Small Transient Clouds - Vast Open Sky

“To genuinely understand the cause of suffering and our potential release and freedom from it, we have to look very closely at this root of human suffering: When we believe what we think, when we take our thinking to be reality, we will suffer. It’s not obvious until you look at it, but when we believe our thoughts, in that instant, we begin to live in a world of dreams, where the mind conceptualizes an entire world that doesn’t actually exist anywhere but in the mind itself. At that moment, we begin to experience a sense of isolation, where we no longer feel connected to each other in a very rich and human way, but we find ourselves receding more and more into the world of our minds, into the world of our own creation.

So what’s the way out? How do we avoid becoming lost in our own thoughts, projections, beliefs, and opinions? How do we begin to find our way out of this whole matrix of suffering?

To begin with, we have to make a simple, yet very powerful observation: All thoughts – good thoughts, bad thoughts, lovely thoughts, evil thoughts – occur within something. All thoughts arise and disappear into a vast space. If you watch your mind, you’ll see that a thought simply occurs on its own – it arises without any intention on your part. In response to this, we’re taught to grab and identify with them. But if we can, just for a moment, relinquish this anxious tendency to grab our thoughts, we begin to notice something very profound: that thoughts arise and play out, spontaneously and on their own, within a vast space; the noisy mind actually occurs within a very, very deep sense of quiet.

… the silence or quiet I’m talking about is not a relative silence. It’s not an absence of noise, even of mental noise. Rather, it’s about beginning to notice that there is a silence that is always present, and that noise happens within this silence – even the noise of the mind. You can start to see that every thought arises against this backdrop of absolute silence.”

Adyashanti. “Falling into Grace. Insights on the End of Suffering.” Sounds True, Boulder, CO, 2011.