An Invitation to StopSILENCE AND STILLNESS: THE GREATEST TEACHERS
All that is required to realize the Self is to be still.
What can be easier than that?1
RAMANA MAHARSHI
If you are a seeker of the deepest Truth, silence and stillness are your greatest teachers. Empty of concepts, absent of separation, our own deep silence and stillness reveal what words cannot. The silence I am pointing to is not a concept of silence, not a spaced-out, trance-like, dimmed, or static state of consciousness. It is not the absence of sound. Silence leads us beyond the mind. Silence comes before names. Silence comes before heaven and earth. Silence is your deepest knowing. You will know Silence, for the body-mind will begin to feel very still and may at times seem to disappear altogether, leaving only peace and utter stillness.
But do not imagine the body must be on a cushion or your environment free of traffic noise. Silence is present everywhere, at all times. Stillness does not require the absence of movement. Silence and sound arise together. Stillness and movement arise together. Sounds come and go, but silence remains. Life, energy, breath, thoughts, feelings move about continually, but stillness never ceases.
Silence is a living presence—alive and palpable, intimate and unceasing, natural and whole. Its depths lie mostly unknown because we use noise incessantly to distract us from silence—the noise of our inner talking, the stories we tell ourselves to keep emotions churning, the lies we live due to fear, the ways we continually trade the alive silence of our unborn nature for conditioned thoughts and judgments. Stillness does not resist the moment. Thoughts, feelings, sensations may come and go, but You are still. To be still is to touch the deep silence of our true nature. Within that stillness of Being all movement can happen.
If you are drawn to interior silence, this is your soul food. If you are drawn to music, this is your soul food. If you are drawn to service, this is your soul food. I am not suggesting everyone needs to be drawn to silence. But if you are, it will take you beyond yourself. For others, the rhythms of music or dance take you beyond yourself. If you are drawn to science, discovery will take you beyond yourself. We are here to be who we are. Because all there is is God or Consciousness, all of life is holy—all manifestations, all functions, all moments.
In order to walk through the doorway that reveals what we truly are, we must leave our concepts at the door—not because the mind is an enemy of truth or because it is not valuable for maneuvering in the world of ideas, but because the thinking mind will never find the deepest truth. Thinking cannot see. The mind operates only in the known and is time bound. What is most deeply true is unknown to the mind, though not unknown to itself, and is timeless. In truth, there is no actual door, but we must walk through it nonetheless. No one can give us our essence or take it away. The journey is one we must take ourselves.
NOTICING STILLNESS AND SILENCE
Have you stopped lately to notice the deep stillness all around you, the unfathomable silence within you? Do you ever stop to listen to the silence in nature, the silence that allows you to hear the wind blowing through pine needles, the sound of the crow calling through the stillness, your own breathing? Have you stopped to notice the freedom, peace, and total acceptance you have for yourself when you do not believe thoughts? Have you stopped to notice what is noticing this moment? Do not pass over this last question lightly, and do not hold on to it too tightly.
An Invitation to Stop
In this very moment lies an invitation to the Silence that reveals itself when you simply stop.
Perhaps your mind is asking, “Stop what?”
Just stop! Stop asking.
Stop trying.
Stop pretending.
Stop believing your stories of whom you are or where you have to go.
Stop thinking you know something or don’t know something.
How?
There is no “how”; “how” is more mind activity.
Silence needs no “how.” It simply IS.
You simply ARE.
If you want to discover what you truly are, just stop—even an instant is long enough.
What is here when you simply stop? 
Stopping does not mean life will cease moving. Silence does not need a special time or place to be what it is. A moment of stopping to enjoy a cup of tea, to listen to birdsongs in your own backyard, or to treat yourself to several days of a silent retreat—all offer beautiful opportunities to stop engaging the restless mind and start noticing the only thing that is unceasing.
AS ATTENTION TURNS INWARD, FEAR MAY GUARD THE GATE
Anxiety and fear may seem to guard the gate to Silence, as gargoyles guard the doors to great cathedrals, or dragons guard the jewel, or Tibetan thangkas depict aspects of bodhisattvas looking fierce and threatening. But eventually, we are given the courage to press on and to discover the insubstantiality of our fears. It can happen when we become more interested in being than in improving, more interested in truth than in feeling comfortable, when we prefer listening to “knowing,” when we are more intrigued by now than by then or when.
This is a journey into the Heart’s cave, a cave that holds a mystery, a precious jewel, but can be reached only by exploring the unknown. Instead of looking out, as we might look out at a sunset or at our most beloved friend, we invite attention to turn inward, not simply to our ideas or memories, but more deeply—deeper than these productions of mind, deeper than feelings, deeper than sensations, beyond all words and concepts.
In stillness and silence, we stop looking “out there” and begin looking within for the truth of what we are. We turn our looking around until we come to a profound “I don’t know.” In such unknowing, the mind may become frightened and want to return to the known in order to feel safe. It may, indeed, reverse our journey many times before we have the courage to keep going. But once we have entered the cave that leads to the deepest discovery of our essence, we must stand firm, neither returning to the known, nor imagining what is unknown. Thinking cannot reveal the unknown. In the intimacy of silence, beyond anything that can be thought, essence reveals itself to itself as the Source of all that is; this can never be described in words. It is sensed, revealed, intuited. Pay attention to the felt sense of silence, how it dissolves barriers, soothes, nurtures, simultaneously relaxes and enlivens the body.
SOAKING IN SILENCE
Soaking in silence is like being bathed from the inside out. Whatever needs attention, warmth, love, purification, or liberation is invited forth from the shadows to be seen, felt, and drawn back into the wholeness that belongs to our Being. As silence drenches us inside and out, we experience its intimacy, freshness, and responsiveness. We can sense the difference between words and actions that come directly from silence and those that feel stale or conditioned. We feel the subtle currents of silence more readily than before; and we begin to feel a tender love for life in all its distinct expressions—not because we should or because we have become saints, but because we have been transformed by Silence.
Have you noticed that silence seems to be in harmony with everything? It neither judges nor agrees with life, neither rejects nor clings to experience, has no “I” to tell it what it should or should not allow, and does not seem to pay much attention to anyone’s inner narrative—the virtual reality of thought. It seems to hold no preference for classical music or rap music, for birds singing or jackhammers pounding. It seems to embrace all creatures equally, those having eight legs, four legs, two legs, or no legs. In its inability to separate from any condition, experience, or form, it has no fear.
Silence is in harmony with moments that seem peaceful and moments that appear otherwise to our conditioned mind. Silence is in harmony with all religions, all peoples, all moments, all experiences. It is equally present in experiences of terror and in experiences of bliss, in sorrow as well as in joy. It presides serenely at every birth and every death. The Western mind seems to be conditioned to imagine life should only be one-half of the play of opposites—the good, the beautiful, the true—and does not like its idea of divine Light to be whole, nonjudgmental, and shining equally on the saint and the sinner, on destruction as well as creation. Nature shows us both aspects.
SILENCE PERMEATES NATURE
Notice how silence permeates nature, how everything has its own quality of silence, the way silence connects us to heaven and earth. Mother Nature is a very wise teacher. She teaches us in silence about life and death, impermanence, renewal, and the connectedness of life. She demands nothing of us in exchange for our enjoying her warmth, shade, food, water, trees, flowers; and her silence never demands we be different from how we are. Of course, she also shows us her power when she sweeps through as a storm, a tornado, a drought, or an earthquake, not picking favorites or targeting enemies. Even these moments arise from her vast, silent nature. Her presence is impersonal.
One of my favorite pastimes as a child was sitting in our backyard apple tree. I could sit for hours just watching the world of sky, birds, and insects and never be bored. The changing seasons delighted me. Mother Nature was a wonderful companion and became a very dependable mother to me after my own mother died. In the arms of her apple tree and in the sweet love of my father, I never again felt so alone as I did that one Easter Sunday after my mother’s death. In the great silence of nature, perched high in a tree watching the clouds and seasons change, I grew close to the Infinite once again. And while I let God know I thought he had lied to me about the “faith” thing, I began to pray again, to let in God again. Over the next many decades, the Divine seemed to appear as mother, father, friend, lover, teacher, guide—whatever was needed.
GOD, NATURE, AND CONSCIOUSNESS
The Infinite is not separate from nature and not separate from you. The idea of Divinity being separate from our natural life and our natural way of being seems unbelievable to me, and yet God is the Consciousness of those who imagine their separateness is real, also. A precocious child observed in the book Mister God, This Is Anna that God has infinite viewing points, whereas we have infinite points of view.2 The light of Consciousness shines out of the eyes of ants and antelopes, butterflies and beetles, honeybees and hawks, dogs and donkeys, monkeys and humans.
When we see from Totality, nothing is excluded, and no one stands outside. Nothing is created apart from or outside of the mystery of Being and the Awareness that is the “knowing” of it. No person, feeling, thought, moment; no illness or healing; no breath, blink, hair, or atom; no touch, smell, taste, or sight is separate. None of those apparent “things” has an independent, separate existence. Each arises because of interconnected causes and conditions, and yet none of those conditions can be divided from their formless ground. That is the paradox. Duality says life is “either/or.” Nonduality says it is “both/and.” Yet nothing can define Absolute Reality. It is not true to call its nature dual or nondual. How can the nameless be named? How can what is everything and nothing be categorized according to qualities? Those are tasks of the mind, but the great Silence does not even have “silence” as its name. And yet we try to describe the indescribable.
Look at your reflection in a still pool of water. Are you the eyes looking or the Consciousness behind your eyes looking? Are you the body peering into the pool or the seeing that sees the body, the pool, and the sky simultaneously? Are you the body you call a “self” or a reflection of your Self? Are you the object of your seeing or the subject of your seeing? Who imagines he or she can know? Who can tell the difference?
IN NATURE, WE ARE FREE TO BE
If we observe nature for any period of time, we may become more and more convinced that there is an action of life that simply happens, that it is mysterious, beautiful, and unknown, and that we are as much a part of that action as a little ant scurrying back and forth between the dead earthworm in your garden and its home under your porch. The silence of nature has no anxieties about its being or what shows up in its space. Unlike judging minds, nature makes no demands on its creatures, including ourselves, to be different from how they are, which is why we often feel so much more open, free, and intimate with life when we are in nature.
We can temporarily lose our self-obsession while hiking in the mountains or in the woods, walking along the beach or a lake, planting flowers in a little pot on our doorstep; and when we do lose our obsession, we often feel a great relief. If we allow it, we can be free of the “me” and free to be naturally ourselves. Spending time in nature, we can become more comfortable with many things, including the beauty and unfolding of both life and death and the necessity of impermanence for the continuance of life. Forms may transform, but life flows on. And through it all, silence and stillness remain untouched, at peace, yet always touching the moment exactly as it is.