Lyn emailed me about a statement on our Difficulty Meditating website page that she found confusing. This blog post is an attempt to explain it, but I'm not sure that I can anymore than I can explain the taste of an apple to someone who has never tasted one. Here's the statement she found confusing:
"Although meditation can be a way to experience inner silence, this comes about not by eliminating thoughts, but by becoming aware of the silence that is naturally present in the mind along with the thoughts."
The statement refers to the experience of silence in a meditative state, and a meditative state is very difficult to describe in words. It's about the space between words, the space between thoughts. It's about becoming unhooked from thoughts and concepts so that the background of consciousness in which everything is experienced becomes apparent.
Trying to describe this experience is like trying to describe space. It's easy to describe the objects in space - a tree, an apple, a human being - but how do you describe space itself to someone? Everything exists in space - it's that no-thing in which every "thing" is! How you put words to that?
Our awareness could be thought of as the space in which all of our experiences take place. It is an "aware space". It is there all of the time, but we don't put our attention on it. Our attention is focused on the experiences, rather than the awareness underlying the experiences. Meditation can bring about an awareness of awareness. And the nature of that awareness could be described as silence. As we disengage from the meaning of thoughts and they are allowed to flow through, the experience is one of silence along with thoughts. The gap between thoughts, the space in which they happen, is being noticed.
Does the statement make sense to you? How would you explain it to someone?