Remembering to forget

A group of friends recently spent some time together, seeking to tune themselves to the fine vibrations of the Sufi path, keeping silence for part of the day in addition to prayers, meditations and other practices. Since then, several have said that they now feel a much deeper appreciation for silence, and we might wonder what is the power of this practice, and why we don’t invoke it more often.

Hazrat Inayat Khan describes the mind world as a palace of mirrors, a series of never-ending reflections, as one thought gives rise to another and another, and then still another. What is more, because the human is a living mirror, and therefore creative, the reflections spontaneously multiply: if something awakens a memory of a tree, for example, in only a few seconds we might spool through a number of images – the trunk, the leaves, the flowers, the fruit, the general form, our friend sitting on a branch, a blanket spread in the shade, a bird flying away, and so on, with each image potentially awakening still other images. Understandably, when this palace of living mirrors is filled with the impressions of the world that is spinning as fast as it does, our mind easily becomes very noisy. Typically, we endure this noise while we endeavour to fulfil various tasks and duties that are often unrelated to what is playing in the mirror realm.

To be silent, then, is a great relief, but to maintain silence for any length of time requires discipline and a change of habit, by which we might understand, a change of desire. However uncomfortable it may be, we often identify with the noise, and unconsciously keep it alive. If we were to recognize that the noise is only transitory, whereas our true nature is hidden in the silence, it would lead us to a profound change. To come to this state, we must forget the noise and learn to appreciate and to listen to the silence.

When he was speaking about the reflectivity of the mind, Hazrat Inayat Khan said that the soul is like a caterpillar in the sense that the caterpillar lives surrounded by colour and beauty, often adopting the tones of its surroundings, and then displays all the beauty it has absorbed when it emerges as a butterfly. In his metaphor, the caterpillar ‘listens’ to the beauty of the leaves and flowers. He contrasts this with the mosquito: “Why does not a mosquito turn into a butterfly, for a mosquito sometimes dwells among beautiful plants and flowers? Because the mosquito is not interested in listening; it is interested in speaking. It does not learn; it teaches. So it remains what it is.” As we have all heard mosquitos ‘speaking’ in our ear in the night, it is easy to follow this thought.

If we are drawn to the silence, it means we do not want to remain what we are, as the mosquito does, but we want to discover something more vast and heart-moving. The surface of the sea is turbulent, but beneath the waves there is silence; it need not be created by the seeker, only discovered. That is why one of the principal devotions of the Sufi is Zikar (which means remembrance). The practice involves the repetition of sacred words, but the real Zikar is discovered when the practice concludes and the seeker, forgetting the turmoil of daily life, remembers the Silence. There is the relief we have been longing for, as explained in the phrase in Gayan Boulas, “Speech is the sign of living, but silence is life itself.

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