NISCHALATWAAM PRADAKSHINAM

SILENCE is meditation and silence is basic for any religious experience. What is silence? You can create it, you can cultivate it, you can force it, but then it is just superficial, false, pseudo. You can practise it, and you will begin to feel and experience it – but your practice makes it auto-hypnotic. It is not the real silence. Real silence comes only when your mind dissolves: not through any effort, but through understanding; not through any practice, but through an inner awareness.

We are filled with sounds, outside and inside. In the outside world it is impossible to create a situation which is silent. Even when we move to a deep forest, there is no silence – only new sounds, natural sounds. At midnight everything stops, but it is not silence – only new sounds, sounds you are not acquainted with. They are more harmonious, of course, more musical, but they are still sounds, not silence.

John Cage

A modern musician and composer, John Cage, has said many times that silence is impossible. You can have musical sounds, you can have non-musical sounds; you can have sounds you like and sounds you do not like. When you do not like sounds, it becomes noise; when you like noise, it becomes music: but you cannot have silence. Cage said you cannot have silence!

Cage reports one incident...

He thought previously, before this incident, that silence is a possibility, but he had not meditated over it. Once he entered a hall in Harvard University built particularly for some scientific engineering purpose. The hall was absolutely soundproof and echo-proof, absolutely. He entered the hall, but he has an ear, so he found some sounds. He is a great musician, one of the greatest of this century. In that hall he began to hear two sounds: one a high sound, another a low sound.

He said to the engineer-in-charge, ”You say this hall is absolutely soundproof; you say it is echo-proof. But I hear two sounds: one high and one low.”

The engineer said, ”The high sound is your nervous system working and the low sound is your blood in circulation.”

Cage says, ”That day I become absolutely certain that, unless I die, silence is impossible.”

Silence is impossible in the outside world, and your nervous system is part of the outside, not of the inside; your blood circulation is part of the outside world, not of the inside. The real inside is absolutely silent. If you allow, I will say that the absolute point of silence is the inside. Sound is outside, silence is inside. ”Silence” and ”inside” are synonymous. If you move out, then you move in sound. If you move in, then you move in silence. You must reach a point where no-sound is, or as the Zen Masters say, the soundless sound. The Hindu yogis have always called it anahat nada; the uncreated sound of silence.

But one need not use these paradoxical words: it will be easy to understand with simple words. Outside is sound, inside there is silence, soundlessness. But Cage is right. If you are thinking in terms of objective silence, there is no possibility of silence. If you are thinking of silence as being somewhere other than your inner center, then there is no possibility of it. But you can create a pseudo silence very easily. You can cultivate it, you can practise it.

For example, you can use any mantra. Constant repetition will give you a pseudo-feeling of silence, a false feeling of silence. Constant repetition of a mantra hypnotizes you. You begin to feel dull, your awareness is lost, you become more and more sleepy. In that sleepiness you may feel that you have become silent, but it is not silence. Silence means that the mind is dissolved through understanding. The more you understand your mind, the more you become aware of its mechanism and working, and the more you are disidentified with your mind.

It is identification which creates inner noise. Anger is there in the mind: you are identified with it; you do not see it as an object. The anger is there somewhere outside you, but you begin to feel angry, you begin to become one with it. Then you miss your inner center, you have moved. Many thoughts are flowing in the mind continuously, the thought process is on, and you are identified with each and every thought. Any thought is yours; you become one with it. Then you have moved.

Not only with thought do you become one, but with things still further from your center. Your house is not only your house: you have become your house. Your possessions are not just your possessions: you are identified with them. When your car is damaged, your innerness is also damaged. When your house is on fire, you are also on fire. If all of your possessions are just taken away, you will die.

We are identified with our possessions, we are identified with our thoughts, we are identified with our emotions, we are identified with everything except ourselves. We are identified with everything except with the innermost center. Because of this identification, noise is created, conflict, a continuous anguish, tension.

It is bound to be there because you are not your house. There is a gap and you have forgotten the gap. You are not your wife, you are not your husband. There is a gap: you have forgotten the gap. You are not your thoughts, your anger, or your love, or your hatred. There is a gap. When you begin to feel this gap, you are always outside of it, a witness, not involved in it. With anything in which you are not involved, you are outside it.

If John Cage, as he reports, heard his own sounds – the nervous system working, the blood circulating – then two things are there: one is the awareness, the knowledge, the knowing, the consciousness. A point is there inside which becomes aware that two sounds are there. But he is aware of only two sounds. He is not aware of the center which is aware of these two sounds. If he becomes aware of this center of alertness, then those two sounds are just far away. There is a gap. And the moment your focus of consciousness is transferred from object to sounds, to the soundless center of awareness, you are in silence. So I would like to say that YOU ARE SILENCE, and everything else except you is sound. If you are identified with anything, then you will never attain this soundlessness.

This sutra says: ”Silence, stillness, is pradakshina, the movement around That for worship.”

You go to a temple and then you move around the attar of the deity seven times. This is a ritual of worship, but every ritual is symbolic. Why seven rounds? Man has seven bodies, and with each body there are identifications. So when someone moves within, he has to leave seven bodies and the identification with each body. There are seven rounds; when these seven rounds are complete, you are in the center.

The altar in the temple is not something outside you. You are the temple, and the altar is your inner center. If the mind moves around the center and comes nearer and nearer and nearer and, ultimately, is established in the center, this is pradakshina. And when you happen to be at your center, everything is silent. This silence is achieved through understanding – understanding of your anger, your passion, your greed, your sex, everything. It is an understanding of your mind. But we are identified with our minds; we think we are our minds. That is the only problem: how to be detached from our own minds, how to be divorced, so to speak, from our own minds.

I am reminded that Mulla Nasrudin applied for divorce.

The whole village gathered in the court. Everyone was just surprised, because Mulla Nasrudin was eighty-seven and his wife seventy-eight. The judge was also surprised. He asked Nasrudin, ”What is your age?”

Nasrudin said, ”My age is just eighty-seven – just eighty-seven!”

The judge asked, ”What is the age of your wife?”

Nasrudin said, ”Just seventy-eight.”

”And how long have you been married? How long have you lived together, Nasrudin?” the judge asked.

”Excuse me, my Lord, not more than sixty-five years – only sixty-five years!”

The magistrate said, ”I am surprised. When you have lived together continuously for sixty-five years, what is the reason for applying for divorce now?”

Mulla Nasrudin said, ”My lord, enough is enough!”

With our minds also a point must be reached when you can say enough is enough. We have lived with our minds for lives together, for millennia, but still the point is not reached where we can say enough is enough. We are still not aware that our whole misery, the whole hell that we call life, is because of our minds and the identification with them. There is no need to leave the world. The only religious requirement is to leave the mind, because the mind is the world. Sometimes we get bored, frustrated, fed up – not with the mind, but with a particular mind. Then we change it, but the change is not for no-mind. The change is yet again for another mind.

And that very thing happened with Mulla Nasrudin. His divorce was allowed. It was granted, and he was thinking, ”When I am free from my wife I will be free at last, and then I can sleep at ease.” But he couldn’t sleep that night at all. He was so excited. Not that the divorce was such an excitement: the moment the divorce was allowed, he began to think of remarrying again.

This is how we go on. Mulla was fed up with this wife, but not fed up with being a husband, not fed up with women. He was fed up only with this woman, not fed up with the mind which creates all these relationships and suffers. And within a week, a rumour appeared that he was going to marry a girl of seventeen. Everyone became disturbed – the whole village. He had sons up to fifty-five years old, grand-children and children of grand-children.

His eldest son who was fifty-five approached him and said, ”Dad, it does not look good to advise you, but to marry a seventeen-year-old girl at the age of eighty-seven is just absurd. And the whole village is against it, and moreover it is not good for health. It may even prove fatal to life.”

Nasrudin said, ”Do not bother about it. If this girl dies, I will marry again.”

This is how the mind goes on working. It is always changing outside things, things that are somewhere else, that are on the periphery. It never changes itself. The mind is the problem, and the mind is always looking outside, never in. A divorce is needed not with a particular mind, not with this or that mind, but with mind itself. With ”minding” itself a divorce is needed, and only then do you enter silence.