[ living silence, dept. ]
In aware living, I’ve noted recently that there’s a gentle moving into, as it were, the silence of being. Indeed, there are less noisy and chatty occasions in the head and heart, and there’s an abiding recognition of actually, factually, only – ever and always – living in complete unknowing. Only in silence can the mind really be transformed; living in the unknown happens. An unknown that’s free and freeing; empty and full. Never contradictory, always paradoxical. There’s a deep and deepening urge, (aka, the peace of one’s self-nature) that can and must only be responded to, by, and with, silence.
IN SILENCE, BELIEF FADES IN THE LIGHT
Indeed, it seems I’ve consistently been used and abused by the very words I thought and believed were true – words studied, crafted and polished that gave me as a writer, something to say, to indicate and profess a certain knowing. For decades, words gave my life a freighted meaning and purpose; they seemed to satisfy my life-long need to know and control, or at least, to pretend to know and control. They gave me hope and dispair, dreams and nightmares, pleasantries and placibos that kept me running thru personal storms and floods toward a better, new and improved tomorrow. There was no place, no space, for silence.
Silence was too mute, too impotent and empty of meaning and the force and the identity, posture and position I seriously felt and unquestionably knew must be ‘me’, James. Words spoken or written, printed or broadcast, were really true; they gave my self-image power and place at work and at home, accommodating and accumulating admiring friends and spawning dreams of a satisfying and successful career strewn with stars, fame and fortune. As ad writers, producers and directors, we plied our trade moving ambitiously along glassy corporate alleys like bakers with little white vans, going door-to-door from ad agency to agency, kneading our daily bread and serving it up as something millions of consumers needed to desire and believe in – even if, at bottom, I always felt desperately empty at the end of the day.
A GRACE IN SILENCE
Well, that was then, and this is now, as they say. As love and the fortunes of folly would have it, The Story and the Beliefs enshrined in words have faded along with the Believer, and I find myself more daily faced with the wordless, the meaningless, the thoughtless. ‘The seat belts are off,’ and one is free to roam the cabin, so to speak. 
One is amply enriched by the fullness and beauty of being everyone and everything in general and in particular, and that innocence and intimacy presents itself lovingly in this living, ambient silence.
One is amply enriched by the fullness and beauty of being everyone and everything in general and in particular, and that innocence and intimacy presents itself lovingly in this living, ambient silence.Out of that silence, these words seem to emerge, and into it they dissolve. All that in truth remains is a silence that’s nothing but peaceful, beautiful and joyful. And one never, ever, knows – or needs to know – what will happen – what event(s) will transpire, what words about them, if any, will arise to express and perhaps to delight and inspire. That’s the wonder of simply resting in silence, in stillness, in curiously passive awareness of it all.. as it passes. That’s living in love, yes 🙂
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