Breaking the Inner_Monologue

      MOUNAM STUTIHI

”SILENCE is the prayer.” By prayer we always mean a communication, something said to the Divine, but the Upanishads say that whatsoever you may say will not be prayer. Prayer is not something to be done. You cannot do it. It is not an act; it is not your doing. So, really, you cannot ”do” prayer, you can only be a prayer. It is not related with any of your doings. It is a certain state of your being.

So the first thing to be understood is that man has two dimensions in Existence: one is his being, the other is his doing. Prayer is not part of the second. You cannot do it, and the prayer that is done will be false, inauthentic. You can be: prayer belongs to the dimension of being.

The body cannot do prayer, cannot be in prayer. The mind cannot do prayer, cannot be in prayer. The body is meant to do something; it is the vehicle of action. The mind is also a vehicle of action. Thinking is doing: it is action. So you cannot do anything with your body which can become prayer, neither can you do anything with your mind which can be called prayer, because these are both parts of the dimension of doing, action. Prayer happens beyond body and mind. So if your body is in total inactivity, passive, and your mind is nullified, empty, only then is prayer possible.

This sutra says, ”Silence is prayer.” When mind is not working, when body is not active, it is silent. One thing to be understood is that silence is not part of mind. So whenever we say, ”He has a silent mind,” it is nonsense. A mind can never be silent. The very being of mind is anti-silence. Mind is sound, not silence. So when we say, ”He has a silent mind,” it is wrong. If he is really silent, then we must say that he has a "no-mind"; no thoughts moving.

So, actually a ”silent mind” is a contradiction in terms. If mind is there. it cannot be silent; and if it is silent, it is no more. That is why Zen monks use the term ”no-mind”, never ”silent mind”. No-mind is silence! And the moment there is no-mind you cannot feel your body, because mind is the passage through which body is felt. If there is no-mind, you cannot feel that you are a body; body disappears from consciousness. So in prayer there is neither mind nor body – only pure Existence. That pure Existence is indicated by silence – mouna.

How to attain to this prayer, to this silence? How to be in this prayer, in this silence? Whatsoever you can do will be useless; that is the greatest problem. For a religious seeker this is the greatest problem, because whatsoever he can do will lead nowhere – because doing is not relevant. You can sit in a particular posture: that is your doing. You must have seen Buddha’s posture. You can sit in Buddha’s posture: that will be a doing. For Buddha himself this posture happened. It was not a cause for his silence; rather, it was a by-product.

When the mind is not, when the being is totally silent, the body follows like a shadow. The body takes a particular posture – the most relaxed possible, the most passive possible. But you cannot do otherwise. You cannot take a posture first and then make silence follow. Because we see a Buddha sitting in a particular posture, we think that if this posture is followed then the inner silence will follow. This is a wrong sequence. For Buddha the inner phenomenon happened first, and then this posture followed.

Look at it through your own experience: when you get angry, the body takes a particular posture, your eyes become blood-red, your face takes a particular expression. Anger is inside, and then the body follows. Not only outwardly: inwardly also, the whole chemistry of the body changes. Your blood runs fast, you breathe in a different way, you are ready to fight or take flight. But anger happens first, then the body follows.

Start from the other pole: make your eyes red, create fast breathing, do whatsoever you feel is done by the body when anger is there. You can act, but you cannot create anger inside. An actor is doing the same every moment. When he is acting a role of love, he is doing whatsoever is done by the body when love happens inside – but there is no love. The actor may be doing better than you, but love will not follow. He will be more apparently angry than you in real anger, but it is just false. Nothing is happening inside.

Whenever you start from without, you will create a false state. The real always happens first in the center, and then the waves reach to the periphery. That is why this sutra says that 'prayer is silence'. The innermost center is in prayer. Start from there.

But that is very difficult. The difficulty arises for so many reasons. The first is that you have never known silence, so the word is meaningless really. You have heard the word, you know what it means, but you do not really know what the experience of silence is, so it connotes nothing. The word falls on our ears; we believe that we understand, but nothing is understood. The actual word is unknown to us as far as experience is concerned, only the sound of the word is known.

Mulla Nasrudin was practising silence in a mosque with three other friends. It was a religious day, and they had taken a vow to be silent for twenty-four hours. This was to be their prayer. ”Silence is prayer”: they had heard this.

Just five or ten minutes after they started, the first man said, ”I wonder whether I have locked my house or not!”

 The second one said, ”What are you doing? You have broken the silence and now you will have to start again!”

The third one said, ”You fool! You have also broken it.”

Mulla Nasrudin was the fourth. He said, ”Praise be to Allah! I am the only one who has not broken the silence yet.”

They have heard the word ”silence”. They have heard that silence is prayer.

Why does this happen? When someone else was breaking the silence everyone was aware, but when someone was himself breaking it, he was not aware. Why? Because to them, to talk, to utter something, was breaking the silence. Really, you never hear whatsoever you say. When someone else says it, you hear it. You are so accustomed to your own sound and voice, you do not know what you are saying, that you are talking.

Another difficulty is that you are constantly talking inside, so when you utter something outwardly there is no difference for you. Inwardly, you were already talking. Now you have uttered something outwardly, but as far as you are concerned nothing has changed, nothing has happened. But when someone else utters something, for you something new has happened. He was silent before and now he has uttered something. If you yourself are talking within, then when you utter something you will not be aware. Someone else may become aware that now you have broken silence.

You are aware of others because inwardly you are constantly talking with yourself. A monologue, a continuous monologue is there. Awake or asleep, you are continuously talking. This continuous talk has become such a habit that you have not known any interval. When you are not talking inwardly, when you are talking with others, you feel relieved, relaxed, because when you are talking with others you are relieved of the duty of talking to yourself. And that is such a boring thing – to talk with oneself. You already know what you are going to say, and still you have to continue.

No one else can be such a bore to you as you, yourself, are. You have told a particular thing to yourself millions of times, and again and again you are telling it. You are not very inventive. You go on in circles saying the same thing again and again. Watch! Watch for twenty-four hours and note down what you are saying to yourself. Then you will feel a weird feeling and strange, to see that you have been saying the same thing continuously all your life.

Even in a single day, you go on repeating yourself. This has become just a habit, deep-rooted. And when something becomes a deep-rooted habit, you are not aware of it. It becomes automatic. The robot part of your body takes it and continues it. That is why silence is very difficult, because silence really means breaking the monologue within. It is not a question of not talking to someone else, mouna - silence - is not really concerned with others. Deep down it is concerned with your own monologue.

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