What is Inner Silence?
It has many names in the traditions: sat-chit-ananda, the Self, the witness, unconditioned awareness, the void, emptiness, Father God, Shiva, samadhi, Tao, and so on… In the lessons we often call it pure bliss consciousness. So many names for what amounts to nothingness. But the nothingness is alive. It is aware. It is everywhere. And it is somehow blissful within itself.
There are three states of consciousness we all know well:
- Waking state – what we experience in our daily activity.
- Dreaming state – what we sometimes experience in sleep.
- Deep dreamless sleep state – what we don’t experience much, but we were somewhere.
Inner silence is a state distinctly different from these three. We know it in our deep meditation as blissful awareness without any objects. Or it can be mixed with objects too, like thoughts, feelings, or whatever. But in its pristine state, it is without objects. So in yoga it gets it own number as a unique state of consciousness: - Inner silence – it is all those descriptive words and definitions mentioned already. In yoga it is sometimes called simply “Turiya,” which means “the fourth state” in sanskrit.
Read more about inner silence here:
Lesson 13 - Awakening the Silent Seed
Lesson 157 - What is inner silence?
More references in the Topic Index
At the forum:
Inner Silence Milestones