Come To Deeper Silence

"Behind the noise is the Silence - the I Am." John Butler guides you 'beyond words' of day to day activities to the still point where you come to rest. Most people ask "What do I do with my thoughts?" John's answer is beguiling: "Adopt the 'couldn't care less' attitude to thoughts."

Come and join in - see for yourself.

Transcript

There's silence,

And then if we listen,

You will find deeper silence.

Because silence is not just a thing like that,

It has no end.

So if we wish to go deeper into silence,

Which really is deeper into the infinite,

Then we need to listen.

And you'll find that listening too deepens and deepens and deepens,

There's no end to listening.

It's not just a limited moment,

If you listen carefully,

Listen to whatever sounds there are,

The gurgling of tummies,

You know,

And breathing,

There's always some sound,

Then you listen beyond that sound,

You see,

And then beyond it,

There you go,

Deeper and deeper and deeper.

Only really listening is required,

There's a great art in listening,

The listening you can penetrate the infinite.

We don't listen to sounds,

We listen beyond sound.

But if you could possibly manage to do so,

As the conversation develops,

If you can just remember to listen beyond it,

You see,

Listen to what is beyond the words,

And then you see the words just,

As it were,

Forming within the listening,

And that's really the secret of understanding what the world's all about,

You see,

Is that the world is like a precipitation out of what's before the world,

It's like a deposit,

You see,

You know,

Like muddy water,

And when it's stirred,

It settles down,

And that's what the world is,

The world is sort of the matter that's arisen out of what's before matter,

In other words,

Spirit.

It's so simple when you see it,

Isn't it?

Think of it like the finest water vapour,

Even before it begins to condense into clouds,

You see,

You wouldn't know it's there,

Isn't it?

There's always some moisture in the air.

Then you begin to get the first mist forming,

First sort of not-crystal clarity of the air,

Then you get the first wispy clouds,

Then you get the thicker clouds,

Heavier clouds,

Thunder clouds,

Then you get rain,

Rain falling on the earth,

Water,

Then what happens?

The water freezes into ice,

Doesn't it?

And you and I are really just frozen bits of spirit.

That's what the body is,

That's what matter is,

It's just ice,

It's just frozen spirit.

So the reverse process is simply to melt.

So we talk of one that in deep meditation happens when the heart melts.

You dissolve back into what you always are,

What you always were.

Before you got frozen,

Before your heart got hardened,

To melt is to become one with,

To realize that differences that are so rigid and separative,

An ordinary experience really are,

Melt away.

The words of Jesus,

Come unto me,

All ye who labor and are heavy burdened,

And I will refresh you.

He goes on to say,

For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.

Now let's just consider that.

So who's speaking?

And where is he?

Well,

I am with you always.

It's here,

Isn't it?

It's this spiritual presence that I am,

The identity of what Adam is.

Adam,

The first man in creation.

Where is he?

He's here,

Isn't he?

First man of you,

First man of me,

What we originally are.

In other words,

That spirit,

Before it gets precipitated and crystallized into frozen bits of ice that think they're separate.

There's no weight in water vapor,

Is it?

And yet ice is heavy.

So come unto me,

Which means come back to the spirit,

And I will refresh you,

Lighten your burden.

For my burden is light.

Indeed it is.

It has no weight,

Does it?

Do you know the famous book called Pilgrim's Progress?

It's one of the great medieval classics.

It was written by John Bunyan sometime in the 1600s,

1700s.

And we had a beautifully illustrated copy of this.

And in the first pages was this picture of this pilgrim carrying his knapsack,

Heavy knapsack,

With his staff and struggling along the stony pilgrim's way.

And he came to a wayside cross.

And he sat down,

And he took the knapsack off and sat down at the foot of the cross.

Felt better,

Felt lighter.

I forget where the story went.

Did he just forget about it when he went on his way?

But I think he did,

Or for some reason he didn't pick it up again.

Well,

Anyway,

He went on,

Really,

Because he laid it at the foot of the cross.

And the cross,

Of course,

Is,

If you think of the perpendicular of the cross,

The perpendicular,

That is the way which leads from the burden to the light.

The cross has two arms,

You see.

One is the horizontal arm,

Which is from past to future.

In other words,

The wheel of the world going round and round from here to there,

Like that.

And we're all hanging on the cross,

As it were,

Being taken around on the wheel of life.

But at every moment now is this other perpendicular dimension from matter to spirit.

And that's why every moment there is our opportunity to turn to freedom.

No matter where we are in the circumstances of this world,

The moment you remember,

Now,

Just listen and look.

It doesn't matter if you're in the middle of an office in London or here.

And you'll find this.

Behind the noise is the silence,

For I am always with you.

Don't be afraid.

And that's safety,

That's the saviour,

You see.

You hold that invisible hand and you're safe.

This invisible spirit is also called the comforter,

Isn't it?

Indeed,

That's just what it is,

Isn't it?

You can feel the invisible arms,

As it were,

Embracing you.

Come,

My beloved,

Home.

That's just what it is.

In these harsh worlds,

Sometimes,

It often seems all against us.

Don't waste your time looking for comfort where it comes and goes.

This is the comforter that never fails.

In the school where I was taught,

You could make a nice little diagram of an eye by sort of doing that and like that.

And all these diagrams they draw on the blackboard about the mind and circling thoughts and all these sort of things.

There was always a little eye up at the top of the blackboard,

You see,

This eye of consciousness that's looking down.

And in many classical icons,

You know,

They'll have the eye of God that's watching the human drama going on down here,

You see.

And that is consciousness,

That's all awareness,

All the I am,

All spirit,

All Christ.

You call it what you like,

It's all the same thing,

You see.

It's that which is netty-netty,

Not this and not that.

It's the observation,

The observer,

The witness.

And we're all doing it because of the fact that you're all looking and listening to me now.

It's functioning in all of us all the time.

But it's beyond description.

And once you try to sort of analyze it in psychological terms,

You've lost it.

And this is what happens when man falls in consciousness from his original pure Adam status,

I am,

Which is singular.

There was only one man in the beginning.

There weren't two Adams,

There was only one Adam.

And then falls into the multiplicity of creation.

Because we've fallen in consciousness.

And this is happening all day,

Every day long.

It's not just an event in history.

I've tried to talk about it,

But actually you have to just shut up and just be still.

Phil's favorite thing from scripture is,

Be still and know that I am God.

There's one stillness,

One I,

God in other words.

I am,

I creator,

I the creator,

The origin.

Just look at the creation.

There's not two creators,

One doesn't make light,

The other darkness.

But what happens is that when you get something crystallized,

See in the real world there is no darkness,

It's all light.

It's only as creation falls,

You get into lower creation,

But you get separation into light and darkness.

It's just what happens.

When you get something solid,

When you get this in other words,

Then you get an obstacle to light and the obstacle creates darkness.

Look,

When I turn to light,

There's no problem,

No obstacle.

When I turn away from it,

I'm in the shadow and so my vision sees darkness.

So I look at the world and I see problems and things wrong with the world.

And I try to sort the world out by little choosing bits of darkness and playing this game of darkness.

This never really works,

Does it?

But when I turn back to the light,

What happens to the darkness?

What is it all about?

What on earth are we here for?

What is suffering?

What is not a lesson to us in one way or another?

Everything that happens,

You see.

There are many old traditional sayings,

Aren't there?

Everything happens for the best.

We can take what comfort we can from these things,

But even better if we actually put them into practice and have some effective means of practicing,

Of work,

Which is what I mean by work is the process of turning that way around,

Turning from darkness to light.

Blessed are those that find an effective way of meditation and put it into practice.

When you get a really good perspective on all this,

You can see how perfectly,

Every tiniest,

Tiniest speck of dust is under law.

Nothing happens by accident.

Everything is lawful.

You see,

You turn away from the light.

We play games with darkness.

We fall deeper and deeper into the bottomless pit.

And everything that happens is consequential.

So if the world is awful,

Learn from it.

Try to figure out why and what we can do about it.

But then if we get lost,

Come back to see,

Come back,

Come back here.

When we get confused and don't know what we're talking about,

The golden rule is come back to this presence.

Here you sense this stillness.

And you can sense how everything is held within this stillness,

Isn't it?

It is all held within consciousness.

In other words,

That God has his eye on everything.

He's within this universal embracement.

Now insofar as we can rest in this stillness,

The one thing we needn't be is afraid.

Be not disturbed.

This world comes and goes as it always has.

The performance,

In other words,

It is formed,

Isn't it?

In spirit there's no form,

It is formless.

No name,

No form.

In this world here,

It's name and form.

We've all got names and forms,

But in the oneness,

What happens to our names?

They're all melted away,

Aren't they?

Just one name.

So from that point of view,

Don't worry.

But now we come down,

We can't pretend we're not bodies.

You know,

We try to eat what suits our respective tummies,

Don't we?

And we're all good people,

I'm sure.

We put our plastic in the plastic bins and do what we're told.

Do what we can.

I played my little part.

I was an organic farmer in the days when that seemed the thing to do.

We play our parts in this performance.

And we grow up gradually,

Because at the time that's where we are,

Aren't we?

That's where we're functioning.

And then gradually,

Through experience,

We may grow up and start functioning at a bit higher level.

And it's a higher level.

To someone like myself who started,

Who was one of the first people really,

Or my dad was really,

To get the organic message.

It wasn't called organic then,

It was called something else.

But just in my short lifetime,

I've seen how this has developed and become a worldwide power now,

A world now,

A worldwide movement now.

All these words like ecology and organic things were unknown when I started like this.

They've all come in in my time.

Conservation.

I look at it the same way as we were saying how meditation has spread,

Blossomed.

When I started again,

It was something from the moon,

Really.

Now it's a worldwide movement.

And things happen.

You have this thing called faith.

What is faith?

At the level of human intellect,

You see,

We just get into a muddle,

Don't we?

This is what you call duality.

There's always another's point of view,

Someone else to say,

But.

And that is the immediate argument.

When you come into higher knowledge,

It's beyond thinking.

So we use this word faith.

Faith is really higher knowledge.

It's faith that everything's all right,

That everything's in God's hand.

And all we have to do is trust,

Have faith.

Is anything really destroyed?

Because all these forms are held,

You see,

In the formless.

Before the ice was crystallized into separate forms,

It was just one vapor.

There's no need to weep tears for the ice when it melts,

Because it's just going back to its origin.

And then it will recrystallize again.

Nothing's lost.

How can it be lost?

If it's all in God's care.

It's just a human concept that arises from separate existence.

See for yourself,

My dears.

Don't listen to what I say.

Find the stillness and see.

What is great,

I think of it as spiritual sunshine,

Really.

It's the radiance from on high.

The sun is a very good analogy of God.

It just shines,

Doesn't it?

Clouds get in the way,

But the sun doesn't stop shining.

We turn around,

Or the world turns around,

But the sun is just shining.

And it doesn't criticize anybody,

Does it?

It shines on the good and the bad equally.

It was certainly one of my great discoveries when I started to meditate,

Because I had to go down to London.

I had my first farm here in Bakewell at that time.

And I had to go down to London for my weekly checks,

It was called.

And it was a huge trial for me.

But I couldn't deny the fact that I could go into any.

.

.

Wherever I could find a place to sit down,

Even in the railway station,

On the train itself,

Anywhere,

Anywhere at all,

I could meditate.

In some ways,

Even better than I could at home,

Because you had to work a little bit harder to do it,

Because the distractions were more,

So you had to be more attentive.

But absolutely you can.

It really makes no difference at all.

The outer circumstances really are almost no consequence.

I know people will go to great lengths to find the perfect meditation spot and perfect sort of arrangements of everything,

Chairs and candles and headsets,

Wear the right clothes,

All this and that.

But really all these things are really peanuts compared to just sitting down,

Wherever you are,

In whatever condition you are,

Just saying your mantra or whatever,

And just realizing that these things don't matter,

And just go beyond them.

It's no matter what's going on in the mind,

You see,

All these questions of what to do with your thoughts,

Am I these thoughts,

Or whatever they are,

This is all just the play of the clouds and the sky.

And you don't really need to know the answer,

You don't get answers really at that level.

But if you just do what you're told and just listen to the mantra,

Just get up in the airplane and go beyond the clouds,

Know the problems and just laugh at them.

Because this question of what to do with your thoughts,

It's everybody's concern and everyone worries about it.

And we asked the head of the tradition for which meditation came was,

Well,

What do we do with them?

And his answer came,

Get the couldn't-care-less attitude towards them,

Which was really such a contradiction to all our hard work trying to sort out our thoughts.

Just get the couldn't-care-less attitude about them,

And it's a wonderful answer.

And so I just don't bother with them.

Sometimes I sit in the church,

My head's full of thoughts.

They come and they go,

I just don't bother about them.

I'm not really very interested in these questions,

What to do about them.

What can you do about the weather?

And then next time I sit to meditate,

My mind is probably clear.

Next day it isn't again.

So it goes.

All the do-nots in the scripture are in the Old Testament,

Aren't they?

When man is living under law.

Now in the New Testament,

When you see you begin to go above the law,

Or come under higher law,

Which is more accurate,

These do-nots fade out,

You see.

Instead we're just given the one commandment,

Love one another,

Which means acceptance.

So instead of trying to fight your thoughts,

Why not love them?

Just let them be.

It doesn't mean to say you have to hold on to them,

Grab them,

Become attached,

In which case you'll get lost in them.

Just let them be,

Nice little thoughts.

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John has brought me back