What actually happens in those intervals between thoughts is that the mind has become 'silent': the mind has emptied itself of all its contents and is, therefore, 'vacant' or silent, intensely aware of What-Is in the moment. This silent mind is not unaware of the stream of thoughts flowing through the conscious mind, but it does not participate in the thinking: it does not discriminate between them, it does not make a judgment between them in terms of right or wrong or importance.
The immediate effect of the silent mind in day-to-day living is that
psychological problems do not seem to have any substance and many just evaporate.
What could be more important is the fact that the silent mind gives full play
to the creative and intuitive faculties, with the result that not only psychological
problems disappear but, that even, intellectual problems and even practical
problems may find their solutions.
There is another kind of relaxation - neither physical nor mental - which
is not to be achieved but which can only happen as a result of the deepest possible
understanding that the individual entity as the 'me', as opposed to the 'other',
truly does not exist. It is understood that the billions of human beings have
no individual volition or choice of decision and action and that they are only
uniquely programmed instruments through which the Source or Primal Energy or
Consciousness or God functions and brings about such happenings as are supposed
to happen according to what might be called a Natural Law or a Cosmic Law. The
total acceptance of this concept, which one can test in the fire of one's own
experience, results in the total acceptance of What-Is as God's Will, which
leads to the real relaxation of the body-mind organism leading to enlightenment
or Self-realization: the fictitious ego-entity doer finds himself surrendering
to the noumenal Source in its entirety. This is what might be called transcendental
relaxation, the sheer Joy of Being.
Excerpted from Peace & Harmony in Daily Living by Ramesh Balsekar
