Sit back. Close your
eyes.
Relax your body.
Take
note, for a moment, of the
sounds around you.
Try to
hear them
all at once,
paying attention to them without really
listening to any one of them.
Now, just like you were looking at that goofy
optical illusion which can look like a
vase or
two faces and you were
shifting your
focus from seeing one to seeing the other, shift your focus from the
sounds around you to the
silence around you.
Don't think you can't hear it. The more
noise there is, the more silence there is, too. Silence is the
dark matter of sound; the
Yin of it, if you will. You will notice the silence
between the sounds you hear, and also
around them,
underneath them.
Focus on it. Try to let it get
really loud. See if you can
drown out the noise with silence (in your
perception, of course).
Now.
Wrap your
mind around the following:
Silence is, for want of a
better word, the
opposite of sound. It is the
non-thing to which
sound is the
thing. For
every thing, there is a corresponding non-thing, a
Yin for every Yang, an
is-not for every
is.
The trick is, while there are
myriad things, there can by definition only be
one not-thing. Nothingness can not be
divided up into parts; it is all one and the same
nothing. So that
silence you are listening to is not just the
absence of sound, it is the
empty space around every
material thing that allows it to be (because of course, you can't have
anything if you don't have
room for it to
exist; that is,
empty space). It is also the famous
No-Mind, for as you will
notice eventually, when
hearing silence, your
brain grinds to a
halt.
One
Void is all void, without which there could be
No Thing. Got it?
So, in
theory, what is the One Eternal Thingy that all those
spiritualists are always out looking for?
Why, No Thingy, of course.
Mu.