Evolution of love

TURN THE KEY OFF

Stop thinking of silence as a lack of noise—mental noise, emotional noise, or the external noise around you. As long as you see silence as something objective, something that is not you but might come to you like an emotional experience, you are chasing your own projected idea.

Looking for silence is like being on a motorboat racing around the lake looking for a smooth spot where everything is silent, and there you are—vroom! vroom!—racing around with increasing anxiety that you are never going to get there. No matter how long you raced around that lake you would never find this silence. Actually, all you have to do is throttle back and turn the key off, and then there you are. Then it is very quiet, very still.

When you start to be receptive and allowing, you start to return to your natural state, which is very quiet. Being receptive is just like throttling back.

It is a natural state of quiet.

Many years ago I was very lucky to make this wonderful discovery, not because I was intelligent, but out of utter failure. Zen students do a lot of meditating and following the breath. It seems very concentrated, but what often happens is that you think you are following your breath, and then you realize that you are following your mind into some story. It's like trying to discipline a dog that refuses to be trained. Some people seem to be good at that kind of practice. They hold their focus and stay with it and become quiet. I, on the other hand, never had the capacity to hold my mind like that, so I wasn't very good at it.

After complete failure time and time again, I heard my teacher say, "You have to find your own way."
Instead of closing in on a narrow focus, I found my own way was just to be present, which was to become totally open. This is more like listening than focusing.

In that listening, I discovered a very natural state, a state that is actually the only state that isn't contrived. From that state that is like listening, I started to see that every effort to contrive created another state. As soon as I made an effort, a state would be manufactured out of thin air. I could manufacture beautiful states, terrible states, concentrated states, and all sorts of states; but there was only one state that was totally natural and absolutely effortless. In that state, I found access to the deepest Self, which is freedom.