap metal so that people wouldn't hurt themselves. [laughs] Completely and utterly different. No one had asked him to do that. No one was paying him to do that.

We got talking more, and he told me a bit about his life. It turned out that he was in his eighties, mid-eighties when we met. He told me a bit about his life. He had been a fisherman, and then at some point his wife got cancer. Being self-employed and having no health insurance, he had to sell his whole business, the boats and everything, to pay for his wife's cancer treatment. And actually she died anyway. He had very little left after that. He was quite alone and actually lonely. Everyone was ignoring him on the beach; he was just this man sort of shuffling around, this old man. But immense kindness just pouring out of him. At the end he said, "Thank you for talking to me." It still touches me today. It's like, everyone was ignoring him, and he said thank you to me, but it was actually me that felt blessed by the interaction and the beauty of this man. What a lesson, as well, just seeing how quickly the mind comes in with these assumptions. In the silence, in the not knowing, we have no idea what people are up to.

[22:07] But generally, as practice deepens, we can get a sense, as we open more to the silence, that the silence -- it's almost as if, as we relax into it, one can get a sense that it's actually permeated, it's actually shot through with love. It's shot through not with that coldness but with a quality of love. It can have that sense in it. And we do get a sense -- and I'm sure many of you know this -- that actually what happens is, as practice deepens and we settle in more, there's a sensitivity to another kind of connection with human beings, with fellow practitioners, with animals here. Usually we feel connected to people, we feel like we're meeting and exchanging with people on the verbal level, when we exchange verbally. But actually there's a whole other level that can go on that takes a little bit of sensitivity. It's almost like one needs to settle into the silence to begin to tune into that level and realize that it's available to us, that it's present to us.

You might -- especially some of you that are here a little bit longer -- might have noticed when people leave who have been here for a little bit or longer, there's this kind of sense of, "Oh, I was actually really connected to you. We had never even said anything." Then they're gone, and one really feels the absence as if a friend has left. Or, again, if you've been here for a while, you don't know anyone -- you might not even know anyone's name -- yet you can be at one end of the meditation hall or the dining room and you hear the footsteps and you know who it is. You know who it is. Sometimes you don't even hear anything; there's just a sense of vibration, and you're sensitive to that. So there's this deepening of sort of connection and openness and sensitivity that's really available to us in the silence, almost like needing the silence, needing the non-verbality to reveal itself. We could say that the journey into silence is also a journey into love. You could say that.

As practice deepens and unfolds, and again you all know this, but what also deepens with it is a kind of stillness, a stillness of the being -- the outer being, the physical being, and the inner being. That can be present even when the body is moving in the walking meditation. That deepening, as I know that you know, is not a linear process. In other words, it's not just a smooth, steady descent into the depths of calm. No way. It's a non-linear process. But generally speaking, there is this deepening of stillness. It's not something we can force, absolutely not. That will backfire. It's something almost like that the being softens into -- it softens into stillness; we allow stillness. There's an invitation, a gentle invitation into stillness. And again, that stillness of being brings with it another kind of sensitivity, and it's a sensitivity to the kind of vibrations that the organism is putting out into the environment. So we do organically want to take care with how we move in and out of rooms, slamming doors or not, and not wanting to kind of disturb the stillness, the peace of the environment too much. It's a very organic movement that comes. So we're taking care when we come in and out of the meditation hall. There's that natural sensitivity there. Again, not to do with being a good yogi. It's not to do with impressing others or impressing the teacher or anything like that. And it's not to do with should. It's a natural, organic movement of the being, of the heart, as the stillness opens. And it's coming out of kindness. It's coming out of love.

But a big part of the stillness deepening and the sense of silence deepening is this opening and corresponding deepening of the sensitivity of the being or the sensitivities of the being. Slowly, it's almost as if the being, the consciousness, begins to become receptive to something else, to some other qualities in the silence. Can be. And again, not linear at all, but just that's possible. It can be that we get the sense of the silence being something that is unitive. It lends itself towards a feeling of unity. It's not that there's a problem with thought at all, but sometimes the way that we engage in thought and busyness of mind actually separates things. It makes things apart. There's something about the silence that has a kind of unifying effect.

Some of you will know there's a beautiful poem by Pablo Neruda about this. I'm not sure if you'll have heard it before, but it's called "Keeping Quiet."^[2]

[27:45 -- 29:19, poem]

Very beautiful. So how might we enter, enter more deeply, if we're interested in this possibility? (And it's just a possibility I'm presenting). Well, one way in is actually via the listening sense, starting with listening. If one can establish a kind of light mindfulness of the body, be anchored in the body, and then open the awareness to listening, to the totality of listening, and just keeping steady with listening. And what happens? Of course, we hear sounds, we hear noises. But there are also the spaces between the sounds, the gaps between the sounds, and hearing that, too, the silence between sounds. Or listening to a sound, even now as I'm talking, doing it with the words, if you like, listening to the sounds and hearing the sounds die into the silence, and what remains after a sound has died into the silence. Taking all that in, opening to all that.

[30:37] So practising in this way is a real possibility. And sustaining that and opening to it and bringing care to that, it might be that it deepens in a way that the sense of silence is not just in the absence of sound. It's actually, even right now as I'm speaking the words, the silence can actually permeate the sound. It's through the sound. It can be in the sound. Just as the whole process deepens, getting a sense of silence being much more encompassing. At that level, we're talking about a level of silence that's not dependent on the absence of sound, okay? It's also not dependent on the absence of thought. Again, we make a dichotomy in our minds between 'silence' on the one hand and 'sounds and noises and thoughts' on the other. But there's a level of silence that the consciousness can open to that's really not about the absence of sound or the absence of thought.

Sometimes, of course, as human beings, we get into real problems with thought, definitely. Sometimes they're so thick that this kind of level of silence is totally unavailable, and we're just obsessing, the mind is obsessing around thought. Just a little bit of a tangent to say a couple things about obsessive thoughts. It's interesting -- why is it that the consciousness can get obsessed in that way with thoughts, and they just spin round and round and round? Something is keeping the energy spinning round. One of the things it can be, and really worth checking out, is that there's an emotion going on underneath, and it's not so much being connected with. Instead all our attention and energy is on the thought level, spinning at the thought level, with the obsessive thinking. What we could do, without fighting the thoughts, is just go to the body and see if there's an emotion there playing out, and just be more with that. It will drain the energy out of the whole loop of obsessive thinking. It can drain the energy out of the whole loop.

Sometimes we obsess in a different way, and it's more to do with a choice: "Should I do this? Should I do that? What's right? What's the best thing?" And again, something's driving that. Something is driving that obsession. It may be that a level of belief and assumption that choice A or choice B is really going to make that much difference to my happiness, to my peace. Maybe that's just an assumption that hasn't been examined, and the whole thing is resting on that assumption. If I look at that and question that, maybe it drains some energy from the whole thing.

But back to the silence. Not dependent so much on an absence of sound or an absence of thought, but it's more that, again, the relationship with thought and the relationship with sound has more ease in it, more relaxation in it. So much in our practice depends on our relationship with things. So thoughts come and they go, and sounds come and they go, and the inner activities of the mind -- it's just like the flotsam and jetsam on the ocean. It's just stuff that's not really that significant. Because there's less pushing away what we don't like and pulling towards us what we do like in terms of thoughts and sounds, the whole thing has a lot more space, a lot more ease in it, a lot more sense of silence in it.

So this is really, really possible to explore, as I said, as a little bit of your practice or as really quite a main piece of your practice. Again, what else might be noticed here? How else might this unfold? Another beautiful possibility is that what comes to the fore, what rises up into prominence in consciousness, is what we had hitherto regarded as the kind of irrelevant elements of our life, something that's not so significant. So, you know, you're doing the walking meditation, and the foot touches the earth or touches the floor and you'd think, "That's not a very significant event in my life, the sense of the foot touching the floor. It's nothing." But there's something about what was seeming to be an irrelevant element -- actually finding its beauty. It's shot through with its mystery.

Usually, as human beings, the things we give significance to are the things of the personal world. Of course, as I said in the last talk, that's really important. We don't ever neglect that in practice. But it's almost like there can be a sense, as the silence deepens, that the personal world is actually less where it's at, it's less what life is all about, than the seemingly irrelevant touch or the simple sensations of life. Actually, this is my life: this sense, the sense of the body sitting here right now, these simple sensations. That actually is my life, free of the whole layering of concepts and views and memories and stories. You begin to see the whole personal world that we've constructed is just that: constructed. It's built up by the mind. The mind has to build that up, the mind and memory. We really get insights into this. What we've taken to be so solid, so significant, so real, is built up, built up by the mind and memory. And something that we thought was so insignificant kind of begins to shine forth with its own beauty, its own kind of significance. So what I do, what I did, etc. -- it's almost like the sense of mystery, if you like, can begin to dwarf that. It just completely embraces it.

So I'm using the word 'silence' a lot in the talk tonight. It may be that, as a practitioner is practising earnestly in different ways, exactly this, this sense of silence, begins to stand out and begins to be paid attention to. But it could also be that what stands out more is a sense of space, spaciousness. Or it could be, again, that what stands out is a sense of awareness. So in a way, everything that I'm saying about silence from now on in the talk can be equally substituted by the word 'a sense of space' or 'a sense of awareness.' So sometimes different aspects become more prominent, but either way, whether it's silence or space or awareness, one begins to get this sense that silence-space-awareness is embracing and accommodating everything. Everything is kind of held within that space, within that silence, within that awareness, everything that comes up.

In a way, at that point, the practice is about letting everything belong, belong to that. It's almost like body sensations come up, sounds come up, thoughts come up, whatever it is comes up, and let it belong to the silence, let it belong to the space, let it belong to awareness. There's this kind of letting everything belong to that. One sees the birth of things, of phenomena, of objects of consciousness. They're born in that space, in that silence. They have their life in that silence. And they die back into it, they fade back into the silence, the space, the awareness. A very beautiful potential opening of the heart, of consciousness.

But what we see here as well, and this is really interesting and important, is that the more I let go of the pushing away of what I don't like and the pulling towards me of what I do want, the more I let go in terms of push and pull, the more this sense of silence or space or awareness becomes prominent. Okay? The more I let go of things, the more the silence stands out. And the more the silence stands out, the more I can let go, naturally, organically. They're mutually dependent. This mutual co-dependency is a core, really important principle in the Dharma. It applies to so much. But the more I let go, the more the silence stands out. And the more the silence stands out, the more I can let go, just letting everything belong to that.

[40:42] And what can happen with that is things and events and objects begin to get less prominent. They stand out less to consciousness. They stand out of the silence less. And the silence itself, it's almost like you can feel the texture, the palpable texture of it. Of course, with all this, the suffering is getting drained as well. We begin to get the sense, as I was saying with the sound, that things are of the same kind of substance as silence, or the same substance as spaciousness, or the same substance as awareness. So rather than [knocks on something] there is this, and there is silence or awareness or space, it's almost like there's a kind of oneness that can come in. The silence, the space, the awareness, it surrounds and permeates. And in that, gradually, and again non-linearly, the consciousness is letting go of its preoccupation with objects. It's letting go of its preoccupation with things and events.

With that, you know, beautiful potential, it's almost like some questions come up organically for a practitioner. And they have to do with what is real, and that question, "What actually is real here?" One sees, and one asks, "What am I actually giving significance to -- and substance to -- by pushing and pulling and involvement and entanglement?" This is a really important question: "What am I giving significance and substance to by pushing, pulling, involvement, and entanglement?" Because that's what gives substance, solidity, significance to things, events, and objects in consciousness. What is real there? And in terms of the self, who am I when there's not a lot happening? There's just not a lot happening, there's not a lot arising, there's not a lot going on, and I'm not giving significance and substance to much at all. Who then am I? I define myself so much by the things that are happening and my relationship with them. So in this, the self-definition and the self-concerns can also begin to die down.

When we talk about freedom from suffering in the path, it depends very much on really exploring these two questions, about the reality of the self and the reality of things. It depends on seeing and understanding these things. Many of you will know the beautiful quote from Dōgen, the Zen teacher. How does it go?

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.^[3]

Often people just quote that much, but the next little verse is:

To be enlightened by all things is to drop the body and mind.

To drop the body and mind. That means dropping our interest, even, our investment, our infatuation with the events of body and mind. It's just this kind of letting that go, letting that go. One begins to just get a glimmer, a whisper of an intuition, that our experiences don't define us. They don't define us, and we don't own them. We don't own our experiences. The events of body, the events of mind, they have no inherent power to imprison us or to constrict us in any real way. They just don't have that power by themselves. You could say, one could use the language, our true nature is undefinable. Sometimes we can get a sense that all this is just ripples on the surface of a great silence. All these things and happenings, just ripples on the surface of a great silence.

So the somethings of our life begin to die down, and the nothing can begin to reveal itself, begin to stand out, the nothing. Maybe -- I think it is -- our freedom and happiness and well-being may depend more on moments of silence and stillness and this sense of nothing than on things and events and happenings. Things and events and happenings are where we usually look for fulfilment and happiness exclusively. So usually we make efforts in life, conscious and unconscious, to find happiness and security and comfort with somethings -- either somethings about place or self or time or event. And somehow, that involvement with that, that effort to look for comfort and happiness and security with somethings, it somehow closes the consciousness. Because we're wrapped up in a certain kind of looking and efforting, it closes the consciousness so that we miss another kind of mystery. We miss another kind of mystery that is actually a kind of otherness. It's something else other than all these events and happenings and objects of consciousness. Something in the nothing. It's not, if you like, in life, because usually we think about Life with a capital L as being things and events and happenings, inner movements and outer movements. It's actually not in life. In the Christian mystical tradition, some of the Christian mystics talk about the via negativa. It's not looking towards things and events and experiences. It's something outside of that. If you know, for instance, there's a beautiful text, The Cloud of Unknowing, or St John of the Cross, or Meister Eckhart, people like that.

As a practitioner, in this kind of way of working, what we're really interested in is feeling the silence, really opening the whole being to the silence, and really getting familiar with it, really allowing a familiarity with it. Rumi has this lovely line: "Live in the nothing that you came from." Again, none of this is very linear, but one can begin to get the glimpse, the whisper. What a freedom to be nothing and to have nothing! What looks from the conventional point of view horrific, actually immense freedom -- to be nothing, to have nothing, not to define oneself. Just the obsession with the self defining itself all the time has just died down, died down, even beyond a Dharma definition of "the self is the continuum of moment-to-moment arising of aggregates" or something like that. (Certainly the Buddha never said that.) But it's just letting go of all the definitions. Not even conceiving of one's life. The self has a habit of self-referencing everything: "Everything has got to do with me. Everything is me and somehow referenced to me." Letting all that die down, not giving the usual stuff significance. This is such an ocean that's calling us: our letting go, not being infatuated with things, with objects so much. When Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, says, "Blessed are the poor in spirit"^[4] -- it's beautiful, "Blessed are the poor in spirit" -- that's what he means, I think, at a deeper level. It's knowing this freedom of not being anything, not having anything.

[49:58] When we define the self less, or to the degree that we define the self less, actually organically consciousness begins to define the world less. I'll talk about this in another talk. But self and the world build each other, and they go together. So as the self begins to unbind, the world begins to unbind. The whole thing just begins to kind of loosen itself and, in a way, dissolve itself. Then this something that I'm calling something *'*other,' it's not of the self, it's not of the world, and it's not of time, begins to reveal itself.

Again, I'm just sort of painting a rough map. Very common if a person takes on this kind of practice, or just in the course of being on retreat anyway, is that it can move through a kind of stage where that silence seems to be a kind of universal love. It feels like love is everywhere. One sees love everywhere, or it could be one sees peace everywhere, or one sees awareness everywhere. One doesn't want to hurry through those kind of stages. Some of you in your practice might have glimpsed this sense. It's almost like love is not just here; it's actually woven into the fabric of the universe somehow. If, you know, you're mid-retreat, and it feels like this is something that can be accessed and repeated, one wants to not hurry through that, and repeat that. Let it be in that stage, and let it do its work on the being.

But in a way, that's only a stepping-stone, because that's still making a 'thing' out of the silence. Eventually, we don't even want to make a thing out of the silence, out of the love, out of the space, out of whatever. When we make a thing out of something, suffering comes at some degree. Very common nowadays in the Dharma world is to make a thing out of awareness. As I said earlier, this silence might take the form of a sense of awareness, a sense of spaciousness. Very, very common nowadays for people to make a thing out of awareness. But actually that sense of awareness is still in the realm of perception and needs to be gone beyond, needs to be let go of -- the whole thing unbound, the whole thing unbound. Thomas Merton, again, has this beautiful phrase: "The palace of Nowhere."^[5]

In our practice, sometimes the mindfulness is of objects, of course. It's of this sensation in my body. It's of this thought. It's of this sight, of this sound, whatever it is. We're very, very interested in mindfulness of things, mindfulness of objects. But eventually we actually want to go beyond objects, beyond perception, actually. So delusion, really, has an infatuation with things, as I said -- infatuation with things and events, referencing the self in relationship to them. Just infatuated with objects. Or even the awareness in which objects happen, the space in which it all takes place, can still be an infatuation for delusion. Sometimes we go beyond objects, and sometimes our practice is very much about objects, very much about objects. One of the, I think, really precious and beautiful things of this type of practice is our practice of bare attention, mindfulness. It's like, in the days here, the luxury of getting dressed in the morning and really giving that this beautiful care and attentiveness. What is it to get dressed? This is human activity. Or drinking tea, or the sound of the wind or the thunder. There's just this precious quality of giving such a care of attention to these things, these objects.

Sometimes -- and again, some people might have tasted this -- sometimes in the objects, through the objects, there is this sense of something other, sort of through them or behind them. Sometimes. So it's not always that one needs to go beyond objects to get this sense of something other. But one can only sense that something other through objects when the relationship with the object is not about pushing away the unpleasant and trying to hang onto the pleasant. So when the relationship is not about that push and pull, it allows something else to reveal itself. Mostly our relationship with objects is very much wrapped up in this push and pull, and it obscures something. It obscures something much more precious, much more beautiful, much more profound.

Sāriputta was one of the Buddha's two foremost disciples, and he was said to be foremost in wisdom of the whole Saṅgha at that time. He was answering someone's question one time, and he said the kilesas -- meaning greed, aversion, and delusion; 'greed' meaning that pulling towards me what I like, 'aversion' meaning the pushing away what I don't like -- the kilesas, he said, very profound, "are makers of measurement and they're makers of significance." Something very profound here. Greed, aversion, and delusion are makers of measurement and makers of significance. You get a sense of how greed and aversion start us measuring between things and giving things significance. But then he went on to say, even more profound, they're makers of measurement, of significance, "they're makers of appearance, they're makers of appearances."^[6] Something very, very deep there to meditate on. The movement towards something, the movement away from something, and delusion, are makers of appearance, meaning makers of experience, what we call 'life.' Makers of appearance.

It's this that ultimately we want to understand in practice. This is ultimately what we want to understand. In that understanding is a letting go, to whatever degree. And in that letting go, what is not of measurement, what is immeasurable, begins to show itself. It's not even immeasurable in a sense of immeasurably vast. It's immeasurable in the sense of being beyond any dimensionality, beyond any way of speaking, unspeakable.

So I'm aware sometimes when talking -- and people, as I said at the beginning, are doing very different practices, and different approaches, and have been here for different amounts of time, and will stay for different amounts of time. But I'm just painting a picture of what actually is available and how one might walk that path, how the consciousness might begin to be drawn into that journey. This actually all is stuff that's very possible for us as human beings. I'm not talking about anything abstract or out of the realm of possibility at all. We as human beings can know this, and we can taste it. It's there for us, totally there for us if we kind of go about practice the right way, the right ways.

Okay. So let's have a moment or two of silence together.