Stage 3: Silent Presence

Silent Presence

You have passed through the first two stages of practice. As a result your mind will naturally be more quiet. The impact of thoughts is less frequent while there is a general sense of resting calmly in the space of present moment awareness. You want to relax into that space – forget the next step! Now shift your attention more and more away from thoughts. Look at what happens in between two thoughts. There’s a little silent gap every time. That’s where we are resting our attention at this stage. Let thoughts come and go as they please – wait for them to finish and see every time.

Listen to the sounds or feel your body and notice all the various details. How sounds vibrate and buzz when some are close-by and others quite distant. Notice the different energetic patterns of your physical sensations. Temperature, expansion, contraction, friction, weight etc… Notice how all the details are “dancing” each and every second. The more you are absorbed in the details, the more your mind will forget to talk and verbalize. There are sounds and feelings but no verbalization or no commentary at all. That’s silent present moment awareness. You can’t force it. You can only allow it to happen gradually by shifting your attention away from inner noise towards the moments of silent presence. If you feel that this is too difficult, please spend more time with the previous step. Inner silence should be a natural consequence of having done the previous steps correctly, consistently and thoroughly.