The Sound of Silence Revisited: A Conversation with my Inner Voice
Again, I was planning to continue the healing thread that I meant to spin further with subtle ramifications in our lives. However, as I am guided by Spirit, heeding the advice of my inner voice, I decided to talk about silence and what it means in our lives.
This immense influx of insights was prompted by listening again to an iconic song of the sixties, that you might have heard at some point in your lives. I’m referring to “The Sound of Silence” by Simon and Garfunkel. It was a song, that was originally inspired by communication without essence, which enhanced the feeling of separation for the song writer, but contains so much more wisdom than humans could grasp 60 years ago.
The first feeling I had was that I cherish silence for a multitude of reasons, as I’m increasingly distancing myself from the meaningless chatter of people that talk without communicating, because their self-centred words don’t reach me. I am included in their plans to the degree that it suits them, even if that inclusion is based on something we share mutually. Our communication and interconnection can only be enhanced by opening up further and building like-minded communities, reflecting unity consciousness. The second impression was that it gives me the opportunity to chat with my inner voice and have mind-boggling conversations with it. Being open and honest with my true Self invites a depth to the conversation that would otherwise be impossible to achieve. It doesn’t matter how it starts and where it leads. What matters is that it cultivates this internal rapport between my limited self and the universe.
I will give you an example of an unexpected chat with my very own inner voice. It asked me to share this conversation.
Me: Hello, Self? What’s up? What do you want to chat about? Remember it was you who asked me to share this.
Inner Voice: I did and I don’t regret it. Regrets have no place within humans who love themselves having accepted all parts of them. There is no aversion towards parts they deem unworthy or bad in any way, because those are the parts that give meaning to their lives by imbuing meaning to the other parts, thereby uplifting the whole.
Me: What do you mean by whole? My whole self or the whole of humanity?
Inner Voice: I am amused that you thought that there is a difference. You should know by now, that there is none. Don’t you remember that different perspectives are the trademark of the current consciousness density? Learn to embrace different perspectives and blend them into a holistic vantage point that gives voice to multiple humans and follow that vector of thought and emotion to the future. No one gets it right initially, just as no one is acting completely from their own inner voice. What you deal with is a fabulous blend of perfection and imperfection, struggle and peace, voice and silence, and All That Is, supporting the evolution of many small seeds as they grow to become strong tall trees, all yearning to be close to the sun.
Me: Where did all this begin? I mean, this was originally intended to be about silence.
Inner Voice: Your limited mind is picking up on certain seemingly unrelated experiential triggers that open the door to more insights, until that door doesn’t fit anymore the wealth of insights that rush into your awareness. Before you know that door becomes a gateway, that allows even more insights to flood your limited self. This gateway becomes a floodgate in time until all precious insights wash away that floodgate and allow what’s compressed in your Heart to wash over you in a cleansing deluge of truth, beauty and reality.
Me: You know me better than I do my self. I do feel like that recently. Sometimes I feel the floodgate inside me, is aching with all that pressure that’s building up behind it, with lessons from multiple lifetimes accumulating and hopes, dreams and positive reassurances from a future that’s within my grasp, longing to be realized by my weary self.
Inner Voice: Now there’s a story that your limited mind tells your limited self. That future you’re referring to has always been within your grasp no matter how you justify it. It is your birthright, just as it is the birthright of all humans. What you perceived so far from life has been the result of the obscurity and opaqueness of your limited mind, complementing its experiential wisdom over many lifetimes, looking at the same things from multiple vantage points. For good reason. Struggling to find meaning is naturally attracting all parts of your limited self. Some you know of, as they are part of your conscious self, some others are scattered withing your subconscious self, having matured enough to present themselves in the current lifetime, yet others are still waiting for you to discover them in your unconscious self in other lifetimes. Evolution never ends and, in a way, you are doomed to experience awe and amazement while you slowly discover the brilliance of life after you cultivate the clarity that is necessary to perceive your own parts. Even these words that reach you through the vastness of your own Self are twisted in subtle ways that you don’t yet fully understand. Relax, everything will come to you in divine time, once your parts become integrated and fused within you in ways that they themselves innately understand, yielding a more inherent understanding of them to you. Just be honest and allow the process. You wouldn’t interrupt the fermentation process of the yogurt you make on your own, because you know that introducing elements that are not conducive to the proper flow of events would disrupt that process and the end-effect would be either neutral or detrimental, and not very beneficial.
Me: So much information, I don’t know what to say.
Inner Voice: Really? I don’t think so. Yes, you are perceiving me laugh, that’s because everything I am telling you I take from the wealth of information you have already accumulated. I haven’t even begun teaching you and there’s no need for that at this time. You already know what you need to know. You just have to dot the “I”s and cross the “T”s yourself and perceive the deeper meaning. And that’s none of my business. It’s all yours. No cheating. But take solace in the fact that there’s a divine time for everything, just like there’s a divine time for everybody. Nothing is out of place, and nothing is out of turn. Everything is interconnected and everything has more than one meaning. You just have to allow yourself the time to recognize it. Go with the flow without analyzing things. Experiencing all perspectives takes time and the more you allow this process, the more beneficial those experiences will work out for you. Find me after that.
The last statement came through with an intensity I didn’t expect. It felt like, I deliberately interrupted this chat by ending the communication on my part. It was too much to absorb and I intuitively noticed that it contained inter-relations that I hadn’t explored yet. Unfortunately, I allowed myself to dwell on them, and was taken out of the experiential state, leaving the “blade of grass” I’d been exploring. Perhaps, this was what my true Self wanted to show me. As you know, the “Blade of Grass” principle refers to experiencing concepts like distinct blades of grass and not exploring them with the mind or allowing it to be aroused from its slumber while we are immersed in our experience. For example, if we daydream about a car, and allow ourselves to stay in that state of being, we might want to allow the process to flow smoothly and not to judge, analyze or deduct. These are the mind’s tools. The mind thinks and by extension does, while the Heart merely experiences and thus just is. This feeling of being overwhelmed stems from not having achieved complete integration of the related “blades of grass” and allowing the mind to control this process, when it is woefully underqualified to do that. I began thinking with the mind and was not allowing the experiential process to proceed further. Oh well, it happens to the best of us. A disciplined mind is like a well-trained servant who knows when it’s time to fulfil its purpose and when it’s time to step out of a room discreetly when they are not needed. Another fact that’s detrimental to this process is that the mind is typically controlled by the ego, so when then process unfolds and the mind steps in, then it is safe to assume that the ego stepped in and at some point, caused uneasiness which may gradually evolve into resentment and rejection of the process. The ego doesn’t like any change which threatens its control over the mind and ultimately the limited self. The Heart is a potent threat to the ability of the Heart to maintain its control over the limited self, as unlike the mind it operates through surrendering to the infinite sea of unity consciousness, something that the ego wants to avoid at all costs as it would end the era of its control.
I decided to allow the Heart to explore the unrealized inter-relations sufficiently in divine timing, so that I might pick up the thread of this inner conversation on the same theme at a later time. This is how little bits of experience are alchemized in the Heart and converted into wisdom. Yet there is such joy to be found, when the inner voice is sharing the inner process of alchemy with us and we become consciously aware of it, perceiving the unfolding of wisdom within our awareness, instead of becoming aware of it after its subconscious unfolding. You might think that this is an awesome consciousness process and you would be totally right. As Z would say, this is so cool.
But how do we know, if we talk to our inner voice, which originates from our true Self or if we merely talk to our ego in disguise? Some people would say that’s easy to answer. Other people would say the opposite. However, there are a few things about that conversation we can assess. The overall mood we were in, the degree of easiness (and therefore the degree of surrendering to the process), with which the conversation was proceeding, the feelings that the inner voice was invoking, or whether the answers were surprising and unexpected, are all forming a background picture that would either point us to the mind or the Heart as the source of the inner voice. The limited self has access to a limited mind, which cannot grasp the thought processes behind the statements perceived from the inner voice and that invokes surprise. If we felt that we were talking to somebody else, then we were talking to our true Self. If we perceived that paradox with our limited minds sufficiently, the effect could be thrilling. The more thrilling the conversation felt, the closer we came to our true Self during that conversation. Also, were the feelings we had negative or positive? The ego operates from a selfish point of view, which doesn’t necessarily intend to harm other beings, but the feeling of separation is an intricate part of it. On the other hand, the Heart knows no feelings of separation, as it is always immersed in unity consciousness, and they won’t pop up in such a conversation with the true Self. If that conversation felt positive, infinite and without boundaries, unburdened and without conditioned thoughts, invoking feelings of freedom, then it is highly likely that the chat was with our true Self. On the other hand, if it felt negative, gloomy or merely neutral, it is highly likely, that this conversation we had was with a part of the ego, that impersonated the true Self.
So, you see, we can distinguish between the fake and the genuine, the false and the true, the negative and the positive. It is not rocket-science, although for most of us it may still be, until we become intrigued by polarities and we stumble upon their infinite interrelation to each other. Spock would say “Fascinating”, Marty McFly would say “Whoa!”, Dr. Ellie Arroway would say “No words to describe it. Poetry. They should have sent a poet.”, Dr. Amelia Brand would say “My god, that’s… breathtaking!” to name but a few well-known movie and TV show characters. That’s because once we consciously decide and choose to discover the infinity of the universe with the mind, starting with our own selves, we automatically discover its infinite beauty with the Heart. Mind and Heart go hand in hand, even if we don’t know it or the ego deliberately denies it.
Our experiential journeys through this world and beyond it, become much more enjoyable once we cultivate this feeling of surrendering to the Heart and demote the mind to a faithful servant as it was always meant to be. Let’s remember Albert Einstein’s quote “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift.” Once we consciously walk on the “Bridge between mind and Heart” we can elevate our life experience to unseen heights, guided by our true Self through our purpose and passions in life. Life will be more like a breeze and less of a chore. In the past, talking to our selves would have us committed to a mental institution. In the future it will open ourselves up to possibilities, that our limited mind cannot comprehend at this time, propelling us forward in ways we cannot imagine. As they saying goes, the ball is in our court. It has always been there. If we tried to look at it from the perspective of the birthright and not from the perspective of a chore, we would be living in a Golden Age already. It takes discipline to remember our dreams, but it takes courage to go after them.