Nonconceptual
Wisdom comes with the ability to be still. Just look and just listen. No more is needed. Being still, looking, and listening activates the non-conceptual intelligence within you. Let stillness direct your words and actions.
Culture replaces authentic feeling with words. As an example of this, imagine an infant lying in its cradle, and the window is open, and into the room comes something, marvelous, mysterious, glittering, shedding light of many colors, movement, sound, a tranformative hierophany of integrated perception and the child is enthralled and then the mother comes into the room and she says to the child, "that's a bird, baby, that's a bird," instantly the complex wave of the angel peacock irridescent transformative mystery is collapsed, into the word. All mystery is gone, the child learns this is a bird, this is a bird, and by the time we're five or six years old all the mystery of reality has been carefully tiled over with words.
Conceptual intelligence is the ability to retain information, analyze, compare, and so forth. It’s a tiny fragment of what intelligence is. There is a vastness of non-conceptual intelligence.
There is a voice that doesn’t use words. Listen.
There are two dimensions to this moment here, the words and the presence, the presence is nothing to do with words or thinking, it is formless, you can't say, aww there it is, you can never make presence into an object, a mind object...Presence is the consciousness itself, before the consciousness becomes a form as a thought, an emotion, a sense perception, it is the stillness underneath all your thinking which has always been there will always be there because it is timeless, underneath all the thinking there is a vast realm of consciousness that you touch when the mind subsides for a moment, there is a space between two thoughts, in which you are conscious, but not thinking.
Speech is of the society. Words are of the mind. Sounds are of nature. The soundless is of the beyond. Thus if one gets identified by one's own speech, that one will belong to the society. If one gets identified with one's words, that one will belong to the mind. If one gets identified with one's sounds, that one will belong to nature. If one dissolves in the soundless silence, then to that one alone the realms of the beyond will yield - to that one alone.
Silence is an ocean. Speech is a river. When the ocean is searching for you, don’t walk into the river. Listen to the ocean.
To listen to the silence, wherever you are, is an easy and direct way of becoming present. Even if there is noise, there is always some silence underneath and in between the sounds.
We talk of God, Truth and Love, but instead of direct experience we have definitions.
The truth is that what we have been calling God or Source or Oneness cannot actually be named. The minute that you name it, you make it and it. You give it definition and therefore suggest that there is something that isn’t it for it to be in relationship to.
The state of not knowing is the most important state you can be in because that opens you up to the deeper dimensions.
The conclusions that you make in your mind can seriously impede your ability to experience life.
Being at ease with not knowing is crucial for answers to come to you.
The people in the Indian countryside don’t use their intellect like we do, they use their intuition instead, and their intuition is far more developed than in the rest of the world. Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. That’s had a big impact on my work.
You could say that intuition is a kind of knowing, but you don’t know how you got there. You know something, but you don’t know by what path you’ve arrived at what you know. It’s a sudden arising of knowledge or knowing something, but “I don’t know how I know this”. What is at work here is non-conceptual intelligence, when intuition arises. Intuition is not arrived at by thinking, not by logic. It’s arrived at in a way that we cannot explain. It is closely related to creativity and inspiration. Inspiration also comes from that place. It is given to you. It is given to all great artists, musicians, writers, and even great scientists who made deep discoveries that were revolutionary - like Einstein. Einstein had a 'sense' of his theory of relativity. Before he could fully prove it, he already knew it was true. It was intuition that came to him. Of course, he had done a lot of thinking before that happened.
Silence is essential. We need silence, just as much as we need air, just as much as plants need light. If our minds are crowded with words and thoughts, there is no space for us.
True intelligence operates silently. Stillness is where creativity and solutions to problems are found.
Let silence take you to the core of life.