Meditation is not Enforced Silence

 

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Meditation is not Enforced Silence

Meditation means no-thought, no-mind, no words. They have all been left behind; one has come to an immense, infinite silence. But that silence is not dead, it is a singing silence. It is throbbing, pulsating with life. It has a dancing quality to it. You cannot see the dance; you can only feel it. You cannot hear the song but it reverberates in your whole being. Your every cell becomes bathed in it.

It is a tremendous experience of beauty, of bliss - but it is inexpressible. It is so vast that no word can contain it. The thing that comes closest to it is music, but that too just expresses it approximately, not exactly. Obviously, music is also sound - it is a very harmonious sound, but the sound is there. In meditation there is no sound, it is soundlessness. Everything has stopped, no movement, one has come to a complete halt. But the experience can only be described as a song, as a tremendous harmony. All these words fall short but these are the only words that give little bit of help. They are only fingers pointing to the moon. They are not the moon themselves, just fingers pointing to the moon.

Meditators kill their spirituality by trying to silence the mind. If one persists one can silence the mind.  We can repress it and there will be a certain kind of silence, but that will be the silence of a cemetery - forced, violently forced. Something has been crushed, something has been killed. a beautiful experience. That’s why so many spiritual practitioners look so sad, so serious. They have lost laughter, they have lost love, they have lost life. They themselves have committed the crime, they themselves have committed suicide. They are sincere people but a little bit foolish too. They missed the point.

They followed it literally but they did not understand the symbolic message. Meditation is silence, not an enforced silence but a silence that comes out of deep understanding, not repression. And then the quality is totally different. When silence comes out of understanding it is a singing silence, a dancing silence, and our life immediately bursts into creativity.

Everybody carries a song in their hearts which must be sung, whatever it is. One cannot know it beforehand; one knows it only when one goes understandingly into meditation. With awareness, when one reaches to one’s core, one finds that there is something which must be shared. It may be painting, it may be dancing, it may be cooking - it may be anything. It does not matter what it is, but one always discovers that there is something which one must share. One must create; one has to participate in existence through it.

That is true worship - when we participate in existence by creating something. God is the creator; then the only way to commune with him is to be a creator in our own unique way, in a small way of course. But we must do something creative. And this creativity should not be thought up by the mind, otherwise it won’t be true to our innermost core. It should be discovered in meditation.