Silence Is to Be Realized

The first Noble Truth is the understanding of suffering, and the second is the insight into letting go. The suffering that we are talking about comes from attachment out of ignorance, out of habit, greed, hatred and delusion. We tend to react to sensory impingement: either wanting the pleasant or not wanting the unpleasant. So the tendency is to react and grasp, and grasping also implies trying to get rid of something.

Then the third Noble Truth is the realization of cessation, nirodha. Cessation does not mean the ultimate cessation of everything, where we go into a kind of blank vacuum; it is the mind empty of ‘I am’, where there is no grasping, no hatred, and no delusion, where there’s simply the realization of what we might call ‘the empty mind’, or ‘the silence’.

Silence, then, is to be realized; it is not to be believed in or created. We cannot make silence; and we cannot realize it by going into a pitch-black cave where there is no sound. It will be silent in a cave like that, of course, but if there has been no insight into suffering and the origin of suffering, the moment the cave is left, noises and the things that come into sight will upset us.

Of course, it’s pleasant not to have things impinging on the senses but if, out of ignorance or greed, we attach to that stillness and silence, that sensory deprivation, we can easily feel very angry when it is disrupted; we may even feel like murdering someone! So, that can’t be the kind of still silence the Buddha was talking about! He couldn’t have been talking about a silence that is dependent upon conditions which, in this case, would be a lack of sensory movement.

If I have to go away from you now to some place where nothing harsh, exciting, or agitating will come to me and find ‘stillness in myself’, there has been no insight. The stillness and silence experienced through sensory deprivation will just be interpreted from the ‘I am’ position. Then, as soon as the silence is broken or disturbed, it will be upsetting, and anger will arise. The silence of the cessation of suffering is now; it is here and now, in the mind. We don’t have to go anywhere to get it.

If there is a realization of cessation (the third Noble Truth), then the way things happen to be in the moment on the sensory plane, whether harsh sensory impingement, painful sensory impingement, pleasant feelings or beautiful sights, they are not really the issue any more. One can bear with conditions when the silence is not from denying or rejecting but from understanding, from letting go, from realizing that all is subject to arising and ceasing.

Then even in movement there’s stillness and a peacefulness that all of us can experience and know directly for ourselves.

This reflection by Luang Por Sumedho is from the book Ajahn Sumedho Anthology, Volume 3—Direct Realization, (pdf) pp. 225-226.