Silence by Adyashanti

True silence has everything to do with our state of consciousness. I think we're all familiar with what I call a manufactured silence, which is a dead sort of silence. If you have been in meditation groups, you have probably experienced a manufactured silence. It's the kind of silence that comes from the manipulation of mind. That's a false of silence because it's manufactured, controlled.
Real silence has nothing to do with any kind of control or manipulation of yourself or your experience. So forget about controlling the mind. I'm here to talk about spiritual enlightenment and freedom.
We are surrounded by coarse consciousness. This kind of consciousness is heavy, thick, and dense. When you turn on the TV, you encounter coarse consciousness, for the most part. Most movies you go to have a coarse consciousness. Coarse means asleep within the dream state.
From this coarse state, silence is seen to be an object. Quietness is something that seems to happen to you. But that is not real silence. Real silence is your true nature. To say " I am silent" is actually quite ridiculous. When you look at it, its not that you are silent, it's that you are silence. Conceptually it may seem to be a small difference betwn the exp of "I am silent" and " I am silence," but this is actually the difference betwn bondage and freedom, heaven and hell.
Thinking of silence as a lack of noise~~mental noise, emotional noise, or the external noise around you. As long as you see silence as something objective, something that is not you but might come to you like and emotional experience, you are chasing your own projected idea.
When you start to be receptive and allowing, you start to return to your natural state, which is very quiet. Being receptive is effortless. Try not to control your experience. When you get up and go about your day and have to pay attention to other things, you cannot pay attention to your concentration, so your peace of mind disappears because it is something that is manufactured.
Half of the practice of spiritual inquiry is to take you to silence instantly. When you inquire "Who am I?" if you are honest, you'll notice that it takes you right back to silence instantly. The brain doesn't have the answer, so all of a sudden there is silence. When you become quiet, you let yourself relax into the moment, here & now.
Silence reveals itself only to itself. Only when we enter as nothing and stay as nothing, will silence open its secret. Its secret is itself. All the books, teachings, words, can only get you to the door, and perhaps entice you to enter. Once there, you start to feel the presence of silence very powerfully.That is the sacred invitation.
Freedom is the ultimate demolition project because it steals everything from you. That's why it's liberating. It steals your argument with yourself and others, because there isn't one.
When there is awakening to our true nature, our minds are no longer looking at emptiness, because there is no separate somebody to look at it.
One of the things missed is the revelation of perfect Oneness, the revelation that you are the ultimate source. You can have the experience that you are free because you no longer identify with a mind, body, and personality, but only rarely, other than having a vague sense of ONENESS, does the individual have a really clear perception of the perfect unity that is actually inherent in awakening.