Speaking without effort

Filed under Notes on 22. July 2007 » Comments

For a long time I’ve been attracted to the idea of not speaking, of simply giving up talking completely. Becoming mute. In this way, I imagine that it would be easier to stay centered and at peace, and to not get sucked into the conditioned ways of perception and behavior that seem to be kept going in such a large part by incessant talking. The conditioning perpetuates itself in the mind through compulsive thinking, mostly repetitive and unnecessary but absolutely vital for the ego to maintain its momentum. This compulsive thinking can manifest outwardly in constant talking and chatter, which means that people will try to keep the dialogue going either by talking to themselves in the head or by talking to someone else, regardless of whether or not anything needs to be said.

Now, I’m not suggesting that everyone should start behaving like robots and talk to each other for utilitarian purposes only. Not at all. Most people enjoy talking, and there is nothing inherently wrong with it. What we are looking at here does not necessarily mean that we need to stop talking, but rather that we investigate where the words are coming from.

Ironically enough I’m having a hard time finding the words for this, but it has to do with the concept of non-doing and the difference between a thought that comes as a result of an act of thinking, and a thought that comes from somewhere else, often described as intuition. Another way of seeing it is to split the mind into higher mind and lower mind, the higher being the realm of inspiration, intuition and creativity, while the lower is home to conditioning, compulsive thinking and the ego.

As talking is little more than outwardly expressing verbalized thoughts, the same split of higher and lower mind applies. Sometimes you speak through the conditioned mind, and sometimes speaking simply happens without you having to make an effort. It is the same with thinking or taking action; there is a great difference between an action that happens intuitively and an action that arises from personal effort.

When I contemplate the possibility of ceasing to speak, what I really mean is to cease speaking from the level of conditioning. To let go of the act of speaking and simply allow words to come if and when they are needed. This means among other things that you no longer prepare what you are going to say, but rest assured that whatever comes spontaneously and from intuition is going to be far better and more appropriate than what you could ever muster with effort and preparation.

It is an approach that has much deeper implications and goes far beyond talking alone, but applying it in this one area of doing will have a direct effect on how you do everything else. The idea of non-action is, as I take it to be, to stop acting on behalf of the person and instead surrendering to the will of God or, if you don’t like that word, giving yourself up to the service of life itself.

Talking (and consequently thinking) is a great area to experiment with this idea of non-action, and the simple practice of not making an effort to talk can reap great benefits in other areas of your life as well.

Being yourself

Filed under Notes on 22. March 2007 » Comments [3]

Have you ever felt exhausted from just being yourself? And by yourself, in this case, I mean the mind made personal self, the story based me. Some people have more capacity for role playing than others, but in my case, as with many others that have come to the spiritual path, I can’t keep it up for long without becoming literally exhausted. It takes so much effort for me to play along in the usually surface driven, banter infested world of the mind made self, that I’ve been forced to find a way out of it.

And I’m going to guess that since you are reading this, you are being forced to find a way out of this as well. Maybe not in the exact same way, but a common element in those that seek spiritual teaching is that their mind made selves have become too heavy for them to carry. It’s like you’re wearing a metal exoskeleton, something like a knight’s suit of armor, that you keep adding to by picking up bits of scrap and gluing them on — an ego is nothing more than a pile of concepts that you identify with, and the bigger and more complicated that pile gets the heavier it is to carry.

Good metaphor? I’m picturing everyone walking around like fully clad knights, all *clank clonk* and rusty as they drag themselves around all day long. Very much an external manifestation of what it feels like when you have a heavy sense of self, stuck in your own story and unable to move freely. Which is why it is such an amazing relief to be free of it, even if only for a moment.

When you experience a glimpse of freedom from that heavy personal self, one word to describe it is that you feel a sudden lightness. A sense of freedom that is even felt in a physical sense; in fact, it feels a lot like shedding a clunky old metal suit. All of a sudden being able to move and breathe with ease, much like a cat, or a bird, neither of which live life through a conceptual sense of self. Or like a child, which is something we can all relate to. I’ve even experienced this strange sense of feeling like I was seeing the world through the eyes of myself as a child, if that makes any sense. Almost like a flashback to a time when everything seemed new.

And although it may sound like fairy tale talk, we really can live and experience life as we did when we were children (or as if we were cats), a life in which being yourself is easy. And the key to this, or at least one way of putting it, is to become free of identification with the mind made sense of self. When you believe that your self is that bundle of thoughts in the mind, being yourself becomes hard work. But when your self is realized as the one self, God, life, source, emptiness, stillness, then being yourself is as simple as breathing.

On Introversion

Filed under Articles on 2. December 2006 » Comments [3]

When I read Jonathan Rauch's article Caring for Your Introvert in the Atlantic Monthly a few years back, I had an immediate recognition of what he described, about feeling drained by social interaction and about wanting to be alone whenever possible. I then went on to read books like Party of One by Anneli Rufus, Celebrating Time Alone by Lionel Fisher, and a nice little collection of quotations called The Wonders of Solitude