The Cacophony of Silence

Once I had a blog about my paradoxical life. Each post had a title in seeming opposition.

Paradoxes are born at the conjunction where the supermassive world I inhabit in my mind meets an ever expanding universe of so called reality.

Perhaps that explains being currently drawn to the systems of belief based on the idea that our minds and our perceptions create our realities.

I confess, I have not studied comparative religions. My pattern recognition mind sees the least common denominator of the highest attainment of these religions as the ability to be free from the illusion of necessity; the demands, desires and suffering of humanity. Suffering being a creation of the mind.

The mind is to be silenced. Yet it is the mind that is to do the silencing.

Can a mind free itself from itself?

Sanctuary is a place free from fear. In this it fits, at least in part, the same parameters as the ultimate attainment of freedom from suffering.

To get there from here

I’m thinking, deeply. That is where these words are coming from, I am in my head processing thoughts. It is by no means silent. Yet it is my mind that is both tasked with being silent and required to direct me to silence.

Loving kindness meditation that gives me ways to direct thoughts worked better; definitely not silent.

The paradox of silencing the mind is why I struggled to ‘successfully meditate’ until I discovered being led in visualization. Again not silent.

Getting somewhere

I jotted down some wisdom from an interpretation of the Tao.

“Work towards something desired instead of away from what is not.”

What is wanted is a freedom from painful, unnecessary, ‘unproductive’ thoughts.

Freedom from fear, pain, sorrow, want, desperation.. sanctuary.

Yet another paradox

I started taking a medication because I had become too dangerously distracted by my thoughts.

My multilevel cacophonous inner world lost contact with the means to maintain a harmony where the necessary actions of maintaining life and health required continuity of action. I failed to keep up with anything but the next intense thought in my head.

By quieting the cacophony, the medication gives me the reigns but life circumstances means it is with no real, internalized and intrinsic idea of where to go.

In other words, I have the other half of the equation; the medication quiets my mind, requiring me to actively repopulate it. Because I repudiated the idea that the world has hard and fast rules about how I am to go on, I have tasked myself with determining my own. Stalemate ensues.

My thoughts are in my way, and the lack of thoughts bars my progress.

What does any of this have to do with anything anyway?

Sanctuary.

Sanctuary is that time out of time, that space between spaces, existing and free from the demands of existence.

Sanctuary is that being in a moment people seek with meditation, and perhaps medication.

Sanctuary is freedom of and from.

Freedom to do and not to do. Freedom to be and not to be. Freedom to think and be thought free.

We are not free from the necessities of humanity; from the necessities of all life higher still to the necessities of sentient life.

Ostensibly linear, yet often fluctuating under the determination of survival these needs begin at sustenance and safety to become more complex with companionship and novelty, to the higher needs met by meaning and purpose.

Balance

Those same organized belief systems recognize the absolute need for these opposing forces, these paradoxes, to exist side by side in balance.

To create a space, a life, an existence, that both provides freedom from and freedom in pursuit of necessity is the highest attainable goal.

A goal in which moments of sanctuary are essential elements to balance the cacophony of chaos and the emptiness of silence.

My mind finds sanctuary when I lose myself in beauty.