Silence...

Stop thinking of silence as a lack of noise -- mental noise, emotional noise, or the external noise around you. As long as you see silence as something objective, something that is not you but might come to you like an emotional experience, you are chasing your own projected idea.

Looking for silence is like being on a motorboat racing around the lake looking for a smooth spot where everything is silent, and there you are -- vroom! vroom! -- racing around with increasing anxiety that you are never going to get there.

No matter how long you raced around that lake you would never find this silence. Actually, all you have to do is throttle back and turn the key off, and then there you are. Then it is very quiet, very still.

When you start to be receptive and allowing, you start to return to your natural state, which is very quiet. Being receptive is just like throttling back. It is a natural state of quiet.



~ From: Emptiness Dancing, by Adyashanti