Silence Is Not Up to You

Q: My experience seems to move in and out of a sense of silence, and my actions sometimes come out of the flow and sometimes out of a separate sense of "me.” However, I’m seeing that I just need to do whatever is in front of me to do, just for its own sake.

A: I like your conclusion: "I just need to do whatever is in front of me to do, just for its own sake." The doings that come out of the flow don’t have anything to do with the limited "me" that you sometimes experience, but they are opportunities for exploring the real you. So the doings are important, but not for the reason we usually think they are.

In addition to being willing to do things just for the sake of doing them, also allow yourself to really notice and discriminate how true doing these things is and how much in the flow you feel when you are doing them—not to fix anything, but just to become very aware your experience.

It is natural that you will have genuine experiences of the silence and a sense of flow, and it is also natural that your mind will try to make that happen or question whether it is real or not. And it is natural that these two states will feel very different.

It is not up to you whether the silence and the flow are genuine or not, but it is up to you to fully experience them in whatever way they are showing up. Any shift or transformation will come out of the simplicity of just experiencing things the way they are, including all the ways they might be tight, mental, apathetic or stuck. Allowing things to be as they are is what heals them, but there is no formula for how quickly that occurs. What can seem like the same old reaction can actually be a deeper level of conditioning that is coming up to be seen.

By simply being with things just as they are, you also get to experience more fully the blessed moments when silence envelops you and the flow carries you gently like a newborn baby. It also becomes more and more possible to recognize that the silence and the flow are here even when the mind is busy.