Conscious Awareness Here and Now Is... Silence

Ajahn Sumedho speaks to a monastery audience on Dhamma as apparent here and now and timeless. He starts from the habit of searching for the “sound of silence” as something to find, and argues that this searching is the sense of a separate self at work. He discusses judging oneself as good or bad, then how monastic routines such as putting on the robe and eating can be done in silence rather than from obedience.

He recounts his own early question about whether anything is not a sankhara, comments on heaven, hell and rebirth as conceptual proliferation, and says he does not know them but knows silence. He ends by encouraging investigation during the winter retreat, whatever mood arises.