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Inner solitude and Noble Silence is a way to empty, cleanse, heal, and renew the heart and mind. This is a voluntary way to start the process of simplification and personal downsizing. The peace will help you purify your perceptions and make presence of mind more acute, clear, spacious, and even luminous. Incredible satisfaction is available when you begin experiencing the timeless truth that less can actually be more; that the most elegant solution is often the simplest one. Gratitude and appreciation serve us better than attachment and grasping. Peace of mind is the inmost secret treasure.

Try a Little Silence

Why not take a Sunday off, or half a day, to be by yourself, with yourself in voluntary simplicity, and experience for yourself the unspeakable joy and virtue in Noble Silence? Spend the time in your room, house, or garden without using any communication devices. Or spend your time alone in nature, communing with yourself. You’ll love it.

Stop.

Be still.

Remain silent.

Meditators should be seen,

not heard.

Ssshhh.

Still

All the senses.

Let everything be.

Let go, and let it all

come to you.

Relax.

Being is in;

doing is out.

Do nothing.

For a moment

Just be. Silence is

golden. Enjoy it.

STEP FOUR

RIGHT ACTION

The Art of Living

In our era, the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action.

—DAG HAMMARSKJÖLD

One day near the end of his life, when Gandhi was boarding a crowded third-class compartment on an Indian train, some reporters caught up to him and asked him what his message was. As he leaned out of the train door he said, “How I live my life, that is my teaching.”

Right Action, the fourth touchstone on the Eight-Fold Path, asks all of us as spiritual seekers to focus on how we live our lives. Life is the ultimate art form, and we are the creators. Are we creating the lives that we want? Are we doing what we want to do—behaving as we want to behave? Do our actions demonstrate generosity, patience, awareness, wisdom, and discipline? In short, are we “walking our talk”? Or are we running away from our true selves? A clear perspective on Right Action teaches us that our actions are like seeds—karmic seeds. The commonsense wisdom of the laws of causality helps us understand that apple seeds don’t produce lemon trees. When we behave positively, we get positive results; when we cling to questionable values, we get questionable results. If we hurt others, we hurt ourselves; helping others, we serve ourselves as well. The practice of Right Action is about cultivating goodness and virtue in the way we treat others; it’s about creating harmony in our world, our home, in this very life, right now.

GOODNESS IN ACTION

Do not do anything harmful; do only what is good; purify and train your own mind: This is the teaching of the Buddha; this is the path to enlightenment.

—THE BUDDHA

Right Action often comes down to the age-old principle: Treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself. Can you and I do that with a generous spirit and an open heart? Or is it just Jesus, Buddha, Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama, and a few other sages and saints who are able to live that sublime ideal? Buddha Dharma has been called the Lion’s Roar because it is a challenge and a call to awakening. As the lion’s roar awakens all the other animals in the forest, the Lion’s Roar of Dharma awakens and challenges us to be as wise, sane, loving, and compassionate as we are able to be—to be all that we are. Not to be somebody else, not to live somebody else’s life, but to awaken and be true to who and what we are, every day—not just in what we think and say, but also in what we do.

Goodness and virtue should be good for something. According to the Buddha, actions that are kind, unselfish, and virtuous serve three primary purposes: (1) They help others; (2) They help you, the doer, accumulate merit and stockpile good karma, which helps propel you along the practice path leading to enlightenment; (3) They are also an expression of wisdom, higher sanity, and enlightenment