From the deep ocean of silence the question haunts the being: what is silence, life and death all about? There is no easy intellectual answer and perhaps there is no intellectual answer about all of this. However, it is an interesting pursuit to try to tackle these issues when you travel on the other side of the world most of the time where all that you knew before is being questioned to the core of your being.
Silence seems so beautiful and right, life seems so unimportant as you knew it before and death is present at the every moment as the mind struggles to find its path toward a new world, unknown, beyond comprehension, where all sounds are played and none heard, all images are seen and they all disappears and shows up again constantly, and all feelings are so unstable as a feather in the wind of a storm that often is difficult to trust them. What is silence, life and death anyway?
When you can get to the real place of silence inside where one thought meet each other, it is like arriving at the top of the all the worlds and as you come back everything seems knew at times and yet old at other times, and all things seems to make sense at one time and no sense at all at another time. It is a dance beyond proportions where harmony is played in the string of life but a different life that you are accustomed in the busy world of the ego trying to reach goals which in the view of this silence makes no sense at all. However, when you step out of this egotistic world everything makes sense even this world as it takes new meaning because it is for sure part of this life as we know it or we were not be here living it everyday of lives. The best use of this life is to live it and then compare it with a new life that you can uncover through the path of silence. So if we did not have this life how would we know that this new life is a royal road to peace and wisdom as this life as we knew it before is the road to pain and suffering.
When you look outside the bubble of the conditioning, beliefs and everything that you were trained and is being trained for, being trained to perform duties without much sense and to adapt to a chaotic social system dominated by war, violence and fear, you open your eyes and look outside the bubble that this world represents where life sparkles like a diamond or like the ocean in the afternoon being kissed by the sun shinning beautifully for the eyes that look and can see to see. Life as we know it lose all these details because we are so busy within with what we believe to be so important that we miss what is really within and we even miss its reflection in the world outside. It is a sad state of being to live in such ignorance with the eyes seemly open but not seeing, with ears seemly functioning well listening but not hearing anything, and with our feelings apparently intact feeling nothing because we are so numb full of goals and objectives dominated by the ego’s restlessness, compulsive desires, greed, envy, violence, fear and everything else in this line of thinking.
When all these questioning and insights knock at your door from the deep cave of silence, death shows up every once so often. Then everything seems to take such an urgency to find what is really real but without need to really do anything in the world outside, to accomplish any goals, to search for answers that do not answer anything because you are already doing what is most important. However, when the ego takes over your mind and fear seems to show at every corner, you tremble for a few seconds. Then you begin to really think and realize in these seconds that death like life and silence might have another meaning and not one we were trained to believe.
Do we really die or not? Is there such thing as death? Or there is a trick being played here in the wings of time and space that we have no idea about it. These things are not easy to answer not because the answer is difficult but because our mind is so trapped by the fear of death that it is difficult to step out of what we were made to believe. So we take the safe road and ignore that we are dying every second as the body withers toward its final and inevitable end that it is here for everyone young or old, good or bad, miserable or happy, rich or poor and so on as we remember the dualities that we can think of.
I guess silencing yourself is some kind of death. All the destructive thinking and behaviors begin to die as you dive deeper into silence and you begin to discover how terrible our egos are. The ego is the most predatory animal in this planet. You can think of worst predatory animal that you can find on the face of this earth and multiply his behaviors a thousand or millions of times then you will find a hint of how predatory our egos are. This is not a play in words and if you step outside de ego's world and look back into it, we are going to realize what I am saying. We human beings prey on everything. Our egos pray on women, men, children, our friends, family members, our spouse, our jobs and work colleagues, and the list goes on. This predatory behaviors take many forms some subtle and some very open. The worst kind it is the predatory behavior done in the name of helping our fellow human being, in the name of doing the good, and it does matter for whom because we are just trying to save our face and trying to help when you are not interesting in helping at all but our egos are interesting in prestige, power, and pride, or to pay for some of its enormous guilt.
I remember when my niece was small and she would cry and cry in the moment that my mother, her grand mother, stepped out of the house to go to the store. I guess she was simply afraid to lose the person who cared for her the most. I was studying behavior therapy in school to become a psychologist, and using this line of thinking I would let her cry instead of comforting or reassuring her, put myself in her shoes saying to her that things were going to be ok and that her grandmother would be back soon. I was trying to extinguish her behavior of crying as say in behavior therapy allowing her to cry as much as she could. I found out later that this was just a cruel way of acting and that my ego was just praying on my niece making a subject of an experiment. How was I glad when I found Carl Rogers, one of the wise psychologist of our times, with whom I had a close association and the main tenet of his line of thinking it is to respect and care for the other deeply be the other children, adult, rich, poor, black and white and so on; you treat them the same and with the same love. You listen to them carefully, you consider them as consider yourself, you put yourself inside their skin, their shoes, you don’t lie to them and you are not destructive to them so that they can grow healthy. You don’t use them as an object of experimentation. If you are in any kind of relationship you just cannot miss knowing more about Rogers’ philosophy and theory of psychology and education.
Let’s look at death in a deeper way and exploring what is going on here as I face it every once so often thinking of it as a possibility. I guess this is predictable after completing last week nine months of silence. The ego is desperate and it attacks you in all kinds of forms knowing that he is against odds beyond its comprehension. I am not sure some times that my body is going to survive this although for all that I have gone through so far due to pain and sickness with healing coming what seemed to me in the last moment gives a tremendous certainty that someone will be there at the end, someone that I am beginning to know. Also my dreams sometimes have been reassuring in this direction. The other day I woke up at my usual time for meditation, at early morning, and as I stepped out the bed for a few seconds I did not know if I was alive or dead. What an interesting feeling. It will be great explore this and more things next. (to be continued)
God Bless us all,
Antonio
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