A Quiet Mind
A quiet mind is all you need.
All else will happen rightly,
once your mind is quiet.
- Nisagardatta Maharaj
I often write the lines above in my journal following a morning meditation (I write a short journal entry immediately following a period of sitting meditation each morning). Generally I write this as a reminder to myself. Within meditation, my aim is to be still and become as aware as possible of just this moment, to listen closely enough to actually hear and feel the song of Now. Even with this intention, however, and years of consistent daily practice, I continue to regularly be taken over by the habitual thinking mind and its proclivity for productivity and intellectual analysis. My mind will cling to a task that lies ahead, or a more broad creative project, or simply bounce between memories, fantasies, and other seemingly random mental chatter. And that is all okay. I am humbled by the power of the thinking mind - it is a force!
But, whenever I can become truly quiet, something brand new is revealed that I could have never planned for, something that lives beyond the realm of the thinking mind. It is something that cannot quite be articulated in words but that provides much relief and assurance, a feeling like waking up from a bad dream and realizing it was merely a dream, immediately freeing the awakened mind from all anxiety or fear that lived within the dream world.
I am reminded of a spiritual teacher from India named Sri Ramana Maharshi. Apparently he believed his deepest, most essential teaching could only be communicated to his students through silence, through sitting together in pure silence and stillness. He said that any form of the teaching in words, concepts, directions, or particular actions, was a degraded form of the ultimate deeper Truth that could only be transmitted through simply being together. He apparently would communicate with students in words, if that appeared to be all the student could receive, all they were receptive to. He would speak their language if he sensed that that form of communication was all they could hear, but this was a lesser form of his teaching. In order to grasp the real Teaching, the student needed to be willing to open themselves in complete silence, to let go of the discursive thinking mind with its limited reliance on the symbolic tools of language, and simply be aware of This, Right Now.
And I wonder if Sri Ramana was also communicating that there was nothing special about him, that, to receive the Truth, both “student” and “teacher” simply needed to get out of the way and allow it to be revealed. I wonder if we all hold the answers we are seeking, if we may plainly know the Truth behind questions small and big, if we only stay quiet long enough to see, hear, and feel the answers. Sometimes the Truth may be painful or scary, so we may not want to sit with it, and that’s okay too. But we can see what we are doing, the choice we are making, and be content with our choice.
I’ll finish here with the remainder of the quote started above from Nisagardatta Maharaj.
A quiet mind is all you need.
All else will happen rightly,
once your mind is quiet.
As the sun on rising
makes the world active,
so does self-awareness
affect changes in the mind.
In the light of calm & steady
self-awareness,
inner energies wake up
& work miracles
without any effort on your part.