What Is Real Silence?

You are never in silence. You have this thought, ‘I am in a transitory state of silence’. You have set yourself a goal call silence and you have told your mind that you want to attain it. So the mind obliges by giving a few seconds or a few minutes of what appears to be silence. But this is not real silence. It is just the mind taking a different form. The silence of no-mind, of no thought does not come and go. What come and go are mental states that you program yourself into having.

You have desires and you put a lot of mental energy into accomplishing them. You are attracted to beautiful things. Your mind goes out to them. You try to obtain them for yourself. But things are only beautiful because your mind has made a judgment about them. The things you classify as beautiful may not be beautiful for anyone else. Look at this flower in the vase. Somebody put it here because she thought it was beautiful. But if a goat comes along, the goat mind will see it as food and eat it. No thought of beauty will arise in the goat. Goats of the past teach the goats of the present what is good to eat and what should be avoided. This is stored in the current generation of goats, who are all conditioned to be attracted to certain things because they know they are edible.

So, what is desirable differs from person to person, and from creature to creature. A diamond has no value in the hands of a man who has not been educated to know that it is worth something. For him, it is just a worthless pebble. But when your mind identifies it is a diamond, this otherwise piece of charcoal suddenly becomes immensely valuable. It is just a piece of carbon, chemically no different from charcoal. But when your mind gives it value, then for you it has value.

What I am trying to say is this: you have decided what is desirable and you are working towards it. You think, ‘I want mental silence, so I will make a great effort to make my mind quiet’. You have chosen to strive for a state which you call silence. You have decided that silence is desirable, so you put a lot of effort to try and reach that desirable state.

But I say, ‘If you are choosing and striving then you are still living in the mind’. The efforts you are making are mental, and the goal you have set for yourself is also mental. The experience of a state you have chosen and striven for will be mental.

If you want eternal rest; if you want eternal silence; if you want the state of real silence, then you have to be choiceless. Your true nature is choicelessness. As long as you choose and strive, the experience of your true nature will be hidden from you.

If you want real silence, you have to give up all ideas about attaining it or striving for it. You have to give up all your searching. And having given up all your searching, what will be left? I will tell you. What will be left will be what was already there before you started running around looking for it.

It is so easy. You are the one who is making it complicated,