I dreamed that I woke up and all excitation was gone. And in its place was a wonderful silence. What is found at the seam of silence and speech? Is there anything behind the curtain? We look into this in zazen. What happens to how you perceive when you truly open into this seam of silence? You may wonder. It may seem beyond you to settle the mind so completely that you lose track of all speech, but it is within our ordinary capacity to relax beyond our incessant commentary and sense impressions, to a quietude of mind.
It’s not what you think. To recognize that the silence in silence is not only auditory. We call it silence because that’s how it shows up to the ear. But the word “silence” signifies something larger, what the Greeks called “aletheia”, the atemporal vitality and suchness of things. Relax, open, trust the breath. Trusting silence long enough for it to show you how immense every moment is.
