Silence

“You live in an illusion and the appearance of things. There is a reality, but you do not know this. When you understand this, you will see that you are nothing. And being nothing, you are everything. That is all.” –Kalu Rinpoche

The first step in the journey is learning to shut up.

When you first begin to meditate, or to simply observe the natural world around him, your chattering inner dialogue obliterates most of the experience.

Shut up.

You cannot hear what the tadpole is saying or what the golden eagle is singing if you are already filling your consciousness with your own mental babbling.

Be silent.

You cannot see, hear, touch, taste or feel what knowledge the universe wishes to impart to you if you are busy talking to yourself about the inanities of the day.

Be quiet.

When you continuously talk to yourself, you are drowning out everything you do not already know. When you constantly define, label, categorize, and speculate about what you see before you and where you may be going, you are throwing out most of your possibilities in the name of security and comfort of all those paths you have already walked.

Meditation is an opening up of the false boundaries you have created between yourself and everything else with which you are connected. This pretense creates the illusion of a cage that is more real than the nation’s best maximum-security prisons.

You are the jailer of yourself. The first step in opening the door is to shut up and listen. Then you will find that that door has always been a “gateless gate,” an illusion keeping you in place.

When you shut up, you may feel small, naked, torn apart, a cog in the great wheel of the Universe. Experience it for it will not kill you. It’s natural to resist. In The Sun Singer, Robert Adams resisted saying the Seer’s Prayer because the voice that answered him when he said it was an overpowering thing.

In his book After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, Jack Kornfield writes, “Meditation practices help us find a way to genuine stillness. In then we find that there are many levels of silence. The first is simply an external silence, an absence of noise. Then there is the silence of the body, a growing physical stillness. Gradually there comes a quieting of the mind. Then we discover the silence that comes as a witness to all things, and then twenty other levels of silent absorption in prayer and meditation. Still deeper, we come to the indescribable silence beyond the mind, the silence that gives birth to all things.”

The “control” you believe you have when you are providing an endless commentary to yourself about yourself is an illusion. Shut up and experience true power.

Travel Photos Wanted for Sun Singer Web Site

The Sun Singer is set in Glacier National Park, Montana; Fairview Park in Decatur, Illinois; and Allerton Park in Monticello, Illinois. The book is a fantasy, so I don't use many real names in it; but since each of these places has been important to me, I do like mentioning them on my book's web site.

Unfortunately, I don't have many pictures and can't afford to purchase any. However, if anyone has some great photographs of selected areas from these locations in a JPG format that I can rotate on my site, I can include your name, city/state (if you like), and web site (if family friendly) and that might bring your site more traffic. If you own a photography studio, you can include the name/city/state (if you like) even if it doesn't have a web site.

Photographs, along with your name, city, state, URL, photograph date or best guesstimate , and cutline information can be e-mailed to me at malcolm@campbelleditorial.com.

You must certifiy that you took the picture and also own it. I will certify that the picture will only be used on my site to show prospective readers some of the settings I used in "The Sun Singer." None of the pictures will be used in any other way whatsoever. I suggest you send a 72 dpi version to keep people from being able to download a printable version of the photographs. However, I will mark them as copyrighted along with your name and the year you took them.
I am looking for pictures without any identifiable people in them of the following:

GLACIER NATIONAL PARK: Many Glacier Hotel, Swiftcurrent Lake, Switftcurrent Valley, Josephine Lake, Morning Eagle Falls, Mount Gould and the Angel Wing, Ptarmigan Tunnel, Lake Elizabeth, Chief Mountain, the "South America" snow patch on the slope of Mt. Altyn, the meadow of wildflowers known as The Garden of Heaven on the Piegan Pass trail between Lake Josephine and Morning Eagle Falls, Mt. Wilbur and the Pinnacle Wall.

FAIRVIEW PARK, DECATUR, IL: Meadows and woods, Dreamland Lake, entrance on Eldorado Street, the old playground child's merry-go-round (which I don't think is there any more).

ALLERTON PARK, MONTICELLO, IL: Meadows and woods, Fu Dogs, Primitive Man statues, Death of the Last Centaur, Sun Singer statue.

Let me know if you have any questions. I will appreciate any photographs any of you may wish to send. And, while I can't promise that my site has a million visitors a day, perhaps the exposure will help your web site or photography business a little in return.

Thank You...in advance!

Stalking Spirit

“You have to stalk everything. Everything scatters and gathers; everything comes and goes like fish under a bridge. You have to stalk the spirit, too. You can wait forgetful anywhere, for anywhere is the way of his fleet passage, and hope to catch him by the tail and shout something in his ear before he wrests away.” –Annie Dillard, “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”

The five colors blind the eye
The five tones deafen the ear
The five flavors dull the palate
Racing, hunting, and galloping about only disturb the mind
Wasting energy to obtain rare objects only impedes one’s growth
So the Sage is led by his inner truth and not by his outer eye
He holds to what is deep and not what lies on the surface
--Lao Tzu, "Tao Te Ching" (Jonathan Star translation from Tarcher/Putnam)


As the illusions of time and space unfold along the paths of the hero and the seeker, there will come a seemingly random moment when spirit speaks and is heard.

Ah, now the journey begins to take on unimaginable new dimensions. Once you discover spirit is real, you will also discover that you must find it and know it.

Spirit is ever illusive. It does not wait for you at the corner of West Wood Street and Fairview Avenue or beside the White Bark Pine in the meadow.

It’s a matter of stalking it as you might stalk a deer or a bear. You are most likely to find spirit when you are quiet, alert, and observant. Set aside logic and allow your intuition to guide you While your five senses may deceive you, use them to explore what you usually ignore—the shadows between the leaves of a tree rather than the leaves, the scents carried on the wind, the music in the bubbling brook, the taste of air, the texture of rock.

Unlike stalking a deer or a bear, you do not know—and cannot guess—what exactly you are seeking. Spirit leaves no easily discernible tracks. Do not try to imagine what spirit will look like, sound like, taste like, feel like or smell like or how you might discover it within your thoughts. And do not seek out spirit as you have read about it in books, seen it in movies, or heard about it from friends. Your expectations will limit your experience and further hide spirit.

“Expectation can only be based on what you already know. In the end you are after what you cannot conceive,” writes Eric J. Pepin in The Handbook of the Navigator. “By looking for experiences you can relate to you will overlook what you are truly searching for.”

Finding spirit is less important than searching for spirit. In fact, the casually expectant hush of the search will change you, enhance you, transform you and bring you closer to worlds outside your dreams.

There is no schedule, no expectation, and no goal. As a hero or a seeker on the path, you will ultimately throw away roadmaps and guidebooks and you will ignore well-travelled roads, trail signs and blazed trees. This is a spontaneous path of feelings, hunches, impulses and apparent coincidences.

When you can silence the chatter inside your head, when you can forget yourself and all your wish lists, and when you can focus on nothing rather than on the outcome you have always desired, you will be ready.