I think about containers a lot, and while one of my ultimate explorations is, ‘what (kind of a container) am I?,’ I’ve just been sitting in the quiet noticing the impact of what I’m choosing to contain… what I’m inviting in, what I’m entertaining…
and how that distracts me from my ability to notice my self, to notice what I am underneath all of that.

Simply, I’m sitting here noticing my daily thoughts…
and how they are a lot of static.
A lot of interference.
Ultimately, just a lot of noise.

When I get below them, when I quiet them, or more realistically, think bigger than them; what is here? Who am I?

Mental quiet is something that meditation offers… a way to quiet the noise. Though my meditation isn’t about stilling my mind, or slowing my thoughts. It’s instead a way to focus; a way to focus my mind, focus my attention on something –like the breath.
Meditation is less about stoping and more about directing, giving my mind ‘wholesome employment.”
Like noticing my breath.
… in
…out
…expansion.
…relaxation.

Then, my mind naturally quietens. It slows down on it’s own accord.

Or instead of focusing on breath, I just sit here, as I am now,
and gently gaze at whatever is in front of me (a wall and a door)
and focus on the underlying quiet of the room.
The relative quiet of reality.
The silence that surrounds me every day, every moment.
The silence in this room.
The silence under all noise.

This silence is where the magic is.
This silence is where I find myself.
This silence is where I find you, and everything else that I am.
This silence is where I feel the underlying connection of Everything.

…whatever connection I manage to feel, this silence is where I find it most easily.

Under the Noise

The depth of reality – who i am and what all of this is- or at least the depth of it that I am able to plumb, IS this silence.
Or rather, I am able to recognize the depth, or be in the depth when the noise of my mind isn’t so loud.

The silence of this room isn’t so important.
A quiet mind isn’t so important.
…The depth of existence is here no matter those things.
It’s more that when my thoughts are not so noisy, I am not so distracted from what I am underneath them.



I can feel my connection with everything easier.
When my thoughts are so distracting that all I am doing is noticing them, it is hard to notice anything else.
It is hard to notice that I am SO MUCH BIGGER than they are.


It is ironic that I (we!), being so vast, am even able to focus so much of me on one thing – on my thought stream. It is a tribute to the fascination and infinite creativity of my thoughts that they are able to capture so much of my attention. And I guess a tribute to me that I am (we are!) able to focus something so vast as my own consciousness down into something so… finite. I could do the same with my emotions, and some people do. Or the body. The infinite physical landscape offers so much to explore. All of these things can absorb my attention so much that I am insensible to everything else. An amazing feat.

The wonder of it all.
No matter what direction I think about it, no matter what end of the scale we focus on it is awe inspiring:
how absolutely captivating being human is
…or our absolute ability to be captivated by it.

Un-Captivating Myself?

When I do bother to remember that I am actually much bigger than all of these things…
everything goes quiet.
everything seems boring.
the distractions, the brilliant fascinations are so much more compelling than the comparative silence.

crickets.
not even crickets.
snore.

yet
deeper than the chorus of crickets…
under even the whisper of the wind…

is a Quietness.
…a very mundane… presence.
…is me. you. everything.

It’s not exciting. no rainbows nor unicorns. no fireworks nor crystalline displays of light.

nothing fantastic.

I think this is why we spend so much of our time running on automatic, focusing on a constant stream of silly thoughts.
straighten this. clean that. put this away. clear that off. sweep this. wipe that…

Because, when we stop doing that, when we quieten down, when we slow down…
When we slow all of that fascination down.
everything gets.. quiet.
there is no automatic anymore.

instead…
it’s alive.
perceptive.
There is… expansion.

But it’s hard to feel.
Especially after the bright chaos, it’s boring.
After all of the movement, it’s sleepy.

But if we manage to stay here long enough, we start to feel me.
We start to feel the bigness of me.
A vastness. That we all are.
We start to know, to remember the bigger container that we are.
We become present to our quiet connection to things.

And slowly
and surely
we start to hear the quiet symphony that underlies all of the noise.

Relative to all of the usual noise,
the quiet is difficult to hear.
the quiet is difficult to feel.
the quiet is difficult to focus on.

It is easier to relax into.
to quietly Drop Open.

I don’t know how big this connection is, how big we are.
But I am finding again that this silence is much richer somehow than all the rest of the distraction put together.

When we drop deeply in, out of the corner of our senses, we begin to feel the vastness of who we are.
that we contain all of this.

I don’t know where it leads. How vast we really are.
I may never know.
I don’t think it matters that I know.

I think what matters is that we remember
when the noise is not pleasing and helpful,
when it is painful and driving us to distraction,
that is is not ultimately who we are.
We can drop out of it.
Beneath all of the noise and distraction, we are bigger than all of that.
We contain all of it.

The only question about that now, is how much of that vastness can we be aware of in our human existence?

Sitting here in the quiet,
feeling the futility of all the noise.
wondering… just how big are we?