by Parmjit Singh
This book will disappoint your inquisitive mind—but in a good way. Disappointment is always good as it can be a door to a new beginning, a new journey and departure from old rut. As the author, Eckhart Tolle, sets the tone in the introduction, “…(I)f you are looking for food for thought, you won’t find it, and you will miss the very essence of the teaching, the essence of this book, which is not in the words but within yourself.” (Introduction, pg, ix)
Mind thrives on challenges, acquisitions and logicizing; its existence depends upon hankering, prevarications, deceptions, selfish endeavors and above all splitting things or life into piecemeal to understand it.
Tolle’s Silence Speaks is an anthology of those non-mental non-efforts or what Zen masters say ‘non-doing’.
Mind builds on reducing the wholeness of life into describable chunks. However, when it does so, it spoils the sacredness or wholeness (holiness) of life. For it, existence becomes a collection of events that can be described through cunning experiments or speculative theories. It always finds some means to generate illusions for us and forces us to live either in past or future—both illusions on temporal scale. Past and future exist only because they are remnants or projections of time in our memories.
But how can mind capture something which lies beyond it own self?
Tolle’s Silence Speaks is an anthology of those non-mental non-efforts or what Zen masters say ‘non-doing’. Though it sounds paradoxical, silence does speak but not exactly in the same manner as the words ring through our ears. Silence rings through a different plane; it is related to ‘allowing’ rather than ‘reaching’. Words reach, silence happens in “the moment of noticing the silence around you, [when] you are not thinking. You are aware but not thinking.” (pg. 4) The commerce is non-linguistic, there are no words involved in that kind of understanding. It is just akin to, when you open the windows of your home and the rays of the Sun rush in. The Sun was shining and it was waiting to light your home but your window was preventing it. Same thing happens in silence, it embraces you when you open the doors of your inner self without ‘seeking’ it. This stage is of complete surrender, a productive ‘non-doing’.
Mind is good at technical things. In fact, all the material comforts and technical gadgetry we enjoy today are the produce of mind. There is no denying the fact that we could not have done that without mind and yet it is the first stumbling block in the spiritual journey. Because it creates a division between you and yourself; it says, “I want to know myself” (pg.55) without knowing that, “You are the ‘I’.”(pg.55) and the only thing you need to do is to eliminate the dividing line between the ‘knower’ and ‘known’.
The antidote of mind is silence, not an enforced silence or an absence of words. It is a state of being where you feel in the heart of your being that, “wherever you go, there you are. In other words, you are here.” (pg.64) In this state, there is neither a past nor future, you are fully alive in the moment, here and now. You become part of the existential stream, a gigantic wave of consciousness or void that gives birth to everything from bosons to a beautiful song dancing on the lips of an opera singer. That endless stream is what silence is all about—it is not an absence of words but presence of fullness which speaks to us through the rhythms of our own being.
Stillness Speaks is a collection of those nuggets which can act as a catalyst to help us catapult into that silence. This is not something which one can ‘think’ about. You have to go one step further, experience it. Otherwise, it will end up becoming another mental exercise, nothing better than solving algebraic equations. Tolle has done well by staying away from sounding didactic in this collection. He sounds like a medium, like the Native American Elder, who whispers the secrets of life with great respect and humility—and then lets us hear the silence.
Stillness Speaks
Eckhart Tolle
New World Library
Hardcover, 2003 | Pages, 144 |
ISBN: 1-57731-400-X
About the Author
Eckhart Tolle is a contemporary spiritual teacher who is not aligned with any particular religion or tradition. He travels extensively, taking his teachings throughout the world. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
