Hello,
My name is Yamima.
Welcome to another reflection from the WCCM Young Channel.
Here we share teachings from John Mayne,
Lawrence Freeman,
And the Christian Contemplative Tradition.
Today I will be reading a reflection from The Experience of Being,
Written by Lawrence Freeman.
Part Five,
The Experience of Being.
We don't have to think about the meaning of the word.
The linguistic meaning of the word is not the meaning,
Is not what matters.
What matters is the experience,
And in silence experience and meaning are one.
Quote,
The sparkling of truth,
Devoid of I,
Is the greatest austerity.
The sparkling of truth,
Devoid of I,
Is the greatest austerity,
End quote.
That's from Ramana Maharshi,
The Indian sage who died in 1952,
I think after the age of about 14,
When he had a transformative experience of being in silence.
For the first ten years at least,
Before it became a great center of being for thousands of people who came to see him,
He spoke,
Taught,
Mostly in silence at the organization.
An ashram grew up around him.
Ramana,
I think,
Shows us that this experience of being is timeless,
Trans-cultural,
Trans-historical,
As Moses discovered at the top of Mount Sinai.
It is present sometimes in great teachers,
In great individuals,
But it's present in us no less,
Continuously,
If we turn towards it,
Recognize it,
Which is what we've been doing this week.
Silence is the most effective language that enables us to commune with that experience.
As Fr.
John said,
Not to experience the experience,
Not to try to anticipate it,
Or imagine it,
Or have clever ideas about it,
But to be,
To be one with it,
To be one to experience being.
Even the word experience,
Maggie Ross says,
Is a very dangerous word,
Because experience always suggests something happened,
Which I am looking at,
Thinking about,
Or deciding about.
Silence introduces us to this reality of being,
Not through words like you look up something in a dictionary,
You don't know what it means and you look it up,
And that definition doesn't help you either,
So you look up the words in the definition,
And you just go round and round in circles.
Silence breaks out of that circularity of words and thoughts into a direct realization.
I was talking to somebody once,
Some time ago,
Who had been meditating for some time,
And the penny had only just dropped,
That you don't have to think about the meaning of the word.
I was surprised,
And they were surprised,
In the way that it had taken them so long to hear what they had heard a hundred times.
Every time they heard a talk or read something about meditation,
They would have come across that,
Meditation is not what you think.
But it doesn't register,
It has to happen in us.
We have to see that the linguistic meaning of the word is not the meaning,
Is not what matters,
And that what matters is the experience.
And in silence,
Experience and the meaning are one.
We're not thinking about the experience,
We are not investigating the meaning,
But the experience and the meaning are one.
Which can also,
I think,
Explain why the words peace and joy are so frequent in the New Testament.
That's exactly what we discover.
What are the signs of this state,
This union of experience and meaning?
It is that we feel joyful,
And we feel peaceful.
Julian of Norwich gives us an understanding of that too.
She says,
Quote,
Of all the things we may do for God in our penitence,
Comment,
She sees life as penitence,
Purification,
Preparation.
So of all the things we may do for God in our penitence,
End comment,
The most honoring to him is to live gladly and gaily because of his love,
End quote.
Of all the things we may do for God in our penitence,
The most honoring to him is live gladly and gaily because of his love.
That's all we have to do to really honor God,
To celebrate.
To praise God is to live gladly and gaily.
And those states,
That state of joy and of peace,
Arise not because we are looking for them.
They just arise out of this deep integration of ourselves with silence.
Silence is therefore much more,
Of course,
Than the absence of noise,
And even more than the absence of thoughts.
Perhaps we've all had a little taste,
However brief,
Of being able to be without thoughts.
But to be aware is not that unusual.
For a moment even,
Or a few moments,
That I had no thoughts,
The sky is very blue,
There are no clouds in it at all.
But silence is deeper than that,
Because the thought,
I had no thoughts,
Is a thought.
It is still self-consciousness.
So silence,
Ramana Maharshi puts this very clearly,
Is when the I-thought does not arise.
There is no external witness,
Observer.
And this,
I think,
Is what Jesus is pointing to when he tells us to leave self behind and all our possessions,
And to enter into that poverty of spirit,
Which we enter into through the mantra,
And by living out the consequences of saying the mantra at the center of our being.
The sparkling of truth devoid of I is the greatest austerity.
Another word for austerity could be poverty of spirit,
Which is when you don't feel you have anything,
But you are everything,
The kingdom of God.
And this poverty of spirit,
It sounds negative of course,
Poverty,
Like the word emptiness,
Is actually the portal of paradox that takes us through into the fullness.
There is a deep Christian resistance to this today,
And a deep Western cultural resistance to this ancient wisdom,
And to this idea that we leave self behind.
But if we dig deep into the tradition,
Our own tradition,
We find it again.
Before the loss of her contemplative wisdom,
St.
Anthony of the Desert said that the monk who knows that he is praying is not truly praying.
The monk who doesn't know that he is praying is truly praying.
So this is what we mean by silence,
I think.
Thank you for joining me at the WCCM Young Channel.
Until next time,
But for now,
Peace be with you.
