Silence: The Beginning and the End
I was reflecting that the day ends in the silence of sleep; life ends in the silence of death. This is not morbid; this is simply an acknowledgement that like night and day, life oscillates between activity and rest, sound and silence.
The recognition that life is a constant rotation between opposites is natural to the Eastern mind whose roots are buried deep into the distant past; but in the West, like teenagers, we look towards the ever-progressively unfolding future.
I sometimes ask myself: "Where did I come from? Where will I go after death?" I have my beliefs, of course, but only rare souls can answer these questions from actual knowledge.
Sunday Service at Ananda includes the “Festival of Light” ceremony. One of the songs in that ceremony is called the “Thunder of Aum” and the opening line is “Out of the silence came the song of creation; out of the darkness came the light.” This is an ancient voice; a dim memory for most of us.
We begin each day from a point of rest, and we end the day returning to rest. Ralph Waldo Emerson stated in the essay, “The Over-Soul,” that “men descend to meet.” This reflects the intuitive recognition that inwardly we are a greater Soul than is evident by our words and actions. (Ever "listen" to your own voice; your words? Too often they seem so small compared to the real "you.")
This is distinct from Descartes' statement “I think, therefore, I AM.” But how can one “think” unless one already exists? It may be truer to say: “I AM, and in addition, I can think.”
In the West we assume that what we feel, experience and think is the “I”. And of course, that seems an obvious fact until one learns to stand apart from one’s own thoughts and emotions. In the Abrahamic faiths, there is no obvious distinction between the ego and the soul. More than this is the teaching that at the final judgement one's physical body is resurrected. Thus, in that tradition the body, the ego, and the soul are essentially one and the same. The Western analysis that separates the subconscious from the conscious mind is a modern insight. On the evolving fringe of that analysis are various speculations around some kind of higher mind. This seems to have started with Carl Jung's theory of the "Collective Unconscious."
Much speculation in the West surrounds the "hard problem of consciousness." This is the debate on whether consciousness is the source of matter, or matter, the source of consciousness. In the East that isn't even a question as Consciousness (aka Brahman, or God, etc.) is accepted as the creator and source of the universe.
Some explain the difference between East and West as a difference between Western orientation towards extraversion and Eastern orientation towards introversion. But this distinction, itself only a general statement, is being dissolved by the fusion of East and West that is underway.
Irrespective of theory, the practice of mindfulness can help us experience that there is an “I” separate and apart from sense-impressions, thoughts, and emotions. This demonstration is one of the benefits of daily meditation practice.
Thus, we see that the practice of meditation is now integrated into the busy, outward pace of twenty-first century life. Meditation and the active lifestyle are potentially complementary from the point of view that meditation brings mindfulness to our busyness and our busyness brings energy and commitment to our meditation.
Otherwise, what may too easily happen is that peacefulness can dissolve into lazy indifference while busyness can exaggerate restlessness and greed. True peace—inward or outward—requires energetic commitment to high ideals. True success—spiritual or material—also requires an energetic commitment to high ideals.
Spiritual success means to see oneself part of and cooperating creatively with a greater reality than one's own. Material success is to understand that success is the result of cooperation with others for the good of all.
Silence as the beginning and the end of all striving shows us that the beginning of all things lies in the Over-Soul of God-consciousness while the goal of all striving should be inclusivity that leads to Self-expansion towards the Spirit. Thus, a return to Silence.
As the Spirit made the choice to create so we, as part of God, are blessed with the choice to either encase ourselves into identification with form, or, to expand beyond form back to Spirit. Does this imply a rejection of form?
The road back to silence begins with the understanding that the human challenge is the hypnosis of our encasement in human form. Nonetheless, our indwelling Spirit can, if we are listening to its whispers, remind us that the real "We" has no form and no boundaries. But rather than reject form, however, we can learn to fulfill the duties imposed by our forms while also identifying increasingly with the indwelling Spirit of the Self. Seeing the transcendent in the ever-changing forms is the solution. This has been called the BOTH-AND solution.
Ultimately, mindfulness represents the co-existence of transcendent Self-awareness (silence) with form (movement and sound) even as each presents a different face and experience when taken alone.
Meditation cannot be successful unless its gift of mindfulness permeates activity. And meditation cannot be successful unless the discipline and focus required of outward success is applied to meditation.
We have entered the new age of BOTH-AND. It is an age of inclusiveness, of co-existence, and cooperation in the light of the greater realization of the Self.
Nayaswami Hriman is co-spiritual director with his wife, Nayaswami Padma, at Ananda Washington, located near Seattle WA. www.AnandaWA.org. Ananda shares the teachings of Paramhansa Yogananda, author of “Autobiography of a Yogi,” and those of its founder, Swami Kriyananda, a direct disciple commissioned by Yogananda.
