Episode Transcript
The Power Of Silence by Ajahn Brahm
For this evening, I want you to give a talk on the spiritual power of silence. But not just the spiritual power. Also the therapy which you get from learning how to dwell in silence, how it solves so many physical and mental and social problems. Just recall, I think it was, um, one of the great, uh, philosophers. And who was it? I think it was Laplace who said that all the problems of human beings come from not knowing how to sit still. It's a very interesting saying there that because people just move and speak too much to create some problems in life. And I've got to be careful not speaking too much tonight. The talk on silence I will be speaking and being a complete hypocrite by praising silence and speaking for about an hour. That's had to be a bit careful, because I just came back from New Zealand last weekend and I was teaching at a conference there, and it was very extreme hay fever in Auckland at the time because the grass was out in full force and much pollen was there, and many people also suffered from hay fever. And I was being very critical of the sheep in New Zealand for not eating the grass. If they'd have done their job properly, there would have been no grass and no pollen. So it's a sheep's thought. But anyhow, just about the nature of silence and how beautiful it is that every time if you are sick, or if you have got a problem in your your life, it's wonderful just to be able to sit still and have a bit of quietness inside. But unfortunately, quietness is such a hard thing to find in today's world. Many people say that we are living in a very materialistic society, but you can also say we're living in a very noisy society. We're so hard to find a place just to sit down and be silent, and especially like someone like me travelling around the world. They get to an airport and it's so noisy. I once went into one of the the chapels and meditation rooms in the airport to now try and get a bit of peace and quiet and do some meditation. And of course, after only about 30s, please do not leave your bags unattended. Paging Mr. So-and-so. You know your flight is about to board and all this other announcements which were going on in the quiet room and there was this noises anywhere else. And just like, you know, in town, if you are having to do some shopping, it's so noisy in shops is music in elevators is always sound. It's so hard to get away from sound. But fortunately we live in a country where there's lots of open spaces, windows, open spaces. You can find places of silence. You can't find these beautiful temples of peace. I remember as a kid growing up in London, which was a very, very noisy city, but you could always find a church or especially a cathedral whenever you were tired, whenever the life was a bit overbearing, you just go and find a quiet place to sit. And I used to love, and as a Buddhist, I wasn't a Christian even when I was very young. 16 I call myself a Buddhist, but still I would gravitate especially to great cathedrals, to sit quietly on the benches, sir, not to worship anything other than silence and enjoy the refreshment you got from just sitting quietly. I remember a man came and told me once he was visiting Bangkok, and he was very interested in Buddhism, but was very hard to find someone who could teach him what Buddhism really meant. But he found some of his answers in experience when he went to visit a Buddhist temple in the city. Those of you who've been to Bangkok notice how busy and noisy it can be. He was visiting a temple and he noticed a girl sitting on one of the benches in the temple, crying her eyes out. She was distraught about something, but not really knowing the culture of Thailand. He thought, I don't think I should intervene, but he felt like he was concerned about this woman who was obviously suffering quite intensely. So he went off to visit the temple inside. And when he came out, maybe 20 minutes afterwards, he noticed this woman had stopped crying and was about to get up and leave. He couldn't help himself, but just go and ask her. Is anything wrong? Is there anything I can do? And she could speak English. And she replied, no, I'm fine now. What happened was I'd lost the keys to my car and I came in a temple, and all I needed was a quiet place just to cry. For 20 minutes now I'm fine, thank you very much. He learned one of the reasons why we have Buddhism, or any spirituality, to provide quiet spaces where we can allow the turmoil and problems of life just to subside long enough to be able to see what needs to be done. Keys to her car. She can always find the spare set of keys. Get a taxi home or something. It's not the end of the world, but unfortunately, sometimes we think it's the end of the world when we're not quiet. Sometimes we can exaggerate things. And this is one of the reasons why quietness or silence can be an enormous therapy. And while it's great to have places in our world which don't need to be dedicated to any religion, but just places of silence where people could just go. And just relax and just be. And allow the natural wisdom of their own minds to come forth and show them just what they're crying for is only a small thing, and there are solutions, and there's something more. So the tears and the pain of life can be softened and parsed forward can be found. You didn't need to sort of go talking to people. He just needed to provide a space where life can talk to them. It's as if there is wisdom all around us, as if insight is right there for the taking. But when there's too much noise, we just can't hear life teaching us. So silent places are places where we learn how to listen. We are great talkers. And I don't mean just with our mouth. We are great thinkers as well. We talk, we think, we talk, we think, and we listen very little. Silence teaches us how to listen. When we're talking to somebody else. Of course, we can't be listening. One of the stories I often mention in my meditation retreats is the story of monastery down at serpentine. One day, passing by the kitchen, when people were making the meal for the morning, and there was, I think, six Thai ladies as only Thai ladies this day, it's the same when Sri Lankan women or men or anybody else is actually serving the food or making the food for us. That particular day had to be six women in our kitchen, and I noticed all six women had their mouths open talking, and there were only six in the kitchen. And if six people were talking, I wondered who was left to do the listening. And the answer was no one was doing the listening because everyone was busy doing the talking. And that's a good metaphor for life. So many people are doing the talking. There's no one left to do the listening. No wonder people never understand things. And even if your mouth is not moving very often, your mind is moving. Moving with the inner conversation, which means we don't listen to very much in life. My life or partner or the birds are speaking to us. We're too busy thinking about life to really listen to her and understand something. Another simile which came to my mind was a simile, which I think I haven't mentioned for a long time, but it was actually a simile which I wrote about in my book, which was again one of these moving experiences for me, where you understood a bit deeper about the nature of life and wisdom and also pleasure by an experience when I was a student, as a student. Again, I was I was a Buddhist, and I gravitated during the vacation periods to the quiet places of the world, mostly to the Scotland, to the the north of Scotland, to the Moors, where you could just wander around without seeing anybody for a few days. On this one occasion I was on the north west coast of Scotland. And it was one of these beautiful summer days. Very often it's cold, wet and rainy. But every so often in the summertime, you get this perfect days. And that northwest coast of Scotland in the summertime is Paradise. You couldn't really conjure up a more beautiful scenery and is so quiet and remote and unspoiled. Just walking along the coast road there with moors and mountains to one side, beautiful cliffs and little islands dotted in the ocean as far as you could see, bright green and glistening in the sunshine. And all the seabirds were just wearing what I called euphoria at the time. And seeing all this beautiful scenery and having all the time in the world to enjoy it, because I had no place to really go. Plenty of time just to walk to my destination. No mobile phones. No duties. Just walking. Enjoying every moment of a beautiful part of our world. And of course, I was totally silent until I saw a car parked up ahead of me on the roadside. There was a car parked there that I assumed. No, because I was stupid. I assumed that someone had been driving along that road, and had also noticed this incredible beauty of this day in the summertime, in this place, and also to stop to enjoy the scenery. When I got close, I found the person wasn't looking at the scenery though. Reading a newspaper. This big newspaper was right in front of them, covering up the beautiful seascape. Mountains, grass, sunshine and all they could see was the news. And I thought, what a wonderful metaphor that is of life. Because what we read with our minds is all the words and the descriptions. And what do they have in newspapers? I know they have the the cartoons, and that's what I always read first when I get a newspaper. I really recommend the cartoons first of all. But they also have they have the wars. They have the fraud of this government or that government. They have the terrorist attacks. They have all this other nasty news about life. And that's what you see in the newspaper. And I thought that what a shame this is that just on the other side of that newsprint. And it's only maybe 1 or 2mm, you have the beauty of the world, and it's just a gorgeous day. And at the time, again, being quite a cheeky person, I haven't stopped being cheeky. I thought of actually getting a pair of scissors out of my backpack. I'd only need to cut a small hole in this newspaper so you could see what was on the other side, but I was very thin in those days, so I was an underfed, poor student. And this guy was a big, hairy Scotsman, and I didn't fancy my chances if he got aggressive with me. So I just passed him by to read his newspaper while I enjoyed the day. But that metaphor stayed with me. How many of us read the newspaper in our mind so we never really hear? Listening. Being enjoying. Always thinking. Now what do we think about? We think about the stuff of newspapers, the scandals of our life. The difficulties of the financial crisis, the ethic of who's going to win the sports tomorrow or the society or the scandal, the gossip pages. That's actually what we think about. This is stuff which we read about in the newspapers, reflects just what we read, what we think about in our mind, that sort of stuff. Now, I think you can understand just a few millimeters on the other side of all that. Inner speech is a beautiful silence where you can actually enjoy the world. Well, this is beautiful things happening. But between you and the beauty of life, we have all of this inner chatter. And again, most of it is negative. Just like in the newspapers, however, there are times when you're almost forced into silence. There are places and occasions where the silence of the outside is just so strong, it tends to make you put down the newspaper of your mouth and also of your thinking. You become silent. I think many of you have had moments of such silence and peace in your life, and there are moments you will cherish forever. For me, it was as a young man going to those cathedrals where nothing moved. We could just sit down and everything just resonated with silence and peace. Sometimes you go into the bush. Australia is a great place simply because you can go not so far out of Perth and you can be alone when no one is talking to you. Were you not thinking where the silence envelops you and gets right inside of you and makes you shut up? So you become one with that silence and you can listen to yourself and listen to life and listen to all wishes around you. Even if it's not in the bush. Even in pers, even in your suburb, you can get up early on a Sunday morning. The dawn is what, about just before 5:00? 4:45. You can get up early on a Sunday morning because in Australia no one gets up that time of a Sunday morning except monks and nuns and people on retreat and other crazies. Well, sometimes you see people on the streets at 5:00 in the morning, but those are people who haven't gone to bed yet. But it's still a very quiet time of the day. And in that quietness you can enjoy the peace, the silence of an otherwise very noisy city. Even in monasteries, sometimes people can talk too much. But I still remember one of the amazing times of my life, one in the mornings, which I will never forget. When I was staying in England at a very new monastery, that one of the first monasteries which our tradition built in England. In Sussex, there was a winter time about now because I had gone to visit my family. I think it was the first time after several years that I went after living in Thailand. I went to visit my family for Christmas and this monastery had just been established. And it was one of the coldest winters in England at that time. In a typical British news sheet. They showed me the headlines -26°C. Even the beer froze. But that following morning, even though it was just so cold, I went out for a walk in the forest early. Not many people were up, let alone outside of the house in such cold weather. But I remember that walk in that forest even now, because as I walked in the fresh snowfall, he looked down in the freshly fallen snow and there were no prints of any animals, let alone human beings. The snow had fell the night before. Now it's like the first. The first person on earth to walk in that forest. Now she walks. Nothing moved. There was no wind or even breeze. Not even the leaves fluttered when I stopped. The whole world stopped moving. All the animals were hibernating. Nothing stirred. It was so silent. The course. My own mind went silent. When you face with such profound and deep and powerful peace. Your mind can't resist resonating with that peace. It's as if the peace gets right inside of you. Just like the cold can do. But this was not unpleasant. You became one with that peace and became one of those magic experiences of my my life. Just walking and then stopping and enjoying the power of silence. If you want to know what spirituality is. You'll find it in those extreme moments of silence. But it's not just incredibly pleasurable. It's also so therapeutic. Many of the problems of life, as I quoted that philosopher at the very beginning, come from not knowing how to sit still. And he didn't mean physically. He meant mental stillness. You find that our mind moves so fast, and it does think. And our nature of our thinking mind is always to think negatively. Unless a job of people like me to keep pushing the positive thoughts. Are you going to think that? Or you might as well think the positive side of life. But even better than thinking positive thoughts. That is calming the thinking mind down so much. There is no newspaper in your mind, neither comics, so neither comics nor financial crisis, but just absolute silence. Because in that absolute silence, when there is no words flowing through your mind, when there's nothing to do or to react to, everything becomes just so calm. It is that calmness which first starts in the mind, which sifts into the brain, which then just cascades into the body. And healing happens. I think you know that some of the interesting events which I am privileged to go to, not just going to conferences, but last August I went to this leadership conference. It was called a leadership retreat in Hayman Island. It's amazing, as a monk who's got no money, no credit cards, no bank accounts. I get to stay in his five star retreats. There with Prime Minister and with the deputy Julia Gillard and all his premiers and all his big shots. I get to stay there for free. If that's not an advertisement to become a monk for a nun, join the Sangha and get to all these amazing resource. Which is the last evening after dinner. And of course, I don't have to. I just sit at the table and talk to people. So will this dervish stuffing food in their mouth. I'm sort of talking to them. It's a great time to convert people because they can't defend themselves. Let's not eat. Joke. But after the dinner, this this biochemist started talking to me and she wanted to sort of connect and network with me because she knows just how. Especially senior Buddhist monks know the nature of meditation, how it works. But she had been doing some research, cutting edge research, to notice actually what she called a cascade from a thought in the brain to how it cascades through the nervous system and affects the bodies, especially with cancers. She could actually tell me how she could actually see the cause and effect of one thought in the mind, and how it affects the tumour. And now we a lot of people know that happens. But how it happens, just the whole relationship, a whole cascade of events. She called it twice. They actually make that tumour grow bigger, or to actually to suppress it and to shrink it. So you could see that. And that's why she wanted some networking with me as a meditator, just to how we can even control something, for want of a better word, just the way we think. And I know from my own experience in that silence. That is even the best thought of all the no thought. Because in that silence in that piece, that's really where a lot of physical healing happens. I know Arjun Shah's story, my teacher being a forest monk living in the jungles. He had malaria for many years. It was for those monks, an occupational hazard. Just like these days. For covered monks, having tummy ache is an occupational hazard simply because, as I told you, I don't own my stomach. You put whatever you want into it and sometimes my stomach says no. But nevertheless, you get to peace with that. But his occupational hazard was malaria for many years, and I remember him telling me that how he overcame his malaria once and for all, having a very intense attack of the fever. And instead of just laying in bed sitting up meditating with it. It is stead of running away from the thief or complaining about it, worrying about it. What most people do. When have you got a problem with a disease or a tumour or whatever? We think about it too much. We create more problems by the way we react to them. But instead he sat with it. He said he sat right in the centre of his fever, quietly, silently. Her peace with it. And it's a very hard thing to do. But it's a wonderful thing to train yourself to be able to do, to be able to make peace with pain or with a fever or with difficulty, to make absolute peace with it. So you don't even think you're just there at one with what you're experiencing, not making any inner speech with it, he said as he was just with that, he sort of felt like he was in the centre of a raging forest fire, but in the centre it was cool. But he could perceive that all around him was a fire getting hotter and hotter and hotter, which was his fever increasing in intensity. And they said at one point the fever got so hot. At first and everything was cool. He never got that malaria ever again. Just by making absolute peace and silence with it, a healing happened. Other experiences. The meditation. Meditation retreats. Always remember this one man. When I was teaching a meditation retreat in Sydney many years ago and a nine day retreat, and you know that people are supposed to be quiet when they're meditating. But this man. He was breathing so heavily through every meditation sitting. So much so that someone came up to me to complain. Can you please tell this person to keep quiet? I'm trying to meditate. He had a tumor in his nasal passages, blocking both nostrils. It was terminal. The doctor had given up surgery, chemotherapy, radiation therapy. The doctors had abandoned him and he came to the meditation retreat as the last resort. So when I told all the meditators that they felt very embarrassed and guilty, that they were complaining about someone who's only a few weeks to live. But he told me that the last day of the retreat, breathing loudly again, but not thinking, being silent, he heard a pop. He said he could breathe again. That's what he said. A pop as his nasal passage cleared, but only for about 5 or 10 minutes. Then it closed again. There was an amazing thing which happened. I thought then that meditation was working, but he left it a bit too late. I never thought he would survive. Few years later, teaching meditation in Sydney, this guy came up. Do you remember me? He said, of course I don't remember. Who are you? As a monk. I'm honest. And he was that mad. He cave with his meditation and his nose had cleared. And I was going around teaching people how to be peaceful, how to be silent because his cancer had gone into regression. Even though he should have been dead years ago, now is the power of such silence is very therapeutic to your body. Because when you think you create stress, when you create stress, you create the disease. You feed it. When you're silent, you're not feeding anything. You're quiet just like that forest and everything has a chance when you get out the way to balance, which is what disease really is. It's an imbalance someway of the body and all you really need to do the body is telling you, please get out of the way. Let me deal with this. Because the body has evolved over so many hundreds and thousands of years of learning how to deal with things, but we think we know better. Get in the way, think too much, and send our bodies sick and make ourselves crazy in the process. All thinking misses. All thinking misses the point, said the great Zen master Rinzai. We miss the point when we have this inner conversation with ourselves. And of course, that inner conversation also creates so much mental disease as well. On Friday, I was very happy to give a keynote speech at a Psychosocial Rehabilitation and Recovery Association. And here I am sort of teaching professionals about how people get through their mental illnesses or drug problems or grief or other things which I have in life, and how they move out of that first few positive thoughts, but then with silence. So wonderful thing, because in that moment of silence, you're not judging yourself. And, you know, the problem with with anybody who's had any difficulty in life. We judge ourselves and become stigmatized, stigmatized by the fact we may have been in prison, stigmatized by the fact that we've had schizophrenia, stigmatized by the fact that we've had a drug dependency, stigmatized by the fact you lost your job or you've separated from your loved ones. And that's stigmatized. Where does that come from? Thinking too much. It's terrible to have that stigmatized, because what astigmatism is that it sticks to you. It's stigmatized, I call it. And once it's stuck to you, it's very hard to get it off. It becomes who you are when it becomes who you are. As most psychologists. Known as a monk. I know this what you think you are. You become. If you think you're stupid, you become stupid. If you think that you are hopeless, you become hopeless. If you think you're worthless, then you make yourself worthless. And sometimes it's so hard to actually to cut that sequence of thinking which creates you to find a circuit breaker, something you can actually stop this process, which reinforces so the stigma which has been given to you, and you accept and you reinforce and you become. And the greatest circuit breaker is the silence. Because when your silence is as if this whole process, this cycle of thinking gets interrupted for a while, and instead of listening to the thoughts, the names, the judgements, we listen instead to life. Who you really are, not who you think you are. Because who you think you are is mostly what you've been told you are. Who you are is something very different. Nor have you been told, but who you perceive. In the beautiful silence of the mind. It's just a fact that all the great insights or the penetrating wisdom of every spiritual tradition happens in the silent moments of our life. So if you really want to be wise, find those silent moments. Create the spaces in life where you could have silence. Have a room which is a silent place. Find a position in in your office where you can just sit down and just shut up and be quiet. And everyone else is not allowed to talk there, or have places in society where people could just go and not be taught. Not be spoken to, but a place where you can just sit quietly and just be. That's all you need. And a huge amount of healing will happen in such places. Even sometimes when people have lost a loved one. When his grief. What happens sometimes with grief? People tell you, oh, never mind or you'll get over it. And sometimes so much information gets into a person's mind is already screwed up with too much thinking about their loss. It just makes things worse. Sometimes there's a bit of silence can be very, very effective. A good example of that. Again, one of these events, which being a perceptive mind, a monk, you could see, you could value and you could learn from rare events of tragedies of life was in the monastery in Thailand where I grew up. One morning we're having our one meal of the day. We had it very early, about 9:00, and a woman burst into our dining room. She burst in and started shouting. She was actually crazy. She was flailing her arms up and down. Now that was completely the wrong etiquette. You just don't do that. And this is about 30 years ago. Traditional Thailand in the northeast. In a monastery. That's just not done. So actually, I stopped eating like everybody else. Wow. What's happened? But the abbot of the time, who was a former, uh, spiritual director here, Ajahn Chakra. He looked up and then looked down and carried on eating. And I didn't really understand what this man was doing. Look, the lady's in trouble there. Go and speak to her. Ask her to do something. But he just carried on eating. I know the meals are very important for monks, but there is something else going on here, and I couldn't wait to find out what he's up to. And this lady was flailing her arms up. It soon became clear what she was saying, though. One of her disciples had shot herself, committed suicide that morning, and this lady, her best friend, had found her. Imagine finding your best friend with a bullet through her head, dead and shaved after calling the police or the doctors as well to make sure that she was dead, came straight to the monastery as the place of refuge, a place where she could get some help with her own trauma of finding her best friend had shot herself. She came in there, so chins killed her. So she shot herself an urgent chakra. The head man just carried on eating, and after a while her arms were flailing less and the acuteness of her voice started to lessen until she stopped and was silent. It was at that moment that Jacquot put his spoon down, stopped eating, and said, what happened? It was a brilliant moment of what we may call emotional intelligence, of wisdom. I've given this woman time of silence to allow the intensity of her emotional hurt, to calm down, to soften, to heal her. So I change. I could find out and we could all find out what happened and then work from there. Silence is such a wonderful thing. It does calm people down. For anyone who's in anger management and that includes everyone who's married. There is a boss of work. Or maybe there's an abbot of a monastery in anger management. Sometimes people, when they get angry at you, they raise their voice and they speak very, very fast. It's a wonderful thing just when they're shouting at you loud, fast and aggressive. Just to be peaceful. And if you talk, you talk in a very slow way. It calms people down. It's true. You could see just how that affects you. And, you know, you should be wise enough here that you can affect people and you can actually soften people's anger just by the silence which you can surround them with or the softness of your voice. For those of you who have a difficult person you live with, I should have given this simile in the talk I gave a couple of weeks ago. And how to deal with difficult people is when they argue at you and they shout at you. What usually happens? The mistake many people make is as soon as they finished, then you start shouting at them. Next time. Hopefully you can remember to practice this when they finished shouting at you before you begin your shouting. Pause in silence about 10s. Because in that pause of 10s, you will find that you're giving them the opportunity to listen and reflect on what they've just said and how they said it. In that pause, because you are not speaking, all they can do is be aware of the echoes of what they've just said. And that is amazing when they have to listen to their own words and they have to feel the effect of their own venom, you are giving them an amazing opportunity to reflect on what they've just done it, and you don't need to be the person who tells them. You need to be the person who gives them the space so they can hear what they've just said. It's a very powerful method of helping people overcome their anger towards you. Silence gives you the space to listen. But if you shout back at them, they've got no chance of understanding what they've just said. And it's the same with the silence after you said something. If you pause, you hear the echoes of what you just said and you know whether it's worthwhile or was just something which was stupid. After a while, you become wise, insightful into the skill of communication because you know how to listen in silence to yourself. The reflective wisdom which Buddhism was always encouraging, what we call insight. This is how it happens. How can anyone become wise unless they listen in silence to life? To themselves. To their heart. When we're too busy talking. And not listening. We learn very little. This. The silence gives us the space, the opportunity. Clears the channels so he can listen very, very well. I should say about health, though. People just stay run around so much and I run around as well. I'm very, very busy, man. But sometimes I listen. I stop and listen to my body. My body tells me what it needs. If I listen to it, it tells me, look, you should really lay down and have a rest. But it's 3:00 in the afternoon. Look, said my body, lay down. Have a rest. I listen and I follow because my body is far smarter than me. When you learn how to listen to the body, it's amazing how healthy you can become. The body. Tusk gives you the sides. Every doctor know before a heart attack. There are many, many signs, but we just don't listen. Any other disease in the body? There are signs. The body is telling us some tension. The. Some tightness is some stress, sir. But we just do not listen. If you listen, it's very easy. You don't even need to see the doctor. Well, it's good to see the doctor, but suddenly you just know how to relax that part of the body. To be at peace with it. To allow the body to balance. Problems in relationships. The the sickness of living with another person. Which happens now and again. How many times is that happen? Marriages, relationships, falls apart. And the other part is said, like I've been telling you for years, you just haven't been listening. It's a communication problem. And that's true because married people very rarely know how to listen to each other. You got to listen in silence. Spend moments in silence between each other so you can feel each other. Not with your hands, but with your mind. In the silence, you know you become intuitive. A communicator is someone who can listen in total silence. What I sometimes called total listening. Total listening means when someone's talking to you, not thinking. You don't wander off into the future and thinking what you're going to say next, and how you're going to counter what they said. You're totally listening, absorbing the information without taking notes, without making preparations or plans of what you're going to do next. Totally in this moment. Total silence. I've taught that to school kids. They found the ability to absorb information goes up incredibly. They can listen to their teacher in the class. They can listen to their lecturer. They don't try to remember. They don't plan. They don't have counter-arguments. What they're saying. That's stupid. Shut up, for goodness sake. Because if you're talking, how on earth can you be listening and absorbing the information? Not just with schoolkids or at university, but each one of us in our careers. We always have to upgrade our knowledge. We have to read the manual for the latest software. We have to keep learning and that's a pain. Sometimes it takes so long, but you don't know how to be silent. To be able just to listen, to read without a thought going on in your mind. To absorb the information without trying is an amazing skill. But when you learn how to be silent, that's how it works. I know many people. One girl who told me she medicine at Melbourne University. Was it? Yes, it was Melbourne. Top every year first class honours because she knew how to meditate and be silent when the lecturer was speaking. Exams came. Make her mind absolutely silent. Read the question in silence. First thought which came up in her mind. Wrote it down. Perfect answer. The power of silence is immense. You can become a very successful person in your life, in your work. If you know about silence, you become more efficient in learning and in performing. When you're not thinking all the time, you become a much better lover for your partner. You're not thinking all the time a much better partner, a much better parent, a much better child, a much better monk. When you learn how to listen more and speak less. But the most important part of silence. Is the sheer pleasure of it. Thinking is such a pain. It drives you crazy sometimes. Isn't it wonderful? If you could find a button in your brain somewhere, if you can find some sort of mechanic to pull a little switch, and there's some in the back of your head so you can turn your thought off whatever you want to. I love silence now disconnect. Only you won't have a sort of a stupid look on your face. You'd have a big smile on your face. Because thinking takes up so much energy. The inner speech drains you of power. But the silence. Is electric. And the longer you maintain that inner silence, the more power builds up. You feel this surge of mental energy which gets so strong sometimes you end up crying in bliss. The power of silence is immense. Whenever you start thinking, talking, we waste so much energy. That's the long time ago. I remember reading a medical journal which says that the brain uses more energy than your legs and arms combined. A huge amount of energy goes into thinking, and that's one of the reasons the monkeys can see me. Actually, I don't eat that much when I eat, but because I don't think so much, my brain doesn't use the energy, so it all goes to my tummy instead. I've often said that there are other reasons. Once put on weight is because we don't worry so much. Look at that fat Buddha. Don't worry at all. No wonder he put on weight. So this is what happens when you have silence. But the best silence of all is when the whole world stops. Just like in that forest at winter time or in some of these amazing caves I used to hang out at in when I was in Thailand. Deep caves I love caves because the very deep ones. Doesn't matter what's happening outside, you can't hear it. It's dark. It's still. And it was so beautifully silent. I know it's the source of places. No matter what you were thinking, what worries you had? There's a whole place to soaked up all your thinking. He just stopped. Her mind was silent. Wow. This is what life is all about. Getting to these beautiful places of silence and peace. And we don't want to give that silence a name. Because as soon as we give that peace and silence a name, of course we're disturbing it. That's why that, you know, in the early. Well. Let's go. Not so early. I think in the Jewish tradition, they would never actually put a name to God. They'd have, like, dots in the manuscript and in the ancient carvings on Buddhist temples, they'd have like an empty seat or a footprint. And they wanted to give things names in the ancient world because names disturb the silence. Instead of thinking about things, we learn how to be calm and quiet. So she. Why that sometimes now, when Christians come and tell what's the difference between Christianity and Buddhism? We do have some overlap. One of them is in Psalm 26 be still and know that thou art God. It says. Be still. Be silent. Shh. Stay there long enough. And the world speaks to you. Who speaks to you? You don't have to learn it from a book. And for goodness sake, you don't have to listen to all the CDs about anyone. What am I talking about, anyway? All these talks that I've given. Somebody actually wrote, I think, from New York. They were listening on the iPod on one of these, um, iPods, which had 150 talks about them from, let's call sort of an addict. So I won't have to listen to so much. Instead of actually doing what all those talks are supposed to be pointing you towards. To be silent. To have moments of peace in your week, in your life. Most when you're not doing anything except for stopping. Getting away from it all is not going to Bali. Getting away from it all is just sitting quietly and allowing their mind to enjoy the beautiful silence and mystical peace which is there all the time. There you will find all the wisdom, all the healing, all the power and the love you ever want in the world, because it all comes from the great source of silence. Ah ha ha! And samba suck. Fuck a rock, Tong Bhagawan. Tug of war. Davey. So I cut off. I go, ah da da da da da da my. Sorry. So party partner. I like a lot of song. Like a saga song. Kind of.
