You see more with your eyes closed. Enter silence, shut off the external world for a while and you gain spiritual sight. This is more meaningful than external sight. In silence you receive more
truth
insight
guidance
intuition.
Contemplation: Imagine your current surroundings to be a theater stage. The chair you’re on, the furniture around you and the nature and buildings outside of your house are the props.
Being only focused on the stage means leading a superficial life, empty, bereft of meaning. Then your greatest concern is what food you eat or the weather forecast. Your senses focus on the stage: You see, hear, smell, taste and touch the stage. Many are barely aware of corresponding inner senses: Inner sight (flashes and fragments of thought, memory, imagination, visualization, inspiration, vision), inner sound, inner smelling and tasting, inner touching. They think the stage is “real” and inner reality is “less real”. But it’s the other way around!
Some are so alienated from inner self it’s like they are devoid of spirit. They become super-materialistic-atheistic-nihilistic. For them, nothing exists beyond the stage.
Have you ever looked at life on Earth and wondered: What is this all about? What does it all mean? Who are we? Where are we? If you’ve ever felt skeptical of this whole “life” thing, it’s because you are closer to the truth. You are on the verge of discovering that it’s a theater-stage. “The Earth” is an anagram of “Theater”. It’s fun to become immersed in the play. You don’t want a party-spoiler reminding you it’s only a game. You don’t want me saying “it’s only a role!”. You wish to play your part with passion. But your health and mental problems start when you get too immersed in the play. When you take it so seriously, as if it were the only and absolute reality.
To regain perspective and great strength it’s enough if you become silent and turn inward just a few minutes a day. Even just 5 minutes a day will do. Most of your perceived “problems” come from the fact that you refuse to sit in silence for just a few minutes. You’re addicted to the noise, the stage, the screen, the drama, the illusion.
Exercise:
Pretend your entire surroundings are a theater stage with props. A lighted stage. Imagine you’ve been playing a role on this stage, your personal reality-show.
In your imagination, let all the lights on the stage go out, one by one, as you close your eyes. Shut it down. Allow the stage to disappear, send the audience home, let yourself sit alone in darkness and quiet. Stop the world.
Do what it takes to keep your mind quiet. Breathe at peace. Sit. Do nothing. We’ve switched off the circus show for a moment of rest. Instead of doing, trying, speaking, acting simply sit and be receptive. Imagine you’ve spent a long time being blind to reality and are just now slowly and gently awakening to it. Awakening to internal reality. Instead of judging what you perceive, allow any flashes, fragments, intuitions that present themselves, to present themselves. It doesn’t matter whether you agree or disagree with what you’re perceiving. When they outside stage is shut down, the greater reality behind it starts to emerge – at first slowly and vaguely, later in full view.
Yes, at later stages you can use the silence to voice intentions for your life, say prayers, contemplate on certain topics or thoughts, meditate, ask questions, etc. But for now, all I’m asking is that you get used to receptive silence, to looking beyond the stage.
We love movies and theater so much because they mimic what consciousness is doing. Consciousness stages realities and events. We are actors playing our parts. But “what is really going on” is always beyond the stage, found when you move from content to context. “Conspiracy theorists” are among the few people who understand this, but they habitually put a negative twist to hidden realities. A spiritually advanced person is like a conspiracy-theorist but without the excessive negativity.
