You can add to the noise of the world

or you can add to the peace

You can add to the noise of the world, or you can add to the peace.

Have you ever listened to the birds or the wind or the traffic or the waves without thinking, without labelling or naming them, asking questions of them, but just listened deeply? If you have, you know that you can enter a deep place of peace, a place of peace which feels so right, feels as it should be, it feels familiar, as if you have lived there before.

If you haven’t there is a thing that you can do just to catch a glimpse of the edge of it. Ask yourself ‘what will my next thought be?’ Go looking for it and you will see there is nothing, nothing arises.

When you listen to the wind and label it ‘wind’ or the blackbird and label it ‘blackbird’, you detach yourself from it. Just as you do with your thoughts while you are meditating. Listen without adding your little words and without this intermediary you can truly hear the world singing, not just in your ears, but you can physically feel it within your body, I feel birdsong and rainfall in my chest.

In meditation this morning. Watching the thoughts arise and watching them go.

Noticing each thought as it arises and simply labelling it ‘thought’ and the thought goes away. Each thought that comes, noticing it and saying ‘thought.’ For each feeling, saying ‘feeling’. And watching them become nothing. Try this meditation yourself. Sit in a good posture (see my older post on posture) relaxed but upright, lower your eyes and with each though label it ‘thought’ and watch it fade away. The thing that comes between you and directly experiencing the world fades away for a while.

You are not your thoughts. The thoughts it seems after a while are not even ‘yours’ they are just thoughts, their own separate thing that arises in you. Do this persistently and you see that nothing is yours. Your feelings are not yours, your desires are not yours. Your body is not yours. We are taught to attach to things, to ideas and opinions, to beliefs and values, to material things. But not of these things you attach to are yours. There is no persistent ‘you’ for anything to belong to, there is just a passing wave and we attach, cling to things to try to slow the wave down and make the journey stop.

I have been getting rid of my things, tools collected over the years, clothes I don’t wear anymore, books I have read and won’t read again. I have sold the house that I have lived in for twenty five years, where my children grew up where I argued with my wife and fell in love again, where I came home from work each evening and left again each morning, where I made a garden and wrote some books, where I planted small trees that are now massive trees that flower and fruit and I am leaving to a new country to start again. I wrote three books here, How to Catch a Mole, the story of how I came to this point in my spiritual journey. Seed to Dust, the story of the work I did for many years in gardens and Spring Rain, the story of how this man relates to the boy that I was. They are all in their way, books about meditation.

In buddhism there is a thing called ‘beginners mind’ It refers to approaching each moment as if it were new, to not believing that you know something but are always beginning your search for the truth. If you believe you know something, you are held back from going further. Beginners mind does not know the names of birds, it just hears them, it is always young, energetic, always exploring. I try to embody the concept of ‘Beginners Mind’ I start again each morning in meditation as if reborn. Knowing nothing, believing nothing. I’ve been doing this for over fifty years.

So in my move to another country I am a beginner again. I did not grow up with the culture or the geography or language or food, I have beginners mind, like a child, even to the point of learning a language, like a child, reborn with nothing left of my previous life. Reincarnated as a sixty eight year old man. With nothing but the clothes provided for me by my previous incarnation.

People I have spoken to have been concerned that I am somehow throwing away memories by getting rid of things I used. It is true, there are memories attached to things. The scythe I mowed a meadow with every autumn, swishing though the grass and the wildflowers as I saw the hedgehogs and field mice getting out of the way, stopping every few paces to shave the burrs off with a scythe stone, hanging my shirt on a tree, going brown, wearing a big straw hat to save my head from the sun, stopping to drink from my water bottle in the heat, the smells, the sights the glorious sounds. I do remember all that. I have sold it to a decent young man who is starting his adventure and I’m pleased that it will be used again instead of being stored away to gather rust and dust like some sad memento of a romanticised past. I have got rid of my scythe and I still remember it all.

As is the way with the mind, with each remembering it becomes more romantic, more beautiful, more of a story. Less true in fact if more true in feeling. Because the past is not true. It cannot be true because the entirety of a single moment is too deep, too wide, too big to capture it all in a memory or a painting or a photograph or a piece of writing. So in memory we reconstruct from fragments and fill in the gaps and the filler will change each time we remember because the memory will be impacted by the way we are feeling now. So, the material things don’t mean anything, the story is romanticised as are all tales of the past.

Will I be sad to leave? No of course not! To cling to a romanticised past, or the fantasy of a future is to invite suffering. Clinging is the root of all suffering. Let go, find peace by letting go of clinging, to past, to future, to ideas and beliefs. I remain here, perfectly and deeply here wherever I am, in this massive, beautiful, infinite, deep and rich, unfathomable now with a beginners mind. A childs mind unhindered by the past, knowing nothing and instead of adding to the noise, I’m adding to the peace.

Cover pictures of three of my books