Silence (Thich Nhat Hanh) - Part 1

This is part 1 of the the notes and quotes from the book Silence written by Thich Nhat Hanh:

• The basic condition for us to be able to hear the call of beauty and respond to it is silence.
• When you’ve been able to still all the noise inside of you, when you’ve been able to establish silence, a thundering silence, in you, you begin to hear the deepest kind of calling from within yourself. Your heart is calling out to you.
• You’ve been running, looking for something, because you think that thing is crucial for your peace and happiness. You push yourself to achieve this and that condition so that you can be happy. You believe you don’t have enough conditions to be happy right now, and so you develop the habit many people have, of constantly running after one thing or another. “I cannot be peaceful now, I cannot stop and enjoy things now, because I need more conditions before I can be happy.” You actually stifle the natural joie de vivre that is your birthright. But life is full of wonders, including wondrous sounds. If you can be here, if you can be free, then you can be happy right here and right now. You don’t have to run anymore.
• The practice of mindfulness is very simple. You stop, you breathe, and you still your mind. You come home to yourself so that you can enjoy the here and now in every moment
• All the wonders of life are already here. They’re calling you. If you can listen to them, you will be able to stop running. What you need, what we all need, is silence. Stop the noise in your mind in order for the wondrous sounds of life to be heard. Then you can begin to live your life authentically and deeply.
• How many minutes each day, if any, do you spend in true quiet?
• Sense impressions: Sensory food is what we take in with our senses and our mind—everything we see, smell, touch, taste, and hear. External noise falls into this category, such as conversations, entertainment, and music. What we read and the information we absorb is also sensory food.
• Perhaps even more than edible food, the sensory food we consume affects how we feel. We may pick up a magazine or go on the Internet, looking at pictures and listening to music. We want to connect and be informed. We want to enjoy ourselves. These are fine reasons to consume sensory food, but often our real purpose in those moments is simply to run away from ourselves and cover up the suffering inside. When we listen to music, read a book, or pick up a newspaper, it’s usually not because we truly need that activity or information. We often do it mechanically—perhaps because we’re used to doing it, or we want to “kill time” and fill up the discomfiting sense of empty space. We may do it to avoid encountering ourselves. Many of us are afraid of going home to ourselves because we don’t know how to handle the suffering inside us. That’s why we’re always reaching for more and more sense impressions to consume.
• Our senses are our windows to the outside world. Many of us leave our windows open all the time, allowing the sights and sounds of the world to invade us, penetrate us, and compound the suffering in our sad, troubled selves. We feel terribly cold and lonely and afraid. Do you ever find yourself watching an awful TV program, unable to turn it off? The raucous noises and explosions of gunfire are upsetting, yet you don’t get up and turn it off. Why do you torture yourself in this way? Don’t you want to give yourself some relief and close your sense windows? Are you afraid of solitude, of the emptiness and the loneliness you may find when you face yourself alone? Watching a bad TV program, we are the TV program. We can be anything we want, even without a magic wand. So why do we open our windows to bad movies and TV programs—movies made by sensationalist producers in search of easy money, movies that make our hearts pound, our fists tighten, and that send us back into the streets exhausted?
• But we can always make the choice to protect our peace. That doesn’t mean shutting all our windows all of the time, for there are many miracles in the world we call “outside.” Open your windows to these miracles. But look at any one of them with the light of awareness. Even while sitting beside a clear, flowing stream, listening to beautiful music, or watching an excellent movie, don’t entrust yourself entirely to the stream, the music, or the film. Continue to be aware of yourself and your breathing. With the sun of awareness shining in you, you can avoid most dangers—and you will experience the stream being purer, the music more harmonious, and the soul of the artist completely visible in the film.
• If you have space and silence to listen deeply to yourself, you may find within you a strong desire to help other people, to bring love and compassion to others, to create positive transformation in the world. Whatever your job—whether you lead a corporation, serve food, teach, or take care of others—if you have a strong and clear understanding of your purpose and how your work relates to it, this can be a powerful source of joy in your life.
• When we direct our attention to certain elements of our consciousness, we’re “consuming” them. As with our meals, what we consume from our consciousness may be wholesome and healthy, or it may be toxic. For example, when we’re having a cruel or angry thought and we replay it over and over again in our mind, we are consuming toxic consciousness. If we are noticing the beauty of the day or feeling grateful for our health and the love of those around us, we are consuming healthy consciousness.
• Every one of us has the capacity to love, to forgive, to understand, and to be compassionate. If you know how to cultivate these elements within your consciousness, your consciousness can nourish you with this healthy kind of food that makes you feel wonderful and benefits everyone around you. At the same time, in everyone’s consciousness there is also the capacity for obsession, worry, despair, loneliness, and self-pity. If you consume sensory food in a way that nourishes these negative elements in your consciousness—if you read tabloids, play violent electronic games, spend time online envying what others have done, or engage in a mean-spirited conversation—the anger, despair, or jealousy becomes a stronger energy in your consciousness. You are cultivating the kind of food in your own mind that isn’t healthy for you.
• Whether we’re conscious of it or not, we are continually watering one thing or another in our mind—things that we almost certainly will consume again later on. What we water and consume unconsciously may show itself to us in our dreams. It may manifest as something we blurt out in a conversation, and then we wonder, “Where in the world did that come from?!” We can do a lot of damage to ourselves and to our relationships when we don’t pay attention to what we’re taking into ourselves and cultivating in our mind.
• When we touch the ground with our foot, we should be able to feel our foot making contact with the ground. When we do this, we can feel a lot of joy in just being able to walk. When we walk, we can invest all our body and mind into our steps and be fully concentrated in each precious moment of life.