Silencing practice is the path to development if a general change of human consciousness is searched for. Silencing practice is the reduction of ego predominance. It is not only an esoteric path towards full awareness and enlightment. It is a life practice that should lead to change the social paradigm, the way we do things and the social and ethical values.
I say “silencing” and not “silence”, because it is not a status to achieve, but a continuous process to follow.
It is necessary to distinguish first what is not silencing practice. Silencing is not silencing human mind, it is not silencing curiosity and knowledge characterized from human specie. Silencing does not look to reduce initiative or act, feelings or emotions, passion or any attribute of living activity, It does not look to reduce growing or decisions, planning or thinking process. Silencing is nor denying things, nor matters, nor emotions, nor feelings, nor values. A silent life means full acceptation of everything that appears in every moment.
Silencing practice looks not to grasp in any of this. Not to hang in any of this. It is acceptation and giving up, It is about living and dying in every moment.
Silencing practice is an active activity that makes us to know that we are not our thoughts, nor our feelings, nor our physical status. Silencing practice reduce identification and open us to consider that we are not anything separate and with particular definition. Silencing practice take us to live fully and then to accept disappearance.
As M. Corbi puts it, silencing is silencing of every constructions of our mind on what it is as a result of our needs and wants. Silencing is to reduce objetivization, representation, identification, continuous desires and wants for appropriation, for demanding appropriateness, for projecting rejections, for imposing ideas or beliefs. Silencing practice is to stop depredation in daily life. It is silencing of the ego. It is to die to our desires and wantings. It is to accept to live dead but fully alive, without subject and them without objects, fully immersed in experiences. To live without object is the only way to achieve unconditional love as a way to live. It is a different way of knowing, calls by this author as “silencing knowing” without bias, without a depredator subject.
How do we apply this to social science? how to build a paradigm that can permit development and integrative human flourishing? This is a crucial step forward of human consciousness that is accelerated by present contradictions of human conflict in societies. It is present in our relationships and ways of living, even if most of us does not come into taking its relevance into account.
Silencing practice is to work for a consciousness of what is of common ownership, of common meaning and of common significance; it is to silence dogma, ideology and belief systems as the legitimation system to separate genders, races, countries and cultures. It is to look for a cosmic culture where everybody can belong to. But it is a continuous practice, which begins in the personal realm and continues at group level and at societal level.
We have to ask ourselves what could be silencing practice for organizing society. It could include practices as such:
o Any activity directed to reduce intolerance and separation between groups and collectives
o Any activity to reduce dogmatic and ideological dominance of the few on the many
o Any fight against appropriation of resources and power by few meanwhile the many lack of the minimum necessary
o Any orientation against creating separate identities, to produce rejection of one on other and to take out the right to belong to on the basis of nationality , gender, colour of skin of any other social condition
o Any activity directed to integration, to inclusion, to take away differences and separate privileges, to make everybody to be part of everybody
o Any premises to organize society based in equity principles, in solidarity and unity, compassion and inclusion, as distinct from nationalistic identification, culture separation, or social exclusion
o Any program that can include secular spiritualism as part of its social approach
It is known that most of this is included in the sustainable goals agenda, but from an “ego” paradigm they can be consider voluntaristic proposals. From a “self” paradigm they are just natural processes. Working silencing practice favors the paradigmatic shift necessary to make these goals achievable.
To hear the “silence behind the silence” is necessary to listen what is real, and for listening it is necessary to become silent. Silencing become then the project to organize non conflictive societies, were essential suffering can be overcome.