Spirituality-Inquiry v Silence

Written by Mathew Naismith

Amended: I have inserted additional supplements to this post in bold letters to better describe the difference between inquiries for our desires & inquiring for our needs, I will also give a real life example of inquiring for our needs. Also at the end of the post I will add another additional supplement pertaining to our hidden ego tendances.  This is the problem of trying to keep the posts short which I won’t try to do in the future; I will just let it flow.

It’s funny how one kind of topic keeps coming up around the same time, it must have something to do with that synchronicity thing again!! The topic in question is inquiry, is or should spirituality be based on inquiry? Well I don’t think it should be but many spiritually aware people think otherwise including a science minded bloke on a Noetic site I’ve recently been conversing with  so are people like myself wrong especially if you think, if we are not inquiring we must be of blind faith & is it blind faith not to inquire? We must also think here there is no right or wrong in spirituality because spirituality isn’t about judgment so any form of life/ideology one chooses to live by is just another form of existence.

I had a bloke say to me about this subject that Jesus made inquiries, how else is one to know about oneself? Inquiries are by far not the only way to gain awareness & wisdom, sitting within one’s silence is another way.  It’s all to do with sitting within your own quietness, Jesus didn’t need to inquire about anything once he started sitting within his own quietness, everything he needed to know just came to him. Ask yourself, how often does this happen in our lives? It’s happened to me a number of times, I would have spiritual experiences out of the blue without inquiry but once I started asking question the experience desisted.  Once you fall within your own quietness there is no need to make any further inquiry, what is needed just comes to one within this quietness/silence however if we desire to know more we cease within our quietness. A need denotes silence but a desire denotes noise, spirituality in my mind isn’t about noise but silence.  Needs also usually denote control of the ego because we are only spiritually feeding our needs however desires are a different kettle of fish. To desire is to inquire to feed our controlling ego. Don’t get me wrong here, there is nothing wrong with feeding the ego through our desires it’s just another way to exist that’s all however it’s not really what I would call spiritually minded.  Yes we can become spiritually aware through this process but it’s the long road around in my mind because you’re not always expressing yourself spiritually, spirituality shouldn’t be about any sort of desires I believe.

Let’s look at this another way, what do spiritualist in India do to become enlightened? They sit within their own silence for hours, days & even years on end to attain this enlightenment/awareness, this sounds like they are inquiring but there not. At first they inquire but it’s only for a very short moment in their lives, once they have fallen within their own quietness only then are they able to know & understand to help them reach enlightenment. This also has a lot to do with suffering as well because within this suffering one will accept all that will come before thee for ever after.  Spirituality isn’t or shouldn’t be about desire but about the acceptance of all & only through the acceptance of all is one able to find true enlightenment; we are in fact talking about a need here not a desire.  “The need to suffer in silence to attain true enlightenment”. 

I would also like to enumerate here that one can also inquire for a need as opposed to inquiring for a desire however there is a fine line here. One must beware of the difference between a desire that is controlled by the controlling ego or a need which isn’t controlled by the ego. To give a better understanding of this I will use a real life example.

I was helping out a lass from Cambodia in various ways, I should mention here it was all above board, anyway she wanted to fit in over here in Australia so she tried to become a Christian. After a few months she came up to me baffled about the ideological concepts of Christianity, she wasn’t happy with it at all so I suggested she stick with what she was comfortable with which was Buddhism. I gave her a book about Buddhism so she could make further inquiries to what she wanted.

In this case it wasn’t an inquiry of desire but a need which wasn’t controlled by the controlling ego. Let’s look at the same scenario but in reverse which is driven by desire not a need. Having a desire to fit in, this lass would have kept making inquiries into Christianity until she herself psychologically accepted these ideological concepts that she was obviously not comfortable with in the first place. This is a desire to fit in which is controlled by the controlling ego. She is to this day quite happy with her choice in not egotistically fitting in.        

However all we are doing is talking about the individual self, what about the collective self, does it too have to suffer, not only suffer in silence but suffer the consequences of the controlling, very noisy, ego to attain enlightenment collectively?  What is above is also below; yes of course the collective has to suffer as the individual self does.  There is also another matter to consider here, why would a soul keep choosing to live within a harsh environment for no reason? We must remember here it’s never about the human vessel but the soul; we are living for the soul soles purpose in reality not our own individual selves. 

This brings us back to blind faith, if were not inquiring all of what we know through silence, our own quietness, is built up on blind faith obviously?  Anyone who has experienced what silence can bring knows it’s not of blind faith however it is understandable anyone who is not of their own silence would look at any awareness/knowing gained from silence being of blind faith.  Anything not detectable by any of the five senses is usually deemed as being of faith only but what are the five senses controlled by?  The controlling ego of course however one can control theses ego tendencies brought to us by the five senses by just taking control of the ego instead of the ego taking control of us. All we need to do is be aware of the controlling factors of the ego & yes it is that simple because all it takes is awareness & the ego will become dysfunctional in its controlling factors quite automatically.

If this or any one of my posts or in fact anyone’s post has upset you in some way you must look within you to why you are feeling this way not look at other people’s perceptions as being wrong in some way. In my case, concerning this post, some people might be offended by me relating the ego to desires, why are you offended by this? It wouldn’t be you don’t want to be seen expressing a lowly human trait like the ego in anyway is it or is it just by expressing anything deemed lowly or unacceptable makes one less spiritual.  If you think on this, what is controlling these thoughts of being a lesser person if we express a lesser valued human trait even when they do help us on our spiritual path?  Interesting isn’t it but don’t worry about not seeing how the hidden ego fools us because it took me years to realise this!!