Advaita Post 09-20 - Nothing and no one is excluded...

Year No. 9 20 (December 23, 2008)

Silent night

There is the great silence. You can open yourself up to that and then it's experientially evident.

Outside, you can experience the great silence, despite the hustle and bustle of the world. You can always tune yourself in more accurately. You can open yourself up very precisely for the very essence of silence. Then the great silence manifests itself very strongly. That can become so overwhelmingly strong that all the rest of your restrictions are swept away. It can also come over you spontaneously, the realization of the great silence, the expansion into that great silence, as grace.

Going within you also discover the deep silence within yourself. When you return to the source of your own self all sorts of worries fall away, all sorts of things that you identified with. With further insight you can release them so that they no longer play a role. In the center of yourself, the center of your heart, it's quiet and free. If you can be consciously present there in that center, the small space seems to be infinite. There is an infinite silence. That infinity merges with the great silence that at first you might have experienced as external. The external silence and the internal silence come together, they are identical. The great silence as the essence of the cosmos in which everything is absorbed and the internal great silence of formless self-being-consciousness merge. The self-being is released from its own restrictions into the Silence.

The one great silence is the foundation of everything. Whatever phenomena arise there, they come forward out of that. Within it all phenomena disappear once again. For example, the phenomenon of the body. Often it's not there, sometimes it is, and then there might be the experience that a body moves. A few moments later and it's gone again. When it is there, you are the body also from the inside-out, as it walks there.

In the same way you experience the sea gull that flies, you know what it means to have wings, wings to use, to fly, to sail on the wind. You know from the inside out what it is to leap through the dunes like a rabbit, to nibble on the young leaves, to dive quickly away when a hunter comes. From the inside out you feel it.

In the same manner you yourself are each man, whoever it is. When the Silence is there, you feel your own self-being in every man. Nothing and no one is excluded, because nothing else is. There is only an unspeakable silent greatness.

When you clearly recognize "this is it", you become free, everything becomes free, an entirely new creation comes into being.

(Schiermonnikoog, June 11, 2008)