The Naked Mind
“When you are silent,
it speaks.
When you speak,
it is silent.”
What is the “it” that speaks? When you become silent, or even contemplate what it would be like to become silent right now, what happens? What arises? What lives in the silence? And what feeling is evoked within that space? Calm? Fear? Boredom? Agitation? What makes it identifiable as that feeling?
In my experience, when I remove obstacles to silence in my environment, my thinking mind becomes louder. I see this as the thinking mind’s protective mechanism to prevent “you” from seeing through its illusive nature, noticing its ultimately flimsy structure, and threatening its domination of your experience.
To remove stimulation and reveal the present moment in a more unadorned fashion may be like stripping raw experience naked of its thinking mind clothing and revealing what’s underneath. What is underneath? What do you envision when you contemplate removing the clothing of the thinking mind and looking directly at the basic substance of you, that which was whole in the beginning, prior to your learning of language, and now remains in its original whole and pristine condition beneath the innumerable layers of thinking mind stuff.
What is the mind like when you strip it naked? What feeling that does that possible action evoke? Calm? Fear? Confusion? Curiosity?
I believe the answers to such questions can only be provided experientially by one’s own inner investigation, which makes them inherently insecure, because you can’t be given the answer from an external source, but also eternally new and interesting. Along these lines I’ll finish with a quote from The Flight of the Garuda:
