The Silence Experiment

Stop for a moment and sit quietly, alone, in an empty room. That is the whole instruction. It is not meditation and it is not a technique, and what it shows you is where most of your trouble comes from.

Most of what passes for inner work asks you to do something. Breathe a certain way. Repeat a phrase. Sit with your spine straight and aim at a state you have read about. I want to suggest something with no aim in it at all. I call it the Silence Experiment, and the instructions fit on three lines. Stop for a moment, and sit around quietly, alone in an empty room. If the instructions are unclear, watch a dog or a cat for a while. They are grand masters of this experiment.

While you sit there, you are not trying to arrive anywhere. You are not practising a way of breathing or sitting. You are not trying to control your mind. Once you have listed everything you are not doing, you are left not knowing what you should do or what should happen. That is the point. All that remains is to be aware.

And a great deal arises. Thoughts, one after another. Emotions you did not know were waiting. Sensations in the body, an itch, a stiffness, the urge to shift. Small temptations to get up and do something useful. Memories, plans, and a restlessness that seems to come from nowhere and has no reason. The empty room turns out not to be empty at all. It is full of everything you usually move fast enough to avoid.

Here is what I want you to see in it. Everything that arises in that room is passing, rising and falling like waves. And as you watch them appear and disappear, you are watching the roots of every problem human beings have, in one person and in the whole world. Not the problems themselves, only the roots. Being able to see them is a sign of health. The trouble starts only when you follow one of them, when a thought about tomorrow becomes a plan, the plan becomes a worry, and you leave the room in your mind while your body is still sitting in it.

When you follow a thought like that, it becomes your centre for a while, and it pulls everything else toward it. Most human thinking is built from fear and lack, a blind longing for something lost, and the pull toward such thoughts is what makes a bad day and, on a larger scale, a war. It is not comfortable to accept that the same mechanism at work in the news is at work in your own quiet room. But it is the same. And if you look for the idea of yourself that finds this hard to accept, you will find it is only another thing arising, another wave.

The experiment does not end suffering. What it offers is the way of least suffering: seeing what arises, letting it rise and fall, and not adding to it with your words and actions. A life lived this way has no fixed centre. It flows the way a stream flows through a valley, quietly, toward a sea it cannot see. You do not have to believe any of this. Sit in the room and watch. The room will tell you.

Questions that arise

How is this different from meditation?

There is no aim, no posture, no breath to follow and no state to reach. You simply sit quietly and stay aware of whatever arises. Nothing is being practised.

What if my mind will not stop?

It is not supposed to stop. Thoughts arising is the experiment working. The point is to watch them rise and fall, not to follow them and not to fight them.

How long should I sit?

As long as you like. A few minutes are enough to see what arises. The length does not matter; what matters is staying aware rather than leaving the room in your mind.

What is the point if nothing changes?

Something does change: you see the roots of your restlessness directly, instead of living downstream from them. That seeing is what loosens their pull.

Where this came from

The Silence Experiment is from my book An Inquiry Into Reality, in the chapter called Rivers. I had been writing about how each of us keeps rolling a boulder up a hill, and asked what would happen if you dropped the effort and looked down instead, toward the streams in the valley. The experiment is what I offer there, three lines long, and the pages after it follow what happens in the room.

An Inquiry Into Reality runs about 90 pages and costs €9. The rest of my books are at jussiniittyviita.com.