Oakville Zen Meditation
Listening to silence to mute the mind and quiet our body
Our mind is extremely sensitive to its sensorial receptors - visual, audio, touch, smell, and taste.
Connected to our surroundings is critical to function socially, and survive, and our mind is computing zillions of data from our receptors all the time.
How to listen to silence when there is nothing to listen to?
First of all, silence is not nothing, it is our surroundings empty of sounds/noises.
How to practice?
Whenever there is silence learn to be mindful of it w/o any analytic thinking, even for a few sec.
When we focus on the silence around us, we freeze our thinking mind and put it on mute mode because it does not know what to listen to since there is no sound to receive and analyze. Listening to silence triggers some sort of “short” in our neural circuits allowing us to reach a mental non-thinking state called awareness. In this case awareness of silence.
So: what is awareness?
Awareness defines the main attribute of our essential bodyless nature called consciousness. It is a critical part of our inner self. Without it, there would be no sensorial experience,
no thinking, no feelings, no interconnection with others nor with our surrounding realities. Our genuine True self is awareness or consciousness incarnated into a biological self-centered person.
Practicing mindfulness-based awareness of external silence triggers 3 important states:
1 Creating a non-thinking state or pure genuine consciousness as already mentioned.
2 Generating quietness, stillness, and alertness of our body and mind which is unique to the practice of listening to silence. With practice, listening to silence often brings bodyless experience.
3 Bringing body and mind into the same space-time that is the present moment.
Any disturbing noise can be helpful when you focus on silence. How? Dropping your inner resistance to these external noises and accepting intermittent sounds and noises takes you into the realm of your inner peace called stillness.
Final words:
The equivalent of our external noise is our inner “noise” which is thinking. On the opposite: the equivalent of external silence is our inner quietness and stillness that we can achieve and experience quite easily by being aware of our surrounding silence in a mindful way. Inner quietness and stillness define our non-thinking, non-ego-driven, non-biological, selfless being, very close to pure immaterial consciousness.
I found that focusing on silence is the most effective way to control my noisy wandering mind and to achieve body relaxation at the same time. Daily meditation has been of great help in this practice.
Listening to silence is one of the best tools to practice pure awareness also called consciousness,
and, through it, to discover the spiritual emptiness of our material ego-centered self. It is called a “bodyless experience”, and it is a wonderful one to achieve. Arnaud
