This is a free preview of the book Seeker of Silences: Contemplations of a Silent Mind.

On Resisting Suffering

If I resist my suffering, I empower it to destroy me.

I am prone to feeling psychological pain and suffering. It might appear as an inconspicuous grain of irritation, or more prominent anxiety. Whenever suffering stares

into my soul with its burning eyes, I feel it at full capacity; it is not relative, but always pure, pristine, sincere, and it devours all the space within.

I cannot escape my suffering through thinking: “It is not as bad as it seems. I have experienced worse than this. Millions of people in the world are in a worse situation than I am. I know someone who has been through the same.” Avoiding, denying, and resisting the feeling of suffering using the tools of thinking only empowers the feeling.

I can see through my suffering only when facing it directly. Facing my suffering does not mean acknowledging its external causes, but gazing into the relentless eyes of the feeling of suffering. As I approach the feeling itself, its eyes burn my own eyes like a thousand suns. They scorch my spirit to ashes. They imprison me in dark and lifeless dungeons bearing the names of fear, hate, anxiety, grief, regret, and worry.

However, beyond all that, after walking through all the agony, I merge to my feeling. I become aware of something that has been in the background all the time— compassion. It is not the limited compassion created by my mind, but something happening deeper within me. That compassion is without an object, and therefore all objects are embraced by it, including my suffering.

Because I hold the ability to feel suffering within me, I can also feel it in another. The suffering in the purest form is the same in all living beings as it is in me. Therefore, I feel compassion for all living beings. When I try to resist or avoid my suffering, I am escaping the world around me, and escaping from the world means denying myself.

I can release myself from the prison of my suffering only by stepping closer to the feeling of it. In the silence of the mind, I can do so with unlimited compassion.

On Trusting in Not Knowing

My knowledge is a self-made prison.

I often believe I hold the truth of a multitude of things. But do I really know anything about them? I spend a big part of my life in an inner world driven by

knowledge. I mistake to believe knowledge is the reality, and during that same breath, I unconsciously produce a false image of myself. One of permanence, rooted in limited knowledge.

I am gazing at the snowfall in front of me. My mind has formed an image of it, but do I really know what a snowfall looks like? In the silent night sky, I can see clusters of bright stars arising from the embrace of the black space. But have I ever actually seen the light of the stars? I feel like a mind attached to a body, a totality I call my personality, but have I ever truly felt my body or my mind? In the moments of inner peace and silence, a question arises: “What is the ‘I’ that can feel myself?”

My thoughts represent the world in their own straightforward way. They create symbolic images of what the world looks like. Arising with the mental images of the world, a symbol of myself arises—the ‘I’ who is looking at the world through the kaleidoscope of my knowledge. If my knowledge of the world defines who I am, then at the same fleeting moment, what I don’t know also defines who I am. Am I therefore everything? My knowledge might create an identity, but it is rarely myself.

The nature of all knowledge is ephemeral. I can only observe its rising and falling, like leaves of the tree appear in spring and wither away in autumn. When the leaves have withered, all that is left is not knowing.

I feel insignificantly small when I think about the volume of what I do not know. However, in that state of insignificance, I can open the mental fist I was unconsciously clenching. Letting go of my knowledge makes space for creation. In the stillness of the mind, I can lean backward, relax, and see life before my eyes as a play, which seamlessly integrates to a much vaster play of existence.

My role is crucial in that play, regardless of my feelings of insignificance. I am unique simply because I exist. Any knowledge added to simply existing blurs the vision of myself and creates false significance. Without my small and insignificant role, the whole play would crumble down in its own impossibility.

Relying on the warm and free embrace of not knowing is challenging because too often I need to invoke my knowledge. But the situation is not dire; only by invoking my knowledge can I experience what the boundless embrace of not knowing feels like.

On Imposing Unnecessary Judgments

Whatever I judge in another is my own ignorance.

When I know exactly who I am, without any doubt of myself, I tend to judge the world around me. I impose my judgments on events, conditions, and especially other people. I continuously need to assess the outside world in relation to myself, and as a result, the world feels like a threat to my own survival. That vague and elusive feeling of threat defines much of my identity, and all identities are prone to impose unnecessary judgments.

No light or heavy judgments arise in the endless vortices of my soul. There are only judgments that exist, and in our existence, they are all alike. None of my thoughts are truly neutral or nonjudgmental, even though I would like to believe so.

My thought that addresses the beauty of the shimmering sunset, which colors the whole skyline with hues of bright orange, is fundamentally no different than my thought that addresses the cruelty of the most hideous and murderous human being in existence. Whenever a thought arises in my consciousness, the mechanical process of the mind judges the thought beneficial or harmful to myself. Everything that feels beneficial or harmful is only an expression of my accumulated knowledge, a mirage in the realm of time.

When judging the world around me, I am actually judging myself. Many times I believe I know the truth, but the other side of the truth holds everything I do not know. If I were someone else, lived in a different time or place, or my life situation was different, I would be part of my current ignorance. Deep within, in the silence of my soul, I am my knowledge and my ignorance.

The best I can do for myself is to continuously find a way to see the two sides of myself: the seemingly real ‘I’, which is small, limited, fragile, and based on my knowledge, and the ‘self’ that is everything else. Together they form the being who I am. Only when the mind falls silent, I can truly accept my ignorance, which is a significant part of me.

On Feeling the Body as Myself

Dysfunction of thinking produces a false identity.

I cannot point to any exact part of the body that I could exclusively label as myself. My identity is created somewhere else than in the body, and the body is only an object of it. In the embrace of an identity, all objects are rendered to concepts of what they actually are.

Most parts of the body are beyond the reaches of my thoughts. I usually pay attention to the body only when it is strained, broken, or somehow in a state of a malfunction. However, those conditions cover just an insignificant part of it all. The significant part of it—that which keeps the body up and running—has a transient and unknown nature.

I cannot directly sense the essential parts of the body. I can only feel some derivative sensations of them. I can feel the heart beating in my chest, but not the heart itself. I can feel the warm tingling in my toes and fingertips, but not the flow of the blood within them. I can see the world around me, but my eyes are invisible to me. I can hear the world, but my ears are silent. However, when the body is in malfunction, I identify with the faulty functionality quite easily—I feel any malfunction as a part of myself, that must be fixed.

The body and mind are intrinsically connected. No definite dividing lines seem to exist where the body is not the mind, or the mind is not the body. Are my thoughts, therefore, similar malfunctions of the mind, just as malfunctions appear in the body? Is my essential nature found when there is no dysfunction of thinking present? Am I the best version of myself when I do not know to be myself? When I do not sense my identity, there is no irritation, hatred, jealousy, fear, or the clinging kind of love the mind is prone to fall into.

To fulfill my part in the totality of the mind and body, I must merge with it. I must jump into the stream this totality creates, leaving my sense of identity behind. In the silence of the mind, I can let things be just as they are without my personal investment in the equation.

On Having Faith in Life

I can see my faithful self in the absence of truths.

If I was looking at life from the perspective of a bird, everything would seem fundamentally different. I would value entirely different things. My feelings and thoughts would be profoundly different if they even existed like they do now.

I would live for food, survival, reproduction, the rustle of the wind under my wings, and the embrace of the open sky around my weightless body. I could feel the wind on my face and see the ground far below me, covered with green forests, clear hills, and deep waters. I could feel the sweet ecstasy of being, which holds no equivalent in power on the level of thinking.

The experience I call ‘my life’ is the sum of all the learned views and selected memories that create the reality around me. I'm mistaken to believing such reality as the truth. I easily forget that an infinite amount of different truths exist in the world. There are countless birds beside me soaring through the open sky. However, sometimes I forget every single truth the world bestows upon me. In the haven of those silent moments, I am freedom.

Without freedom, I am destined to perceive everything through a thick lens of my thoughts and mental positions. They dictate how I experience a world that already wanes into the past when I try to make sense of it. My past is a memory I look through that same lens. As I think about my life, even the future, I actually think about my past. As I stop thinking, I experience reality.

The world’s true nature unfolds when I dare to look deep into the world’s soul. It is a mirror in which I can see myself. I am because existence gives birth to something I can observe. In such moments of simple existence and inner silence, the faith in the world is.

Get Seeker of Silences Now

The Dusk Hour

The Sands of Time

Homeward Bound

Echoes From the Distant Horizons

Scattering Lights

See all posts from Jussi Niittyviita