Getting to Know Your Health - 007 Inner Silence

Adapted from דע את רפואתך, shiur 7 (excerpt)

The Torah Method vs. the Non-Torah Method

The most internal kind of power a person has is the power of stillness, when there is no action whatsoever going on. As long as I am doing something, or even feeling something, or even thinking something – I am still not reaching my essence, because the actions\feelings\thoughts are an active force in me, whereas my essence is a still part of me that doesn’t move. As long as there any movements going on with me – even subtle movements inside me, such as my feelings and thoughts – I am still not yet accessing my inner self.

“Man” in Hebrew is called adam, which comes from the word demamah – “silence.” On one hand, man is called a medaber, a social creature who likes to talk, (see Bava Kamma 3b), but on the other hand, man is also demamah, silence; Chazal say that “silence is a sign of wisdom.”

There are three kinds of silence. The most basic kind of silence is when we silence our physical actions. A deeper silence is when we silence our emotions, and even deeper than this is when we silence our thoughts.

Our essential self, our very “I”, is clothed by three “garments”. The outermost garment covering our self is our actions, the middle garment is the emotions, and the innermost garment, closest to our essence, is the thoughts.  If we want to reveal our essential self, we have to remove these three “garments” that cover it. This is not meant as a permanent detachment from our emotions and thoughts, but it is only a temporary means to achieve a greater goal: to reach our very self.

The way to remove our “garments” is by silencing them. Let us explain why we must do this.

There is a very big difference between our actual essence and the rest of our soul. Our essential self has no movement, and it is calm. The other parts of our psyche, though – actions, feelings, and thoughts – are kinds of movements. They are constantly shifting inside of us, and they move around in our psyche as long as we are mentally stable. They are constantly flowing within us. If we silence them, however, we bring them to a halt and they become inactive. Now that they are removed, it is possible for us to get past them and reach our essence.

Rav Avraham ben HaRambam, author of Sefer HaMaspik, writes the following: “Our inner job is to ascend our emotions.” What does it mean to “ascend” our emotions”? It sounds simply like being emotionally cold. However, there is a benefit to detaching from your emotions. If we detach from our emotions by silencing them, (rather than by simply ignoring them and closing our heart up inside from having any feelings), then it actually bears positive results. If we do it only temporarily as a means to achieve a greater goal, it is a positive practice, but if we do it permanently, it is of course detrimental.

In order to silence our soul, we need guidance in how to do it. We need to come to a situation in which we aren’t even thinking. It is much harder to silence our thoughts than to silence our actions and emotions, because it is our nature to always be thinking something. Even if our thoughts aren’t so intense, they still get in the way of reaching our essence, so even light thoughts need to be silenced, if we are reach to the inner self.

How can a person accomplish it? Rav Avraham ben HaRambam suggests that a person should sit in the dark for this, and this will slowly calm the person, more and more, until he is able to halt his thoughts and begin to focus on his very existence. Now, here comes the challenge. Our thoughts will not want to just simply think of our actual existence, and by nature our thoughts will stubbornly refuse to halt. But if a person keeps saying the words, “I exist” and he focuses on his very existence – not just as a lip service, but because he really wants to get there – the thoughts will become calmer and calmer, until they eventually become totally silenced. Keep repeating “I exist” more and more, and you will see how this brings your thoughts to become calm. If one sees that this isn’t working, he can calm himself first by listening to relaxing music or eating something light, and after that he should attempt to calm the thoughts in the way we have described.

There are non-Jewish practitioners of inner silence, and it seems similar to what Rav Avraham ben HaRambam devises, but their methods are an incomplete picture and do not bring us to our goal, because they aren’t doing this in order to connect to their essential self. (We will explain why this is so). Since the non-Jewish methods do not have the goal of connecting to their self, the methods they have come up with do not get us to the truth. The Jewish people have Shabbos, in which there is menuchah (serenity), which is a concept of silence to our movements. This represents a Jew’s ability to reach a place of non-movement, which is the nature of our “I” – to be still and non-moving. The non-Jewish approach, however, does not identify with a concept of non-movement, and this is eminent in the fact that they have no Shabbos. Thus, although reaching the self is part of their goal, they aren’t aware that the self is non-movement, and in their outlook, the self is also something that moves.

The non-Jewish method does not equate the inner self with non-movement. They do want to connect to a higher power, but their focus is on nullifying the self, without a goal to actually connect to the inner self. So although they have gotten some of the facts, their methods are missing pieces of the puzzle, and thus their methods do not bring us to the true goal: to truly desire to connect to the inner self. This is a point which has to be very clear, because this point alone is what differentiates a Jew’s soul with a non-Jew’s soul.