The Paradox of Silence
On Inner Silence
The Work advocates “Inner Silence.” It means ignoring inner chatter: the stream of automatic, often negative, internal commentary. This naturally leads to suppressing outer chatter, particularly gossip and meaningless talk. You can think of this as reducing inner and outer noise. You create a quarantined environment, isolated from ‘mechanical’ life and its prattle. Our Work requires a retreat into this protected inner state to provide space for us to grow.
While we may possess much knowledge of our colleagues in The Work, we never discuss such knowledge. Indeed, should we encounter other members of our group in the presence of people of normal life, we will usually feign non-recognition or just vague recognition. This isn’t social awkwardness; it’s a hermetic seal around The Work that helps to maintain its integrity. Contrast this with typical human behavior – the broadcast of observations (“I saw him with her”), which is typically unfiltered, mechanical, and often descends into counterproductive social signaling (gossip and scandal). It is needless or even malevolent data leakage.
Acceptance – Diagnosis
Fundamental to this process is an important principle: you cannot effectively fix or upgrade a system (yourself) until you know and accept its current operational state, warts and all. Simply applying corrective methods without the baseline of acceptance is futile. Genuine change demands an unflinching diagnostic phase first.
Consider the ‘mechanical talking’ issue again. If you haven’t fully internalized the fact that you operate this way by default, attempts to change it are superficial. You might claim to be implementing fixes, but if full acceptance is missing. You’re running the change process from a corrupted baseline. The corrupted baseline is our ‘False Personality,’ our flawed self-model based on wishful thinking, and usually, distorted information. Any effort from this baseline is simulation, not reality, not even close to reality.
Why is accurate self-assessment so difficult?
In general, because of buffers, defense mechanisms that prevent us from acknowledging uncomfortable truths about ourselves. We might appear to concede a flaw (“I know I lie”), but if it doesn’t register in our heart (emotionally), the acceptance is false. If I were to casually confess to being a liar, I would most likely not have processed the implications of that. Buffers create a state of inefficient ambiguity – we both know and don’t know, and this prevents us from correcting ourselves.
Likewise, discussing multiple ‘I’s conceptually is different from recognizing our own fragmented nature. Without this deeper recognition, our Work remains at a surface cosmetic level.
For the Work to be practical, it must penetrate our whole life in all its aspects. The key challenge lies in truly integrating our Emotional Centre, our core source of energy and feeling – and at a higher level, intelligence. When the Emotional Center becomes truly engaged, our entire perception of ourselves undergoes a fundamental change. The observations become real: we recognize our lack of self-awareness, our default dishonesty, our mechanical patterns, our tendency to pretend effort rather than make effort. Our Emotional side sees the stark reality of it all.
Progression
There is a progression, a path we try to navigate. We confront increasingly challenging knowledge about the self. And we accept it. But this acceptance isn’t passive resignation; it’s the prerequisite for dismantling the False Personality and its associated illusions. Such a dismantling creates a stability from which genuine change can commence. It requires real self-observation to replace our prior simulated efforts.
The default human state is one of operational ‘sleep’ – a pervasive cognitive inertia, a kind of hypnotic state, governed under normal circumstances by False Personality and its Imaginary ‘I’. Breaking this state requires self-observation. It is a diagnostic tool. Acceptance is the crucial step required for processing the diagnostic data you gather without denial. The goal is to make the “Personality” passive, reducing its processing priority so that the core “Essence” can function optimally.
Acknowledging one’s “nothingness” – recognizing the lack of a stable, unified, pre-existing ‘self’ and the pervasiveness of mechanical operation – is often a necessary diagnostic outcome. It clears the slate. From this state of acknowledged flaws, the Work provides the tools and protocols to build something more robust and functional. The initial ‘descent’ into uncomfortable self-awareness is the necessary precursor to the ‘ascent’