To forget the self does not refer to the elimination of personal qualities or self-experience. It is also certainly not to eliminate a sense of self, which has wonderful capacities and can give us that strength that allows us to hang in there, let go, tolerate pain, and encounter suffering. To forget the self is to drop our cravings, learn to see through our reactive patterns of behaviour and judgements as many time these are the causes of our own suffering.
We could say that we are immersed in a world of sounds. If you pay attention, almost every minute of your waking life is filled with some form of sound: most prominently the ambient sounds in our natural environment, including music and radio, conversations and messages, and the cacophony of thoughts in your own head. Considering all of this, we have to ask ourselves: How frequently do you get genuine moments of silence in our everyday life? If we reflect, it seems that we have the inclination for filling moments of silence or stillness with noise and distraction and all other activities in between. What is the reason for this? Why do we have this inclination towards filling up moments of silence with some type of activity? Because it seems that silence makes us feel uneasy, and since silence makes us feel uncomfortable, we will automatically try to fill it up. Why? In moments of silence or stillness, we return to ourselves, which is not always an easy thing to do to ...
Comments
Post a Comment