Listening to Silence

Our relationship with silence is the flip side of our relationship to discursiveness. If we rarely touch in with the stillness of a winter night, yet find ourselves absorbed in the cheap business of gadgetry, the conversations and entertainment that take place in our mind will feel like home. However, such a home is never fully satisfying. Peace is hard to find in a nest of heightened emotions teeming with relentless activity and insecurity.

A neurotic relationship with silence translates into a neurotic relationship with the whole world. It forces us to take a defensive stance whereby meditation is regarded as foreign and threatening. Tibetan teachings speak of the “Cut-Off Family,” pointing to those who have become so disconnected from direct experience that they have no interest in introspection. Instead, they suffer through life within an egoic prison of excruciating, existential loneliness. Being born in a “cut-off” family might be seen as a phase of evolution, and such people should not be scorned or discarded as unworthy of compassion. However, they find themselves on a trajectory towards totally superficiality, firmly encased in primitive beliefs about reality. If you can imagine a life where genuineness has lost all meaning, hopefully, compassion arises.

Conversely, an open, inquisitive, and engaged relationship with silence is consistent with sanity and lends itself to a more harmonious relationship with things as they are. Listening is fundamentally inquisitive and is, therefore, the ideal basis for true dharma practice. Taking an interest in silence highlights the intricacies of apparent confusion and sets the stage for a more penetrating investigation into one’s own mind. The more internal dialogue can be set aside, the deeper one can truly listen. Through this healthy pursuit, the narcissistic thinking mind loses its bearings and life reveals itself to be refreshingly workable.

As Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche once pointed out:

Confusion is two-sided; it creates a need, a demand for sanity. This hungry nature of confusion is very powerful and important. The demand for relief or sanity that is contained within confusion is, in fact, the beginning point of sanity. That is what moved Buddha to sit beneath the Bodhi tree twenty-five hundred years ago—to confront his confusion and find its source.

This “seeking out the source of confusion” is a concise definition of spiritual inquiry. The confused mind’s “demand” for sanity is the driving force behind the act of listening. This subtly desperate thirst compels us to seek relief, often with urgency. But it is this very desperation that clouds our clarity. As we wake up to the reality that we are imprisoned by our own egos, that the thinking mind simply won’t shut up, we feel even more hopeless. These days, the spiritual supermarket is being flooded by a fire-hose of seemingly helpful options, most of which turn out to be unnecessary sidetracks that result in discouragement.

Whenever we take the approach that silence is simply a void to be filled, suffering increases. Not wanting to see ourselves as “crazy,” we regard our habitual distractions as innocent gestures that fit perfectly within anyone’s definition of normal. However, by indulging in such unexamined self-deception, our connection to sacredness is weakened. We may be content to tell ourselves that it is fine to stare at our screens even as we ignore the fact that, by doing so, we are slowly going blind. What we are missing is a healthy regard for simplicity and a disciplined willingness to identify with the primordially good, a naturally existing quality that has been right in front of us all along. We have to relearn how to surrender into the background of silence.

Usually, when we try to listen, it is as if we are trying to find darkness with a flashlight. We already know it is there, but it remains ungraspable. Precisely because silence is ungraspable, what we need to let go of is grasping itself. We have become so caught up in the game of pursuit that we have forgotten that the whole point of the fight is to end the war. While listening to silence may be a healthy response to confusion, it is also a matter of honing in on honest humanness. Our incessant self-talk may be so rife with negative critical appraisal and self-condemnation, that we have forgotten have much we have to celebrate as human beings. For example, we may be the only species in the entire universe that can truly appreciate the brilliance of quantum physics. The memories and imaginations and intellectual powers that we share are far richer and more abundant than those found in any other known entities. Yet, for all our semi-miraculous traits, our ability to shift from thinking mind to listening mind with real intention might be our supreme gift. For within it lies the capacity to unleash compassion beyond limit.

When we actually stop and listen to the immediate world, we unlock moments of peace that remind us what it means to be truly human. Silence can be like a doorway we pass by every day for years but never take the time to enter. If we decide to open the door and explore that quiet world of mystery, what we have assumed to be an insignificant closet might turn out to be a cave of infinite proportions, an eternal reservoir of space and a portal into expansiveness. Listening Mind is the key to that door. There are hundreds of spiritual texts from many traditions that point out the irony that such liberating truth has always been at our fingertips.

As everything that manifests as sound arises out of silence and returns to silence, when we finally stop and listen, it draws us into the unborn, unmanifested dimension of being. We can no longer ignore the roar of pure potentiality, the primordial energy humming within the womb of space. Embracing the hush of ultimate quiet is transformative, like the intersection of birth and death. Thinking cannot penetrate the blueness of the empty sky, so we have to let it swallow us so that we might enjoy its depths.

Therefore, finding the courage to surrender makes life meaningful and transcendent. However, such courage also forces us to be increasingly more sensitive and vulnerable. Most people exhibit a love/hate relationship with vulnerability, emblematic of fear and sadness, as well as joy. But perseverance furthers. Listening to silence is not just a matter of blanking out—it is a way to summon spiritual warriorship and train the mind to stay focused on the ineffable. Tuning in to the background silence is not always easy. Such a practice requires strong intention, particularly at the beginning, as well as discipline and persistence over time. It is possible to transcend ordinary discursive chatter, but not without a resolve that is fueled by genuine effort and the wisdom to appreciate the power and value of such a worthwhile undertaking. Consider silence as a portal into presence and discursive thoughts as guardians defending the gate to an immense treasure. Without a disciplined listening mind we cannot slip past the guards that keep us imprisoned. We sift through the clouds of neurosis by seeing the sky, not as merely a field of blue obscured by moisture, but as fathomless space that can accommodate everything.

Ordinary sounds remind us that things are always cooking within the cosmic caldron of nowness. What we hear is birth and death percolating, moment after moment, while silence lurks behind it all. Even on the busiest streets of Manhattan in rush hour, a primal silence haunts everything.

Of course, it is ironic, and perhaps unnecessary to try to point this out with words. I simply encourage you to find a few moments to listen to the depths of silence with a receptive mind. Dwell in it; play in it; reach out and embrace it, and let it touch you. Pay homage by listening, deeply and purely, to the quietest of quiet without holding on to anything or grasping for any reference points. Just let sounds flow in and out of silence but remain still. This is a wonderful meditation. We can train our attention and develop awareness of almost anything, but paying attention to silence offers us a uniquely potent way of accessing the sacred quality of space. The space of our own minds is the most refined object of attention available to us. Becoming totally and completely at home within that vastness begins with listening to the unmanifested background from which time arises and into which it again subsides. Returning to the silent magic of Square One, again and again, lets us trace our cosmic roots into the primordial space of nowness, the eternal spring of enlightenment itself.