Real silence, dhyāna, is stopping talking to yourself inside your head; is to get real mental silence. Now, that doesn’t mean that you have a blank mind. You are vividly aware of what is, only you don’t give it any name.
Each one of us is an aperture through which the universe is observing itself.
To understand absolutely, to be totally in control of everything, would be like screwing a plastic woman. Who wants that? See? Always, there needs to be an element of mystery. So the thing that is is mysterious to itself—but not completely, because if it were completely mysterious to itself, nothing would happen.
What would you do without death? Norman Brown made the point very cleverly in his book Life Against Death that it is only that we die that we have individuality. Death is what creates our individuality.
One always thinks of death as something lying in the future. I want you to think of it in another way: as something in the past. How would you know you were alive unless you had once been dead? This sense that we are here, that we are real—that, you know?—depends upon that contrast. All knowledge is contrast. That we go back in our memories, zzzhhhhht, and we find a place we can’t remember anything.
Gary Snyder, the poet, said once to me, “You cannot work effectively in the realm of good ecology unless first you realize that it doesn’t matter.” If you have the primary realization “it doesn’t matter,” then you are in the position of a surgeon who can operate with a steady hand. If your surgeon is so concerned about you that his hand shakes when he operates, you don’t want a surgeon like that. But surgeons who are excellent and very competent make all sorts of funny jokes while they’re operating upon very important people. And they talk to the nurses and flirt with them, and, you know, carry on as if nothing mattered, and so therefore have absolutely accurate and precise work. Because they’re not anxious. They don’t shake.
In order to do good work—politically and so on and so on—we have, first of all, to realize that it doesn’t matter. Then we have the energy to go into it. You can’t lift yourself up by your own bootstraps. It won’t work! It won’t happen! So: you can’t improve yourself, you can’t improve the world. Forget it! But then, suddenly, you have the energy available to do things that can be done.
At the end of August last, we had a conference at a Benedictine monastery where the good fathers invited a gaggle of gurus to be present—there were twelve of them—with 150 students who were priests, nuns, monks, ministers, educators; goodness only knows. We had this great audience. And what we did was that, instead of being merely talkative, we started at 4:30 in the morning to practice each other’s disciplines. You know, we attended the dancing and chanting of a Sufi master, we attended the Jesus prayer of a Greek orthodox master, we attended the zazen sessions of a Zen master, we had the services of two great yogis—Swami Satchidananda, et cetera—and three rabbis who were Hasidic, and we all joined in, and likewise, also, we attended the mass of the Benedictines and the divine office, which is the chanting of the Psalms. And we found in about one and a half days—we had five days in all—that there was nothing to argue about!
When you get beyond words—which is what I was trying to show you—when you get into that state of consciousness where you’re not talking to yourself, but you are simply experiencing what is, then you begin to be at the level of the divine.
Talking and discussing these things is very much like the art of cookery, and you can overdo it. And so there comes a certain time when the soufflé is just right.