Unsound, wonderful question.
This is difficult because the "answer" is paradoxical to the thinking mind; dualism can not encompass it. So, the best I can do is try to point.
Yes, it is a journey. But when you end you are at the beginning, yet you also see that there is no end or beginning. Confusing, eh?!
Well, you can use your mind to find out about things and all kinds of things about things, and this is good because you are then kept warm in a house-box and can eat without worrying about a cougar over your shoulder and can listen to stereo-boxes. Not bad. But if you want to know your true nature - which also turns out to be at the end the nature of everything that you've been examining - then you have to turn towards your interior - and only you can do it.
Interestingly, this turn is precipitated when thinking itself finally comes to the end of its powers and turns upon itself, deconstructing itself by seeing the limitations of thought. Perhaps, at that point, you can't see beyond that power of thought, but you know that further meaning must be found somewhere and you only have beyond it to go.
However, some people at this point don't take a step into the dark beyond just thought-based knowledge, as St. John of the Cross put it, and instead do one of two things, both of which are recoils from where you might go: the first is to turn back and hold unto the thinking mind regardless, telling yourself that the thoughts you have gotten from others are the only truth (the attachment to scientific truth is actually, deeper, a recoil from moving beyond it). The second is to see the way ahead without thought-power as only a dark expanse, of Nothingness. This is what nihilism is; a look beyond thought and an assumption of groundless-ness. In this second way, paradoxically, although the mind does not go back to just thought based knowledge, it still defines what might be beyond thought in terms of its absense; the mind still defines what might be in terms of thought as a reference.
And, of course, this is where we are, as a species: oscillating between an attachment to thinking (and scientific thinking because it is the most powerful we have evolved over matter) and an attachment to groundless-ness. Yet, interestingly, both are two sides of the same coin: they are both recoils from what may be beyond thought.
So, if you continue to turn your mind's eye to see the interior of what you are - simply conducting the next experiement in our long evolution - what do you find?
You can not see below thinking by using thinking, so that becomes problematic, and you soon learn that you "see" more, both within and without, from this place of silence, which is your being and true nature. Even more ineterstingly, you find that the view inwards is also a concurrent one outwards. In other words, awareness expands like the rings of a tree both inwards and outwards at once. In fact, you see that inward/outward is one movement; you begin to "see" the silence as the ground of both your self and all the environment. This movement produces progressive empathic identification with the other, who is seen as less and less as the other.
This expansion in awareness can produce a quickening in thought agility, but since thought is no longer the axis point upon which the self turns, it does not become a pole for identification.
As your awareness expands, it does so based upon "burning off" karma, or past acts and thoughts and their prey/predator essences, through your watching the thinking mind and not going into those thoughts pull of reactivity (meditation or watching while waking). The burning off of instinctual reactivity is concurrent with seeing deeper outside.
When the ring of awareness expands to a certain point you begin to see both the meaning in thought and the meaning beyond thought at the same time; they are not exclusive perceptions, but integrated; power of thought, in letting go of its instinctual remnants attached towards power (predator past) or fear of power (prey past), transcends itself and becomes integrated with a "seeing" that occurs prior to thought. It is this "seeing" which becomes the predominant mode of perception, but never exclusionary of the use of thought.
You see the beginning of silence is in you, as you, and all things, now. Beginning is end; end is beginning.
Silence = silence = silence = silence
That is enough, here.
This is difficult because the "answer" is paradoxical to the thinking mind; dualism can not encompass it. So, the best I can do is try to point.
Yes, it is a journey. But when you end you are at the beginning, yet you also see that there is no end or beginning. Confusing, eh?!
Well, you can use your mind to find out about things and all kinds of things about things, and this is good because you are then kept warm in a house-box and can eat without worrying about a cougar over your shoulder and can listen to stereo-boxes. Not bad. But if you want to know your true nature - which also turns out to be at the end the nature of everything that you've been examining - then you have to turn towards your interior - and only you can do it.
Interestingly, this turn is precipitated when thinking itself finally comes to the end of its powers and turns upon itself, deconstructing itself by seeing the limitations of thought. Perhaps, at that point, you can't see beyond that power of thought, but you know that further meaning must be found somewhere and you only have beyond it to go.
However, some people at this point don't take a step into the dark beyond just thought-based knowledge, as St. John of the Cross put it, and instead do one of two things, both of which are recoils from where you might go: the first is to turn back and hold unto the thinking mind regardless, telling yourself that the thoughts you have gotten from others are the only truth (the attachment to scientific truth is actually, deeper, a recoil from moving beyond it). The second is to see the way ahead without thought-power as only a dark expanse, of Nothingness. This is what nihilism is; a look beyond thought and an assumption of groundless-ness. In this second way, paradoxically, although the mind does not go back to just thought based knowledge, it still defines what might be beyond thought in terms of its absense; the mind still defines what might be in terms of thought as a reference.
And, of course, this is where we are, as a species: oscillating between an attachment to thinking (and scientific thinking because it is the most powerful we have evolved over matter) and an attachment to groundless-ness. Yet, interestingly, both are two sides of the same coin: they are both recoils from what may be beyond thought.
So, if you continue to turn your mind's eye to see the interior of what you are - simply conducting the next experiement in our long evolution - what do you find?
You can not see below thinking by using thinking, so that becomes problematic, and you soon learn that you "see" more, both within and without, from this place of silence, which is your being and true nature. Even more ineterstingly, you find that the view inwards is also a concurrent one outwards. In other words, awareness expands like the rings of a tree both inwards and outwards at once. In fact, you see that inward/outward is one movement; you begin to "see" the silence as the ground of both your self and all the environment. This movement produces progressive empathic identification with the other, who is seen as less and less as the other.
This expansion in awareness can produce a quickening in thought agility, but since thought is no longer the axis point upon which the self turns, it does not become a pole for identification.
As your awareness expands, it does so based upon "burning off" karma, or past acts and thoughts and their prey/predator essences, through your watching the thinking mind and not going into those thoughts pull of reactivity (meditation or watching while waking). The burning off of instinctual reactivity is concurrent with seeing deeper outside.
When the ring of awareness expands to a certain point you begin to see both the meaning in thought and the meaning beyond thought at the same time; they are not exclusive perceptions, but integrated; power of thought, in letting go of its instinctual remnants attached towards power (predator past) or fear of power (prey past), transcends itself and becomes integrated with a "seeing" that occurs prior to thought. It is this "seeing" which becomes the predominant mode of perception, but never exclusionary of the use of thought.
You see the beginning of silence is in you, as you, and all things, now. Beginning is end; end is beginning.
Silence = silence = silence = silence
That is enough, here.