Silence—The Homecoming

Silence, interestingly, has a way of making one feel connected. We notice our mind is silent, and suddenly we are back at home.

A lot of the time our senses are taking us ‘out there.’ We don’t realize that actually the world begins in our hearts/minds (citta) and is triggered by ‘out there.’ The senses and their objects are constantly triggering our citta, so when we bring the [citta(?)] to a place of coolness and calm, we have a chance to look at what is triggering us.

This gives us the opportunity to understand how those triggers are affected by the outside world and how we respond to those triggers. A lot of the time we tend to blame what is outside of ourselves; we blame people, we blame situations, we blame the world. We still haven’t seen clearly that what manifests outside is very much a reflection of our mind itself.

It takes a while to realize that everything that happens to us comes from the mind, is created by the mind and is mind-made. But it’s not that clear at first because as human beings we have so many things going on in our minds. It wasn’t clear to me for decades, how to truly know without any doubt that what I see outside is definitely my mind.

We struggle so much because of that lack of clarity. We don’t clearly see how the mechanisms of our mind and body respond to things. It’s a very complex world. We double-react to things. We react, and then we react again. We find ourselves trapped in reactions.

But it’s not our fault. There is nobody to blame. If we want to blame something, we should blame avijjā. When I realized this, when I stopped blaming myself, I found freedom. It’s the freedom of realizing that you can take full responsibility for your mind.

This reflection by Ajahn Sundara is from the Article “On the Way to Liberation.”