Tag Archives: Larry Rosenberg

The nature of silence

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In Larry Rosenberg’s new book, he writes:

There are many ways to quiet ourselves, all of which are valuable. There’s a silence that comes from reading a book filled with magnificent ideas. There’s a silence in seeing beauty in any form—in nature, taking a swim in the ocean or a walk in the woods, or just being in solitude. But I’m talking about a measureless kind of silence that grows out of the practice. You could say it’s the heart of the practice because the deepest essence of our innermost being is silence.

This silence is shy. You can’t find it through the intellect. You can’t reach it with your emotions. In fact, you can’t search for it—the search itself would cause stirrings, movements, vexation. You can’t order it, expecting to receive silence by command. That would be like commanding love—we all know you can’t force love into existence. Silence likes humility, gentleness, innocence. It likes to be valued for itself. Thought goes into abeyance gently, gracefully, peacefully, without a struggle, without any bloodshed…

This silence is not a rarified experience. Stillness or silence or emptiness is not reserved for mystics who live high up in the Himalayas, wear loincloths, eat one grain of rice a day, sit cross-legged for weeks while freezing cold, or stand on one leg for ten years. It’s part of the human constitution.

The emptiness I’m talking about is not dead; it’s not a vacuity. When the mind gets silent, you’re tapping into the energy of the universe. Though we’re part of the universe, we typically just receive it in little drips—drip, drip, drip, like a faucet that’s not fully turned on. When we let go of who we think we are—all the notions, concepts, images, and delusions—we channel the energy that animates the whole universe. Silence is an energy that’s packed with life. It’s highly charged.

Larry Rosenberg, in an extract from The World Exists to Set Us Free: Straight-Up Dharma for Living a Life of Awareness, published in Tricycle Magazine, July 2025

I’ve often written of silence on this blog, but Larry Rosenberg’s words here seemed to say something I’ve been trying to say for a long time, and probably failing to capture. Silence, the silence of spiritual practice that is so intimately connected with stillness, is not the absence of noise.  It thrives on the presence of background sounds, whether gentle and quiet like the wind in the tall trees behind the garden, or rather less so, like the occasional sirens from the main road – which are actually not all that occasional, since we live near a major hospital. It will grow quite happily, as I wrote the other day, in an airport departure lounge.

No, shy though the silence of the heart seems to be, it is actually a thing of greater power than we’d imagine. In this long extract published in Tricycle Magazine, Rosenberg goes on:

Silence is what spiritual life is about, at least this version of it. Behind all the commotion of our lives there is an unfathomable silence accompanied by unlimited space—an endless dimension. We’re psychonauts, whether we know it or not. Ours is an inner orbit. The Tibetans put it plainly: the cognizing power of emptiness. In silence, there’s an awakening of a kind of intelligence. Great healing, the most important healing, occurs in silence. In silence you find you’re more compassionate, wiser. All the metta, or loving-kindness, you could ever want is in silence.

The longer I go on with the contemplative life, the more obvious it seems to me that what actually happens in the silence is that our apparent separation from the ground, from the source of being itself, falls away. Separation is an illusion anyway, less substantial than moon-shadows on a cloudy night. We are not ever separated from the ground – else how could we exist? – but our enserfment to the useful illusion of our everyday life in consensus reality makes it seem as though we are. Just to sit still in open awareness allows the mind’s illusions to settle out, like sediment in a disturbed pond, until the clear presence can be seen for itself, the ground of all that is.

Just this simple

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Remember, you have been learning to allow the breath to flow naturally without imposing a model, form, or ideal on it. Now, with the same art of allowing, you open to your own life, your own experience, and watch everything reveal itself. As you sit, the entire mind-body process displays itself from breath to breath, and you watch it all arise and pass away, come and go. You are learning to refine the art of seeing, which is nonreactive and equanimous—a clear mirror that accurately reflects whatever is put in front of it…

There’s no such thing as a distraction, because whatever happens—that’s it. The same emotions that you see in your sitting meditation—whether peaceful, anxious, or full of doubt—provide you with the perfect materials for practice. What arises will vary from moment to moment. The breath, however, remains constant. Even when a powerful energy such as loneliness or agitation visits, the breath remains present. Perhaps it is in the background, quietly, in-out, in-out, while your awareness is mostly involved with loneliness or whatever it is that has naturally captured your attention. In this method, you take advantage of the breath’s constancy. It is such an obvious fact, and yet one that most of us often forget.

Larry Rosenberg with Laura Zimmerman, Three Steps to Awakening: A Practice for Bringing Mindfulness to Life

Really, it is just this simple. There is next to nothing to it, this practice of ours. And yet it is the work of a lifetime, and the more we go on, the lovelier we discover it to be. There is something so juicy, so moreish, about this whole enterprise. Part of it seems to be that we uncover the essential impermanence of everything that arises; and that of course includes ourselves. Once this is seen – truly seen, not just accepted intellectually to be true – then there is nothing more to fear. To watch this unfold, from breath to breath, all the timescales from pulse rate to year’s end to geological epoch meshing like the gears of the Antikythera mechanism, unpicks in a moment our own house of anxiety in which we have been taught to live. Our long schooling in the myths of progress and responsibility, the weight of the future, the despair of failure – all gone in the lightness of the breath, the flicker of sounds from beyond the window, the actual presence of our body’s warmth against the good floor.

More than this, the webbed patterns of causality seem to come clear, bright wires against the dark softness of the breath itself; they are as they are, and yet all their vast geometries of causality are all right – deeply, inalienably all right. What is is the most precious gift, Merton’s diamond, the open ground of isness in this ordinary room, this plain body resting in just now.

In another way, of course, what I’m describing isn’t complicated or difficult at all. What you are really learning—and this begins with following the breath—is the art of doing less and less until finally you are doing nothing, just being as you are and letting your experience come to you. There are no distractions; you are mindful of your present experience just as it is. Nothing in particular is supposed to happen. You attend to what is there just because it is there. It is your life at that moment. We are used to doing things all the time, trying to change our environment, improve our situation, so it may seem difficult to do nothing. Actually, there is nothing easier. You just sit and let the world come to you.

Larry Rosenberg, appendix to Living in the Light of Death: On the Art of Being Truly Alive

Contemplative Reading

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I was at a loss to think how to title this blog post. If you Google “spiritual reading” you will immediately be flooded with psychic suggestions, tarot divinations, horoscopes and astrology, interspersed with the occasional Catholic site recommending “reading [the] lives of saints, writings of Doctors and the Fathers of the Church, theological works written by holy people, and doctrinal writings of Church authorities.” None of these are what I was looking for, you may be pleased to know.

If you are a member of a monastic community, Buddhist, Christian or whatever, you will probably find that daily study of some kind is part of the discipline of life, or, if you are a Benedictine, that in accordance with Rule 38, “Reading will always accompany the meals of the monks.” But leading a secular contemplative life comes with no such in-built reminders that practice shouldn’t take place in an intellectual vacuum.

I have found that regular reading from what is actually a fairly small list of contemplative writers has become an indispensable part of my own practice. Readers of this blog will likely know who they are already, but people like Toni Bernhard, Tara Brach, Pema Chödrön, Daishin Morgan, Larry Rosenberg, Alan Watts have become my companions on the way, and I keep returning to their books over and over again.

I’ve not yet made a time and a place in my day for this kind of regular reading, but it occurs to me that perhaps I should. It is too easy to get sidetracked into reading only more speculative or philosophical writings, and think that’s the same thing. It isn’t; and that’s just the point. Something in the heart – mine, anyway  – gets dried out and brittle without the companionship of those who are also following the contemplative path.

A (very) short booklist:

Toni Bernhard, How to Wake Up

Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance

Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart

Daishin Morgan, Sitting Buddha

Larry Rosenberg with Laura Zimmerman, Three Steps to Awakening: A Practice for Bringing Mindfulness to Life

Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

Eternal life?

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In Three Steps to Awakening: A Practice for Bringing Mindfulness to Life, Larry Rosenberg ends his chapter on choiceless awareness with a Q&A session. One of the questioners asks:

Q: Ideas and beliefs about rebirth are often mentioned in dharma books. I wonder if you could tell us whether you believe in rebirth.

A: If you are a person brought up in a culture that has believed in rebirth for thousands of years, such as in Tibet or Thailand, the answer is obvious. I’ve known wonderful Tibetan teachers who look at me with sympathy when I say I’m uncertain about rebirth. On the other hand, many professors in the sciences might look at you like you’re crazy if you even mention the subject. All I know is that I am open to the idea but honestly don’t know!

One of the reasons I no longer profess to be a Christian, and could never be a Buddhist in any formal sense, is just this question.

In Christian doctrine God is held to be eternal – though opinions vary as to whether this implies that he exists outside time altogether, or whether he exists simultaneously in all dimensions of time, past, present and future. To die as a Christian is to possess eternal life (John 10:27-28) through knowing God (John 17:3). The only way I could ever make sense of this was to think that the instant of death must somehow be atemporal, and that in that moment outside time one might meet God. I have never been able to make any sense of the idea of a portable plug-in soul that could somehow be translated to a land beyond the sky. Maybe I never was a “proper” Christian.

Similarly, any idea of rebirth runs into the same problem, only worse. Not only is there the question of what might constitute the soul to be reborn, and where it might be located, but Buddhism explicitly, and cogently, states that there is, in a living person, no permanent unchanging self or essence (anātman). So what is to be reborn?

The metaphysical mechanics of life after death don’t make any sense to me, however they are expressed. That there is life after death – that the human race will go on, and so will all the other forms of life – is undeniable; but my life after my death? I’m not sure that idea even makes sense.

Cause and effect is another matter, maybe. Things have consequences; they are themselves always consequences. There is no discernible beginning or end to this chain of causation (karma), short of cosmological speculations about the “beginnings” of time. I was born as a result of certain events in history – my mother and father met; they met because of their work during WWII; there was a war because of certain political, economic and military factors, and so on and so on, back into time – and there will be certain limited consequences of events in my own life that will outlive me. But this is not the same as me in some way continuing, or recurring into the future.

But things exist. They are. There is a ground of being – Istigkeit, Tao – from which, in which, all things arise.

The way that can be spoken of
Is not the constant way;
The name that can be named
Is not the constant name.
The nameless was the beginning of heaven and earth;
The named was the mother of the myriad creatures.

Tao Te Ching

Things go on. Where they come from, where they go – I’m not sure those are questions that mean anything in the context of being itself; hence the “nameless” in the Tao Te Ching.

All we can do, all we need to do, is sit still. Daishin Morgan:

A theme I return to again and again is to just do the work that comes to you. Such an attitude is open-ended in the way that life itself is open. If you give yourself to the way, the way appears and that way is always changing.

The dear breath

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Remember, you have been learning to allow the breath to flow naturally without imposing a model, form, or ideal on it. Now, with the same art of allowing, you open to your own life, your own experience, and watch everything reveal itself. As you sit, the entire mind-body process displays itself from breath to breath, and you watch it all arise and pass away, come and go. You are learning to refine the art of seeing, which is nonreactive and equanimous—a clear mirror that accurately reflects whatever is put in front of it…

There’s no such thing as a distraction, because whatever happens—that’s it. The same emotions that you see in your sitting meditation—whether peaceful, anxious, or full of doubt—provide you with the perfect materials for practice. What arises will vary from moment to moment. The breath, however, remains constant. Even when a powerful energy such as loneliness or agitation visits, the breath remains present. Perhaps it is in the background, quietly, in-out, in-out, while your awareness is mostly involved with loneliness or whatever it is that has naturally captured your attention. In this method, you take advantage of the breath’s constancy. It is such an obvious fact, and yet one that most of us often forget.

Larry Rosenberg with Laura Zimmerman, Three Steps to Awakening: A Practice for Bringing Mindfulness to Life

Contemplative practice is an odd activity – it is so easy to fall into what we have learned to call distraction, and yet it is even easier to judge ourselves for becoming distracted. “Call yourself a meditator?” we sneer to ourselves, “you couldn’t concentrate if your life depended on it!” And yet, as Rosenberg says, really there is no such thing as distraction. There are only thoughts, that come and go, because that’s what minds do: they think. We have only to observe – and if we find ourselves tempted to follow trains of thought, to observe the temptation. Soon enough, the mind distracts itself from its distractions – and if not, the faithful breath is waiting for us to come back.

As long as we are alive, the dear breath is with us. There is such comfort in knowing this, if only we can remember. There is nothing, save gentle death itself, that can take the breath away from us: not illness, not sorrow, nor even happiness or anticipation. Always the breath is waiting, infinitely patient and kind. It is the soft weight of life itself, our companion from the minute we are born. All we need to do is trust it, like the steady tide on the wide shore of being.

The way of persistence

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If there’s one thing that’s truly essential in contemplative practice, it’s keeping on keeping on. Sheer persistence lies at the heart of contemplation: session after session, day after day. Sometimes I think keeping at it is more important than what it is we keep at. Inevitably, over the years, there will be changes – sometimes radical, as mine have occasionally been – more often slight and gradual, as we reveal to ourselves more about the nature of mind, and of the way things come to be.

Importantly, though, we need to understand that practice doesn’t make anything happen. Perhaps though, for me at least, practice does make a place where it is possible for things to happen. Maybe practice functions like cultivating a field. Cultivation doesn’t make anything grow – you need seeds, and water, and warmth for that – but it does make a place where seeds can safely germinate. Awakening itself comes, it seems to me, from some kind of slow, unseen growth or change in the mind itself. Mindfulness, self-awareness, openness to what is – a more religious mindset might call it grace…

Breathing in, where do you feel the breath sensation? Breathing out, where do you feel it? You maintain this sense of bodily sensations that come and go. It’s not imagination. It’s not an image. You’re just learning this art of allowing, which in more religious language would be called surrender. Surrender to what? To what is, to the natural law that the breath is obeying as the lungs fill up and empty.

As you follow this way of practice, you take your seat and you’re upright and relaxed. You’re sitting, breathing, and learning how to stay with one theme: breathing in the context of the whole body. As you do that, of course, the world doesn’t stop. Wherever you are, there are sounds. Some of them are pleasant, like the birds singing “chirp, chirp.” Others are not so pleasant, such as the trucks, cars, ambulances, and police cars that speed up and down city streets. Letting sounds come and go, you’re learning to peacefully coexist with all that’s other than breath…

This comprehensive approach can be especially helpful for intellectual people, because there’s no verbal content; the intellect isn’t being fed. In this approach, you’re not for or against thought. You’re not trying to fix anything, not trying to use the breath as a stepping-stone to get anywhere. Rather, you allow the mind to think itself in whatever way it wishes. You’re learning how to temporarily let things happen. You’re learning how to let the mind do what it does…

Larry Rosenberg with Laura Zimmerman, Three Steps to Awakening: A Practice for Bringing Mindfulness to Life

Slowly, slowly. Sometimes things will happen suddenly – walls will fall, dark places illuminate – but more often, far more often, it will be so gradual that even the practiced attention won’t notice, until one day everything is different. Rosenberg again:

Maybe not all at once, but little by little, as breath awareness becomes more continuous, something very good comes out of it—you feel more calm, more peaceful. There’s joy. Otherwise, why bother doing it? If you haven’t experienced it, you will. It’s not mysterious. As the breath awareness develops, the body starts to relax because they’re all interrelated. Finally, you’ll see that it is just one life happening.