Cognitive science, particularly research in the field of embodied cognition and conceptual metaphor, strongly intersects with my meditation practice. Following is a description of methods, which are consistent with embodied cognition, that I often use to achieve profound inner silence.
True and complete inner silence is a descent into the fullness of the ineffable field of potential underlying all form. During my meditations, achieving inner silence generally progresses in three stages.
- Stopping internal verbal monologue
- Ceasing conceptual constructs
- Residing in the non-conceptual state
- Creating a satori-conducive concept space
1. Blocking Subvocalization
Stage 1, stopping the internal verbal monologue, simply means I shut up inside. I don’t always shut up entirely. Sometimes I’m still mumbling, but I just need to turn down the volume enough to focus on stage 2.
One quick way to attenuate inner speech is to interfere with it by focusing on your mouth and breathing. Try to move your mouth and inhale and exhale in ways that conflict with the movements and patterns prompted by inner speech. Inner speech is often accompanied by subvocalization, or slight movements consistent with those you would make if you were actually speaking. When you block subvocalization, inner speech naturally dims.
2. Identifying Deep Conceptual Structures
Stage 2, ceasing conceptual constructs, requires a capacity to recognize that what initially seems like awareness of what is is a conceptual construction of the subtle mind.
Our conceptual constructions encompass everything. Everything you think is is a conceptual construction. That includes time, arrangements of objects in space, social situations. This is not like saying “time and space are illusions”. It’s more like saying “your seeming awareness or perception of time and space is a mental construct”. In virtue of realizing that “reality” is a mental construct instead of an actual entity, generally the constructs are easily abandoned.
Special note: I have noticed that this process occurs primarily in my body, not among my inner verbal thoughts. We think with our whole bodies. To achieve silence, the whole body must be silent.
3. Recursive Conceptual Dissolution
This process of ceasing conceptual constructs in initially recursive, because the effort to recognize and abandon concepts involves additional conceptual processing. For example, you may think [abandon X] or [drop situation Y--given Y is mental(z)]. Call this concept or set of thoughts “dropping.”
Once the concept involved in the effort (i.e., “dropping”) has served its purpose (or even before, if it has assumed focal attention), the next step is to abandon that as well. Drop the concept of “dropping.” You might think, for example, as you are making an effort to recognize the mental-construct nature of your “awareness” of a situation, that you must “let go” of the construct. Then realize that “letting go” is conceptual. It’s conceptual to the extent that it involves an amalgam of sensory simulations that are, in fact, not happening “out there.”
Verbal thoughts naturally stop arising when the underlying conceptual constructs are dissolved. However, it’s difficult to see the conceptual constructs without first relaxing the verbal monologue to a large degree.
4. Using Thought to Dissolve Thought
In order to use conceptual thought to stop conceptual thought, consider what sort of concepts will accomplish this. What you will arrive at is the vast collection of spiritual ideals for the seeker: surrender, one-pointedness, placing enlightenment at the top of one’s priority list, pooling all of one’s desires (which have concepts as their substrate–or rather, the shapes of our concepts lend themselves to our desires) into one.
All of these ideals create a conceptual orientation or conceptual atmosphere in your mind that makes it monumentally easier to let go of the concepts that do arise. You use desire, motivation, and belief regarding everything in life (i.e., everything in your conceptual system) as a tool for dropping your concepts, because otherwise your tendency is to want them there.
If you want them there, no amount of intellectual acrobatics or meditative discipline will dissolve them.
Love, the Concept that Uncovers Itself
The most powerful conceptual orientation or attitude for achieving mental silence is total, unconditional love. There’s no moral element in this, and how it motivates your actions is irrelevant in this particular context.
The point is to cultivate a world view that is subsumed by the ideals of love, where love is the belief or desire that all beings experience well being, and one’s own self is a part of this but not the center of it (there is no center).
Love entails self-lessness, where all I’m talking about here is that you don’t devote as much of your conceptual machinery to representations of the self in relation to others.
Love erodes concepts of social arrangements, to a large extent.
Ironically, while a conceptual system governed by love brings you closer to mental silence, mental silence reveals that love is the true nature of everything.
Written during a Dzogchen meditation retreat led by Younge Khachab Rinpoche in 2009.
