A Quiet Mind or a Silent Mind

A relatively small number of people attend to the quality or texture of the mind. People tend to identify with the sensations, feelings, emotions, thoughts and reactions that ‘take over’ the mind stuff. We become angry and identify with that movement so closely that we do not normally observe the anger, but we ‘are’ the anger. We don’t observe the sensation of heat or cold, hunger or thirst, but rather, we identify with them. For those who are able to step back and observe the ‘mind stuff’ regardless of the modifications that it undergoes as these impulses play upon it, they can observe that the mind may be agitated, it may be excited, it may be dull or cloudy, it may be calm, attentive or focused. These states of the mind-stuff are independent of the actual movement of thoughts, feelnigs or sensations into and out of the mind. They represent an opportunity for the spiritual practitioner to separate himself from the exte
al reactions and begin to work on developing mental receptivity, clarity and focus as the basis for spiritual development. An early stage of this practice involves achieving a status of calm or quietude that aids the seeker in maintaining some distance from the modifications that occur. He can observe and he feels separate from whatever occurs on the surface.

It is easy to fall into the modifications. Someone says or does something we don’t like and immediately we react, we may argue, we may fight, we may get depressed or discouraged. Circumstances don’t turn out the way we expect and we may lament our fate. A loved one dies and we fall into a deep state of grief which can last for a long period of time, depressing the life energy and interest in things. We may enter a competition and let our fixation on winning create an aggressive pattern in the mind. Jealousy, envy, fear, greed, anger, lust, hatred, ambition, joy, pleasure, pain, and many other modifications of the mind-stuff carry us away. For the individual who has achieved a basic state of calm, a quiet mind, he can mitigate the impact of many of these modifications and take a balanced and peaceful attitude to everything that comes to him.

A further status is one of silence, where the mind essentially becomes still and devoid of modifications. Sri Aurobindo described his own experience with the development of silence of the mind when he was able to observe the thoughts coming in from outside, from the universal Nature, and he was able to simply reject them as they tried to enter.

For practitioners of the integral yoga, it is a well-known and described phenomenon that there is a descend of a palpable Force from above, sometimes felt as a drilling down into the skull, sometimes as a vast Peace that descends, and when that status is established in the mind, a total silence reigns.

Sri Aurobindo observes: “The first step is a quiet mind — silence is a further step, but quietude must be there; and by a quiet mind I mean a mental consciousness within, which sees thoughts arrive to it and move about but does not itself feel that it is thinking or identifying itself with the thoughts or call them its own. Thoughts, mental movements may pass through it as wayfarers appear and pass from elsewhere through a silent country — the quiet mind observes them or does not care to observe them, but, in either case, does not become active or lose its quietude. Silence is more than quietude; it can be gained by banishing thought altogether from the inner mind, keeping it voiceless or quite outside; but more easily it is established by a descent from above — one feels it coming down, entering and occupying or surrounding the personal consciousness which then tends to merge itself in the vast impersonal silence.”

Sri Aurobindo, Bases of Yoga, Chapter 1, Calm — Peace — Equality, pp. 6-7