Class - Silence

Transcript has been edited with Sat but has not been finalized
*Sat is abbreviations for Sathyam

Summary: Sat talks about practicing the Silence

Class begins with a meditation.
Sathyam: Tonight I am going to talk about silence. How many of you know through your own experience what silence is?

A woman says: It’s hearing of nothing, Seeing of nothing. You are nothing
One of the men says: It reminds me of that one meditation you had us concentrating on all the noise in this place and what you brought up at that time was that silence is kind of like a table, if I can make that analogy. Everything is on the table, and that silence is the base.
Sathyam: That is exactly right, because if we don’t have this discrimination of where the silence stands, all we are going to hear are noises, because we cannot find the silence. So, tonight we are going to experience silence.
If I may ask to close your eyes and just relax in yourself. Just be aware of the silence, if the thoughts come, just search for that silence. You don’t have to push the thoughts away. See if you can feel it or find it.


Meditation takes place for a few minutes

Sathyam continues: Slowly open our eyes. Again we shut our eyes and look for the silence- that is all we do. And when we feel it, we stay in it.



Meditation takes place for another few minutes

Sathyam continues: Slowly open our eyes.
Sathyam: Now, what we all need to exercise here is to be able to go into silence at a moment’s notice. But we can’t do that unless we practice it. Do you see what is happening? If you never practice that, when someone says, ‘Go to the silence,’ you search your body for it. Silence is beyond the body, there is no word for it. We might search for it in the body first but it has to go beyond that, why? It is because we have to allow it to be unlimited. Why is this so good and why is this so important? It is because if we do not become accomplished in the Art of Silence, the mind will increase its thinking and continue and continue to increase its thinking and it will convince us that every thought is important.
Normally the best way to start is to bring your eyes inwardly to the region of the heart. There is a sheet of silence, there is no color, and there is no activity of the imagination.


Sathyam goes into a meditative state

After a few minutes She says: Slowly open your eyes. Are you guys able to sink in better as time goes by? Is it getting calmer for you? If every person on this earth knew how to go to the silence, there would never have been any wars, any killings, or any hurting of any kind. This is because in that silence there is so much peace that no one would think of anything else. This is how important this silence is. Yet if we leave it to ourselves as the mind and body, it would be the last place we would go to, but it is the most important place for our well-being. You might not agree with what I am saying, which is just fine, but no accomplishment in life is as important as a man or a woman who can sit silently and be completely o.k.
One of the men talks in length about how he has been starving the mind to not give it attention and how it resulted in him feeling depressed, as a way for the mind to try to get his attention in this new manner.
Sathyam: The best way for stopping the mind is the natural way, which is you Just Stop. If however, the mind knows that you have made a decision to starve it, then the same mind that says ‘I am going to starve it,’ is the same tool that says ‘I don’t want to starve.’ It becomes the game of the mind.
I don’t know how many of you were here last week, and I really need to express this. I saw a very silly program on TV called the ‘Super Nanny’. I was just prompted to watch it and thank God I did, because maybe this example will demonstrate to all of us how to do the Stop Meditation, that’s the one we have been working on for the past year and a half.
On this program, the children were obnoxious and completely out of control. But the good thing about it was that it really was not their fault, neither was it their parents’ fault, because parents don’t know better and the children follow their parents. Their life was a chaotic and obnoxious life; I do not say that as a judgment, but rather as a description of how it was. The nanny asks the parents about how long it usually takes to put their child to sleep. They respond by saying four or five hours. The nanny then instructs them to put their child in the crib, sit on the ground next to the crib, facing forward, so their child would be able to see their profile and to just be quiet, with the eyes half closed. This is ironic because that is what we try to do here. The child will come out of the crib, and you continue to sit quietly. You put him back in the crib and continue to sit quietly. You continue to get up and put the child back and sit quietly. This process was really hard for the mother, and she almost broke down and was in tears, because she could not stand to see her child screaming and crying. Finally after about twenty five minutes, the child went to sleep.
This is exactly what I mean by Stop Meditation. The mind thinks; we have no tactic-there is no tactic. We don’t want to eliminate the mind, we don’t want to do this or that, we just sit.
A few minutes ago, one of the gentlemen talked about the mind’s tactic to get his attention by acting depressed, as far as I am concerned that was absolutely the truth. Ego is duplication of who you really are. Depression is the reflection of the ego and the ego always wants to manipulate the attention towards itself. The best way to not have this problem as much is to just not have a tactic. This is because any tactic that is used, is used with the same energy of the mind. It becomes homeless in the mind.
Now, one of you is studying really hard, the rest of you work really hard… What is there to do for those of us who are so involved in the world daily? Every day, no matter how busy we are, we should be able to take two to five minutes every hour and just be quiet. Otherwise, the world that we have made by our thoughts becomes so serious that any small failure would be a great failure in our eyes, as would any small changes.
Tonight, we are going to practice silence and stopping. With your eyes half open, even if they want to shut, for the purpose of this practice, keep them half open, and just be quiet. The mind can do whatever it wants to, you just stay quiet and unmoved.

Meditation takes place for a few minutes

Sathyam continues: When you are that unmoved, the mind cannot make a friend or an enemy out of you.
Sathyam: Now, why do I ask you to keep your eyes half open? The reason is when you have your eyes half open, you learn to feel that silence and that indifference towards the mind, while you are active. This is because I know people who learn how to meditate and it becomes very much a habit for them. So much so that they can’t wait to finish their work, get home, close their eyes and meditate- which is great. But wouldn’t it be better to master it, so that you can do that while you are sitting at the library, when you are at the office, or working on the computer, doing whatever you need to do daily? This is why we do it with the eyes half open or fully open.
Now, I think pretty soon we will begin to understand the Stop Meditation. I know it has been very hard for all of you that listen to this over and over again. But hopefully, little by little, what I mean becomes clearer and clearer by our practice. This is because Stop Meditation is really the end of the mind, without having eliminated the mind or having done anything to it.

The mind that condemns you for having eaten a steak with the fat around it is the very mind that encourages you to eat the steak with the fat around it in the first place.
Again bringing you back and say Namaste. Thank you very much for sharing tonight, but remember to solve the daily problems is to solve the riddle of the mind. And to solve the riddle of the mind is to be in the being of who we are, and not becoming.
This would eliminate the excess, do we push the mind away, do we invite it, do we love it, do we fear it, do we accept it? We just sit like Buddha did, unmoved, unmoved! And when I say ‘sit’, I don’t necessarily mean you actually sit down. What I mean is that you go through life’s activities like that; we are unlimited, unbounded, Absolute.
Namaste


Excerpt from Class- Silence
April 19, 2005