A follower asked, "You said the false self is the self looking at itself in the mirror of itself. Does this mean I need to eliminate all self-reflection?" "No," the Sage said, "what is gotten rid of is not the mirror but the demand that you look at yourself in the mirror. There's nothing wrong with the mirror and nothing wrong with looking in the mirror."
Two traits of the false self, or egocentricity: 1) I am what I see in the mirror. 2) I must look at myself in the mirror.
*Brian K. Wilcox. "Meetings with an Anonymous Sage."
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A Zen story -
Four monks entered a period of silence. They agreed not to speak for four days. This agreement lasted less than a day, when the tranquillity of the quiet ended during the night.
First monk: "Oh, no! The candle is out."
Second monk: "We're not supposed to talk!"
Third monk: "You two broke the silence."
Fourth monk: "Ha! I'm the only one who didn't speak."
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This humorous tale connotes the challenge silence poses to us. I am often amazed at how people enjoy hearing themselves talk - how they must hear their voices. They think they are talking first to others while talking first to themselves.
Something within demands that many persons entertain themselves through their chattering on and on: self-talk projected outward for others to listen to. This something is attached to experiencing itself through speech, whether the speech appears meaningful or meaningless. This is so because the sense of a separate self cannot exist without mirroring itself to itself. The mirror of the false self is the false self.
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Reflecting on my own experience with silence and that of others who are devoted to it, it seems the following is the journey from silence to silence -
1) The silence of the womb.
2) Entering the sounds, talk, and noise of the world - joining it, adapting to it as one's way of life.
3) Detaching from sound, talk, and noise through a yearning for something "deeper" and cultivating that through a spiritual path and practice. Decentering the ego by denying it its self-reflection through habitual talk.
4) Experiencing a condition of heart-mind wherein one realizes - experientially - silence is what within which all sounds arise and dissolve.
This means the ego-centricity of ego thrives on self-reflection. The practice of silence is like denying the false self the air it needs to sustain its fascination with itself. Egocentricity is the self admiring itself in the mirror of words and actions.
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Denial is only one side of this practice, however. Cultivation is another. We all have within us what Zen calls seeds. These seeds are innate capacities that we can join with to nurture. This has been called "basic goodness" in Buddhism. We are gardeners of these qualities of our true self. In Buddhism, we can call this Buddha Nature. Or we can refrain from calling it anything, for it is not a thing.
Thomas Keating, for example, founded his teaching of Centering Prayer as a technique leading to Contemplative Prayer. The latter is similar to the Zen practice of Shikantaza. In Contemplative Prayer and Shikantaza, one is simply in what we could call presence - beyond any meditation technique or means of prayer.
When we practice silence as a method of meditation, we are, in time, ushered into a spaciousness where we do not want to use a technique. We do not want to use a mantra or prayer word. The silence has been drawing us back into itself. We will resist letting go into the silence, or, better, allowing the silence to continue to pull us into itself.
Subsequently, there comes a time when we may return to some method, or we may not. We may sometimes use a technique, sometimes not. Now, the silence plays through form, including sound; yet, we have no attachment to the form, and the silence is sensed as the background from which form arises. Sound is experienced as the dance of silence. The world becomes God's dance.
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How do we move toward detachment from the egoic need to hear ourselves, including knowing others hear us? How do we move through the resistance to silence, pulling us into itself more and more? How do we move into a subtler listening beyond words, so we can experience formless wisdom arising into the receptive spaciousness and intuit others beyond what they are saying and doing? We sit with the ego fussing and crying. We are refusing to placate its felt-need to express itself so to sustain its reflection of itself to itself.
Then, we welcome and nurture a deep, satisfying quiet that relishes the nothingness - the zero - that silence is. We come to see silence and ourselves are one reality. We experience silence, so ourselves, as a profoundness, a fulness much more satisfying than we dreamed possible. We feel more deeply, a feeling, or subtle sense, richer than emotion. We can better listen heartfully to others, discern their needs, and act more aptly in compassion. How wonderful the freedom from the inner push, the incessant rush, to be heard and seen!
