Stimuli and Silence

You realize it when you’ve been thinking about things, walking along on a busy road, listening to music through your headphones. It’s too loud. You haven’t really been listening to your music, you realize, once you realize that the music is on and actually too loud now. You had turned it on so you could think, so it might give you an even flow of sounds that you favor more than the honks and engines outside your head. It seemed that the music had worked for a while to drown out those roaring cars, because you had forgotten it was playing as you walked and thought about your life; but now in this flicker of awareness when you’ve stopped thinking, you notice the two sounds just clash.

You turn off your music, and continue to walk. It feels profoundly quieter and more peaceful, easier to think. You didn’t expect that. You realize now you only have to find a way to turn off the cars and all of the birds, the outside voices, the construction machines, the airplanes rushing, etc. Then you can hear your own noise inside your head.

That’s the thing. You realize that you turned on your music only to come to an awareness that it’s on and not serving you, because it only adds to the loud clamor outside. You turn it off. You realize that you have cut out one layer of audio stimuli. You could turn off the cars. You’d realize that’s another layer, but then there would be more noises you’d be able to detect now in the absence of the cars. You could turn layer after layer of sound off, until there was no sound but your voice when you speak. You could stop speaking. Then the only sounds left are your voice in your head, and the churning of your hot blood within your ears.

You can then move to sights. Close your eyes. You still see the backs of your eye lids, the dark red that shows from light coming in through the thin skin. You can start rolling your eye balls back and up, to the third eye place of darkness. Then you can stop focusing on seeing at all, and only experience how it is in the darkness of your entire being.

Move to physical touch. Stand still, and do not consume or feel anything. The best you can do, given that you have a physical body that you always are in contact with and must perceive physically, is to be elevated off the ground and only feel the air against your skin.

Eliminate taste and smell.

Then you are finally getting to a place of peace and quiet. But somehow it is still extremely loud. It’s your thoughts. You now realize there’s this voice that you have inside of you. It’s racing and louder than anything else that had been outside. You can’t see at first how to stop it. It’s completely within you, stemming from you, but seemingly out of your control. Then you attend to the silence you’ve created outside. You awaken. For a split second, you hear nothing, you are quiet within your mind. You focus on the black, the nothingness, and for longer and longer periods, you turn off your head. All that’s left is the flow of your blood, the slow beating of your heart, and the subtle rise and soft fall of the lungs inside your chest.

There’s not so much space for thinking when you realize how loud and packed it is outside of yourself. There is so much going on, so much stimuli that hits you at all times, every day. You create more noise, thinking this will cover the nonsense. You either do that for the rest of your life—consuming, creating, reorganizing, discarding, shifting materials from place to place but with no end—or you step outside of it as best as you can, and learn to shut off the layers step by step. You might begin inside your head, right away, without even bothering to turn the outside stuff off first. Because really, it never will turn off completely. You have the most power over your own thoughts, your internal world. Learn its contours. Learn what you are capable of. Learn what you are.