Silence Behind the Mind

Some Dharma friends from Paradise, California, Mazie Lane and Bob O'Hearn, prolific and insightful writers, have recently took up blogging:  

Standing Here Talking 

Feeling to Infinity  

Transliterations by Bob O'Hearn

Bob O'Hearns Photo Gallery

Here is a sample of Bob O'Hearn's writing:  The Silence Behind the Mind and True Transformation:

"For those who have not experienced themselves as the silence behind the mind (their own original nature), they may get confused when they hear about concepts like “silent mind”, and assume it means having no thoughts. If that were true, then rocks and logs would be sages!

Thoughts are not a problem. It’s only in our habitual tendency to attach an enduring reality to our thoughts, to fixate on them to the point of identification, that the internal conflict is spawned and reinforced. Such conflict is a kind of falling off balance against a background of perfect balance.

Awareness itself is the silence behind the mind, which has also been described as the light that illumines all creation. It is not an attainment, nor can it come and go depending on causes and conditions. It is the fundamental basis. All arises and dissolves within it, and yet it cannot be characterized as either existent or non-existent, since it transcends dualities. It has nothing to do with thinking or not thinking (which are mere brain phenomena) — arbitrary, transient, and of no lasting significance except as modifications of consciousness.

From the vantage point of the silence or light behind the mind – pure awareness — one can realize the insubstantiality of one’s transient self-images. When they are seen through and recognized for what they are – cases of mistaken identity that do not actually implicate who and what we are — they tend to become obsolete, and what remains is a love that has no boundary or self-limitation.

Such love is our natural state, prior to the charades of conflicted incarnation. It is our primordial essence, and ever-present, though usually hidden beneath the conditional layers of neurotic personality that we consider “normal” in this time and place.

Aligning with this perspective both inspires and makes possible true transformation in the way we live and act in the human world, and frees us from the heavy burden of fear and doubt that clouds the usual vision. The fist at the heart opens and life breathes.

When this true nature, or essence, is first recognized as one’s prior identity in moments of genuine awakening, there is an enormous sense of ecstatic emotional relief, but typically one soon is drawn back into the conflicted egoic state by the weight of accumulated habit energy. Nevertheless, this glimpse creates the space and faith for further liberation to proceed, and thus begins the process of real transformation.

This process generally involves systematically seeing through and discarding all within one’s own being that is not in congruence with the original recognition, such as hatred, greed, envy, and arrogance. It’s a process of embodiment, or full integration, of the initial penetrating insight.

Attending to the task with sincere persistence, humor, and creativity, a genuine concern for others gradually replaces the selfish motive that previously characterized the individual, and true compassion becomes possible, as one’s natural state of unconditional love more and more shines through.

If we are truly keen on authentic human progress, we need to start with our own self-absorbed craziness, our defensive reactivity, the knot at our own hearts, rather than speculating about global transformation, for example, which is merely a distraction from the work at hand.

Ultimately, it must be seen that effective transformation can only be built on a foundation of real compassion, which is what true love is all about, and why we have appeared in this or any realm in the first place — to be an expression, each in their own unique way, of Love’s unfolding Grace."