Silence is essentially all that you are. You are not anything other than silence. It is the space in which everything arises, and everything that comes out of it is passing phenomena: thoughts, feelings, sensations, stories. They come and they go. The only thing that remains is the silence, and that is your essence – what is essential to you, without which you would not be you.
This is why I call silence the most powerful teacher and healer. Words and instructions can never take you to the place that is beyond the mind. They can point, but they cannot carry you there. Only silence can.
What the mind really is
To understand why, it helps to be clear about what the mind is. The mind is not its own thing. It is a thought, and then another thought, and another, and another. The collection of thoughts is what we call mind.
Ego is the illusion of an identity that is creating those thoughts. So we have ego, which sits like an umbrella above the mind, and the mind, which is simply a collection of thoughts.
The point of meditation is to move from identification with ego and mind into spaciousness, into silence. Silence is so profound because within it, the mind is no longer leading. The mind is no longer ruling. The mind is seen for what it is – simply thoughts arising and falling by themselves – and the ego is seen for what it is – an illusion.
Why suffering lives in thought
Anxiety and psychological suffering only take place in thought, in the mind, and with an ego. It is only the ego that suffers. Thoughts, mind and ego, and the trance-like effect they have of sucking us in, create the sense of suffering.
In an ultimate sense, that suffering is not true. As soon as someone steps out of their stream of thought into silence, into awareness, they see very clearly that the suffering is being created by the thinking mind. And when the thinking mind is creating suffering, it is always tied to identity.
If there is no conceptual identity, there is no psychological suffering. There can still be physical pain, but there does not have to be an identity attached to it, or a narrative, or a story, or psychology attached to it.
This is where psychology can be completely transcended. From a non-dual perspective, psychology is a wave on the ocean compared to the vast spaciousness of awareness. It functions in a very small bandwidth, on the top layer of the waves. All of psychology is built around the analysis of thoughts and identity, on the notion of a self. But any notion of self is entirely conceptual and held in thought, because you cannot conceptualise what you are. You are silence. You are awareness, and neither silence nor awareness can be conceptualised. Any idea you hold of yourself is a fiction, and it is this fictional self that suffers. It is the one that has anxiety and fears, desires and disappointments, that experiences loss and psychological pain.
Why silence is the deepest healer
Silence heals because when someone recognises themselves for what they are – spaciousness, silence, awareness – they see very clearly that past traumas, anxieties and scars do not exist in the way they believed they did.
Before that recognition, we live in a chronological timeline. This is how the mind exists: through time and space. But awareness, the infinite, is outside of time and space, which means it is outside of mind. When you step out of the mind into spaciousness, anything that supposedly happened in time no longer exists as it did. You recognise it for what it is now, in this moment, and what it is now is a thought. That’s it. Just a thought. An impersonal phenomenon, arising and falling by itself.
When you are embedded in silence, in awareness, in consciousness, thoughts don’t have the same effect. They don’t have the same impact on the body. Thoughts and feelings lose the magnetic pull they had on each other. When you recognise your being as pure silence, pure awareness, consciousness, there is no longer any trauma. You see very clearly that it was all happening in the mind, in a realm you are no longer operating from.
“But when I sit, all I find is noise”
This is very common. Almost everyone experiences it when they first start to meditate. The point of meditation is to reach the place of silence, spaciousness, love, beauty and oneness that lies outside of thought, and at first it can be very hard to get there. It can take a long time.
What worked for me was a non-doing practice. Not a meditation that focuses the mind or sharpens attention and concentration. Not focusing on a candle, a mantra, the body or the breath. All of these actually enhance and tune the mind. What we want in meditation is to relax.
The deeper you go, the more you find that it is always about letting go. Letting go of a belief, letting go of an identity, letting go of a stream of thoughts, letting go of a notion you had of yourself. As you let go of more and more, you go deeper and deeper into the spaciousness and the silence.
In practice, sit comfortably with your eyes closed. Closing the eyes limits distraction and turns awareness inward, where it can naturally deepen. In my experience, stillness is found inwardly first, before it begins to move outward. Thoughts will become hypnotic and pull your attention away. When you notice that, just notice it, and come back. There is nothing to do and no right or wrong. The only thing to avoid is creating aversion: if thoughts come, don’t push them away. Let them be exactly as they are. That is the essence of non-doing. If this is hard at first, guided meditations from teachers who speak from stillness, using the direct path as their approach, can help.
Just sit, and allow yourself to be exactly as you are. Don’t attach to anything. Don’t try to change anything. Allow everything to occur as it occurs, and don’t make it an objective. If the mind, and the thoughts that are trying to get somewhere, can get out of the way, consciousness will do the rest. Silence will do the rest.
Don’t make meditation another task
People ask how long they should sit, and how often. It is individual for everyone, because there is no instruction book or framework that can take someone to awakening. The most important thing is to follow the inner calling, not a structure the mind has made.
For most people the mind is in complete control. It is the general governing their life with instructions: constantly fixing, planning, improving, changing, every minute of every day. The trap to watch for is meditation becoming another product of the mind, a task with a reward attached. I’ve done my meditation, I’m good. I haven’t, I’m bad. That is how the mind operates all the time, judging itself as good or bad, productive or unproductive, against the goals it keeps setting and the conceptual self it measures itself against.
Non-doing meditation should never become an item on a to-do list. It wants to come from a gentle, subtle pull inside, a tug to go deeper and inward, to rest in what is true rather than in the noisy chaos of thoughts. Like the urge to sleep or to eat, it is an intimate calling from the body. That was very much my experience.
The clearest thing people say when they arrive in that spaciousness is that they are home. They are truly themselves, and everything else was clutter that was never really them, or even really there.
When the pain is loud
People often ask whether silence makes pain worse. When you are hurting emotionally, sitting in silence can feel unbearable. Everything gets louder.
This was very close to my own experience. What drew me deeply into this came through loss and suffering. I didn’t want to escape that pain in the usual way. I didn’t want to run from it, block it out, bury it or build on top of it again, layering and masking it with new identities and new beliefs. That is what so often happens in psychology and psychotherapy, and it is one of their great limitations.
So I was pulled to silence, and it was the most intense thing I have ever done. Meditating in silence on retreat, with no distractions of any kind, for the first few days the noise and pain from the mind were so loud that I could barely sit. I could barely keep my eyes closed. It was survival. But I stayed with it. I didn’t run. I turned and faced the thoughts and the noise head on.
From there came an enormous shift, a seeing. It was crystal clear that there was nobody who wasn’t good enough. When that was seen, something lifted physically from my body, and I laughed uncontrollably. I walked on the beach, still in silence, laughing and laughing, because when that was seen through and let go of, there was so much light.
It took about another ten months of continual meditation for that to integrate, deepen and stabilise. But I came to see that the suffering I was experiencing was an advantage in this process. Every time there was suffering, I was pulled deeper to see more truth: who was suffering? What was suffering? The ego was writhing, and I didn’t act from it. I let it scream. I let it be on fire, and I sat there as if strapped into a cinema seat with my eyes pinned open, watching it. It was the most painful thing, but that is all the ego has, and if you turn and face it, you will see through it.
Before seeing from the space of silence, we are so governed by the mind. Everything is driven by the conception we have of ourselves, narrative after narrative of who we are, relayed over and over again. We live through a thick layer of ideas about ourselves, and the mind is always in charge. Do this. Achieve that. I need to get this. I need to change that. This will make me happy. I need to fix this.
It is like living in a tiny room with a television on very loud, and no escape. Then you find a door. You never knew it was there, but it always was. You open it and step outside, into the most glorious meadow, a hundred acres bathed in sunlight, lush green trees everywhere, a river running through it. You run into the meadow and look back at the tiny room you have been living in. You can still hear the television playing, but it has no effect on you now, because you are running free, and the meadow never ends. You have entered a different universe.
And everything playing on that television – all the narratives, all the injustices, all the pain, all the hurt, all the history – simply dissolves. It was only relevant while you lived in that room. Outside, in spaciousness, in truth, in silence, you see it for what it is: a faint chattering that has no bearing on you, because it is not who you are. You are the awareness, and awareness is untouched by anything that happens in the story.
Silence is love
Silence is all that lies outside of thought and mind, and therefore ego. It is the eternal, timeless presence that we all are at our core. The quality of that space is love. It is also contentment, joy and peace.
When you rest in, or as, that space, everything is one, and so everything is a manifestation of love. It is the mind and the ego that divide. When the ego divides, there is conflict, comparison and jealousy, good and bad. Remove that division and what remains is one: everything arising from the same moment.
Think of what we mean when we say we love someone. We mean we feel so connected to them that we are not divided from them. The feeling of being undivided, united, one, is what we call love. When you are resting in awareness, in that beautiful silence, everything is one. So everything is love. Silence is love.
Working with silence in therapy
If someone arrives caught in anxiety, in a stream of thought, or in the aftermath of something dramatic, the work is to help them separate very gently from that thought process. Nothing too extreme and nothing out of reach. It has to happen at the right pace. Movement towards seeing truth, towards living in spacious awareness, is a process, and much of it has to happen first on a psychological level, because that is where the person is living.
The non-dual psychotherapeutic work is to zoom out slightly, to take a wider perspective. Moments of space open up, and those moments grow bigger and stronger. Depending on where someone is, that perspective can keep widening until they are resting in total peace.
If you would like to explore this work together, you can read more about non-dual psychotherapy and how I work.
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