Episode Transcript
We Americans enjoy a wonderful and powerful way of life, but internally and in relationships we may wish for better. Join me as we look beneath the surface and gain insights to transform every aspect of your life. My name is Dr. Ann O'Hare, and this is the Spiritual American. Hello everyone and welcome to the Spiritual American. My name is Dr. Anne O'Hare, and I'm your host. And today we'll be talking about silence and I wrote the title of this as Silence is Not Dying. Interesting Idea. So why am I saying silence is not dying? So basically, you might realize that we're actually talking about meditation, and when we're meditating, the idea is to have a silence experience. That's the idea. Now, if you're like me, you have a very active mind and you have been outward focused and thinking a lot and using your mind a lot. And I have higher education and that taught me how to think even more. And so far that how to reason and evaluate things. But when you're trying to sit still and you're trying to have a silence experience, none of those active functions of the mind are going to help. And one of the things I've noticed is sometimes when we start meditation, we might be a little afraid of being silent. I, when I started meditating, I remember that there were a few times where I had an experience that I didn't understand and I had to ask someone. Like for instance, one time I was meditating and it almost felt like my body, like jolted, and I was afraid maybe I was leaving my body. I was afraid, I thought that if I meditated and I went too far out, that maybe the body would die or I would, I was leaving the body. You know how sometimes people say they have out of body experiences? I didn't know what was happening. There was some kind of jolting and I felt like I was going off into this meditative state and then all of a sudden the body was like strange. And so the person that I spoke to, this experienced meditator, told me that, no, you meditation will not make the body die. You're not going anywhere. As I'm gonna talk through this here. I'm gonna talk about silence and I'm gonna talk about meditation, and I'm gonna talk about what the actual spiritual awareness is that we're trying to achieve. We call it bodiless stage. Your body is still there. This is why it's weird. It's like spirituality is weird. I just quickly, I was in a class one time and we were watching a video, a meditation video, and at the end of the video the person says it was a commentary, like guided meditation, and the person said, meditation is the art of forgetting the world to remember the soul. Now, if you are kind of more. Energy minded. That sentence makes sense because you're like, I'm not gonna think about this. I'm gonna think about this. I'm gonna remember this and I'm gonna forget this, but I still have it. But if you're more literal, if you're more literal minded, one of the students actually said, what do you mean forget? Forget the world. How can I forget the world? I'm forgetting myself then. How can I forget myself? How can I forget the world? And I said, you know what? You're absolutely right. So one of the points I wanna say is what I said to this student, which is when we're meditating, we're not leaving our body. Even though I'm calling it bodiless stage, it's a stage, it's an awareness. It's not that I'm leaving the body, I'm still here, still alive. Everything's fine. What I'm doing is I'm creating an awareness different than my ordinary thinking awareness. So everybody right now, when I'm speaking, just think for a second, your ordinary thinking awareness. Imagine that you're walking around in the morning, you're doing the dishes, you're getting something to eat, you're taking care of the kids, you're getting ready for work, whatever. You're ordinary awareness. You're a human being. You're a soul and a body. You're living your life. That's it. It's fine. In meditation, we're sitting still, so the body's not being used at that moment, and I'm trying to have an experience different from all of that ordinary awareness. That doesn't mean I'm dying, it doesn't mean anything's wrong. I'm not separating from my body. Another thing that might happen when you start meditating is that it might feel scary because maybe I never looked at my mind before. Now I have to say this too, that if you have a serious mental health diagnosis, schizophrenia, bipolar, severe depression, severe anxiety, things like that, I would not recommend just doing meditation. I would talk to your mental health care provider and make sure that this is something that you wanna do. The reason is because those are extreme situations and you need a different kind of a help for a while first until you get to that middle ground. Once we get to the middle, then I can start facing my mind. For those of you who are in the middle, you don't have a mental health diagnosis you're not like, you know you're able to function. Everything's okay, but you would like to get some kind of control over the mind or maybe even experience some peace. Sit down and be willing to face your mind. What does that mean? Well, I'm sitting still and I'm trying to be quiet and the mind is going crazy, talking thoughts. I wanna get up. I don't wanna be here. What time is it? How much longer do I have to be here? Like, all this stuff is going on. What I can do is, while that's going on, I can realize and think to myself, I am a peaceful soul. That's the mind. It's not me. The mind is kind of like the hard drive, but the hard drive is not me. The mind is the drive that's got everything. Recorded it in it, and it's showing me what's in oc. This is what you thought about yesterday. This is what you've been thinking about nonstop for 10 years. Here it is showing it to you. That doesn't mean I can't create another thought or have another experience. I can experience myself as peace or get in touch with silence while that's going on, believe it or not. But I must realize that. It's going to be okay that there's nothing to be afraid of, that I'm just facing myself, my mind, my creation, everything that I've been thinking about all this time. So what is silence? So I was, I wrote down here, I, silence is where there's no thinking, but it's not something you can control. It's something that you become aware of. I'll give an example. Did you ever hear, I'm laughing 'cause this was on the show, Frazier, it was like funny, but did you ever hear of a, what do they call it, A sensory deprivation tank, something like that, where you go into a tank it's so insulated for sound and you float in water so you have no sense of gravity, and you have ear plugs and eye patches and whatever. There's no light. There's no sound, and you're floating in the water and you have no sensory input. So in that moment, it's just you in your mind, but you're insulated from the sound that's coming from the outside, right? So even in, at nighttime when you go to sleep, maybe maybe somebody in the other room has the TV on, maybe you shut the door to kind of give yourself some room away from the sound and the movement of the rest of the house. You go to the bathroom, you take a shower, you shut the door, you close the curtain. You can create a space where you're kind of not experiencing something else. That's what we wanna do inside. In silence, when I'm in meditation, I really can get in touch with silence, even when the mind is active. I know this might sound interesting or maybe not possible, but I'm gonna say this is a really important thing to think about, because how many years have we been watching the mind Following the mind? Paying attention to the mind, believing the mind, reacting to the mind, feeling pain because of the mind. The mind's not going away. It's not going away. So I need to be able to get in touch with the deeper energies of myself while the mind is doing what it's doing. All the mind is doing is showing me what I put in there. That's all it's doing. Does it calm down eventually? Yes, it definitely does, but I have to practice feeling peace, being silent, getting in touch with that silence. There's nothing to be scared of. It's kind of like the sky and the clouds. The cloud is there and it's moving, but the sky is there too. The sky's not moving. The sky is just there. That's how silence is with the mind. Silence is there. We just have to pay attention to it. The other thing was pure feelings. So pure feelings means that when I am in touch with the silence, and I am, even though if there's other things going on, I'm in touch with the stillness and the silence. When I experience that other feelings have a chance to emerge, like peace, like gratitude, like care. Generosity of heart, they have a chance to emerge naturally from me. If you think about it, like the way I'm describing it, you have all this activity out here and so you close the curtain or you put yourself in the tank and you still there. You know it's still there, but you're in this silent space. And then as you're in this silent space, because there's no distraction, other feelings are able to emerge. Now, it's a little bit hard at first when we start to meditate because again, we're used to following the mind and paying attention to the mind. And frankly, we're weak. We are weak in this, in the concentration of staying in that silent place, in that stillness. But little by little, with daily practice, we get better at it. And then I said here, what is the real spirituality? So, one last thing I wanna say. So I said that we don't have to worry about dying, but I do wanna say something about the reality of the situation. We're in here. This body came from the earth, came from my mother, came from the earth. The ashes to ashes, dust to dust kind of thing. I know that's like philosophical, but let's talk about the actual reality. This body is not forever. It was born, it was little. It got bigger, it got older. It's now this age and it's gonna get older or whatever, and then it's going to stop. And then the earth will take the body back. Now just, let's just admit that for a minute, okay? Yes. I, the soul came into a body in the womb. And then the body was born and I was there and I'm still here and I'm here in time and space, and my name is Anne and I live in here and I have this family and, and it builds and it grows and I have this experience and the body changes and, and everything and gets older and I have a family. And then these relationships and these experiences and then the body dies, goes back to the earth. What is the soul, then? The soul doesn't die. So part of spirituality is the silent point of reality that yes, I am the immortal being. I am the eternal being. This body is changing in front of me. I'm watching it change, but I am not changing. I am the soul. I am the spiritual being. The living consciousness. Now some of you might be thinking, that doesn't mean I don't have to be afraid. What happens to me then? But that depends on what you believe, right? Sometimes you believe that, you go to heaven, you meet your loved ones. Other people believe you take another birth. I'm not here to tell you what happens after that. Each of us is gonna have our own experience. But literally we know that the body's going back to the earth. So what does this have to do with like silence and death or the silences is not death. What does this have to do with that? Sitting and being quiet is not death. The body going back to the earth, is the body dying? But I'm not dying. So that's the real spirituality. What happens when we admit that? Something opens up like a possibility to understand more opens up, to understand more about who we are, to understand more about what we're doing here, our potential. We have so much going on in our mind that we're paying attention to, fears and upsets and all this stuff that's going on, suffering, but it's all not mandatory that we experience life in that way. We can purify our understanding of reality. One of the things is that we have to understand that I'm alive and I'm eternal, and the body is not, and that things keep changing. And I am. I'm eternal. I'm alive. I'm here. So I'll leave you with one last thing. There's this proverb about a yogi, who says, I want enlightenment. And he sits under a tree and he meditates and meditates and meditates and meditates. And the final realization comes. The final realization. And the final realization is expressed in this way. I'm here. I've always been here. I'm here. I've always been here. What does this have to do with meditation? When you are sitting there for meditation. You have more than one thing going on at that moment. You have the time-based mind who's showing you all the stuff and all the things you've recorded. You got the body sitting there, and you have the eternal soul that's sitting there. I'm the soul sitting there in peace. I would say, I would assert that we have spent a lot of attention in the mind and a lot of attention on the body, and very little to no attention on the soul. So in meditation, we're bringing our attention in and I'm feeling the silence in the sensory deprivation tank. I'm going in and I'm gonna feel the silence and also get to know myself and try to experience some of those spiritual feelings, some of those pure feelings. Peace, love, stillness, self-respect. And when I feel those, they have an impact on me, then they have an impact on my mind. They have an impact on my understanding of the world and my relationships and everything else. So I leave it there. There was some philosophy in there and some pretty straightforward reality there about life and death and about the soul and the body and so forth. Something to think about. I mean, we don't wanna think about it 'cause we're so attached to the way things are and we're so, I mean, and it's okay. It's okay to like being alive. It's not like I'm saying, oh, I'm supposed to be so detached now and so spiritual, but let's just face the fact, how about that? Let's just face the fact and try to meditate and try to be peaceful. That's what I'm saying. So think about it and I'll leave it there. So our slogan is Heal, empower, and Serve. And until next time, take care.
