A SoCal Weekend: On Silence

"Pay more attention to the silence than to the sounds.  Paying attention to outer silence creates inner silence: the mind becomes still... Every sound is born out of silence, dies back into silence, and during its life span is surrounded by silence.  Silence enables the sound to be.  It is an intrinsic but unmanifested part of every sound, every musical note, every song, every word.  The  Unmanifested is present in this world as silence.  This is why it has been said that nothing in this world is so like God as silence.  All you have to do it pay attention to it." -Eckhart Tolle


Silence.

As the harmonium fades to a whisper and voices cease to be, all I hear in this great hall is... Nothing.  A profound silence echoes so loudly in my soul that I finally understand the meaning of, "The silence is deafening." 

No, it's not that there's an awkward pause in a conversation between acquaintances. Nor is it two lovers at a rift who don't know what to say to one another.  That's not a deafening silence I've ever experienced. This emptiness, this lack of sound, this silence is deafening.

After a fifteen minute kirtan session with Krishna Das, after chanting the name of gods until my mind is not thinking, after the drones and bows of the ocean-like currents of beautiful notes fade into nothing, there is just silence and  it is ringing in my ears. 

Kirtan with Krishna Das is almost indescribable.  For when your mind stops and your body becomes nothing but winds of breath traveling in a vacuum, there's not much to say.  Das tells a story of love, a story from his time with his guru, Maharaj-ji. This quote sums it up:  

"Meditate like Christ.  He lost himself in love." -Maharaj-ji

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