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Roaring Silence - 03 Presence and Awareness

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Roaring Silence — Chapter 3: Presence and Awareness

The chapter that turns from what shi-nè is not (Ch.1) and how not to do shi-nè (Ch.2) to what one discovers by sitting. Its operation is to frame shi-nè as the disciplined confrontation with oneself as one is, and to name the fruit of that confrontation: presence — a meaning greater than the naïve affirmations of existence that pose as hope.

Key Claims

  • Shi-nè is getting used to the fact of our existence. “Initially, the practice of shi-nè is getting used to the fact of our existence.” This is the Ch.3 gloss on the Ch.2 adage “meditation isn’t; getting used to is”: the “getting used to” is not to nothing — it is to the full texture of what one is, “containing both pleasure and pain, hope and fear, gain and loss, meeting and parting, pride and humiliation.”

  • Nothing lurking in our depths. “This will never be terrible. There will be nothing lurking in our ‘depths’ that could possibly cause devastating dismay.” The thesis is anti-sensationalist: the twenty-four-hour entertainment floor show is what causes estrangement; once it is sat through, there is nothing left to cause distress. The only problem is that this could take longer than we might like.

  • “Solid and grounded” — redefined. The fruit of sitting through the range of one’s unacknowledged negative feelings is “experiential ballast necessary to become solid and grounded as a person.” Solid and grounded here does not mean “stolid and lumbering, in the style of a person with limited perceptual horizons” — it means “someone who no longer daydreams while his or her dinner burns.” One mode of this: an artist who actually produces, accepting the challenges of manifesting imagination even when inconvenient.

  • The first attainment. “Being able to acknowledge the range of permutations that comprise our response to existence.” Not mystical, not subtle — the simple, hard fact of admitting what arises. The chapter names it first because without it nothing else lands.

  • The canvas-and-emptiness move. “Imagination relies on empty perception. Painting relies on empty planes. Sculpture relies on empty space. Music relies on empty time. Literature relies on empty concepts. If we are to realize the art of freedom, if we are to discover our creative potential, we need to rely on the experience of our intrinsic vibrant emptiness — the beginningless ground of what we are.” Shi-nè is “our method of approaching the white canvas of Mind” — so completely nonmanipulative and uninfluenced by anything that it disengages from imagination and fantasy of any kind. Active imagination comes later; shi-nè clears the ground.

  • The momentless moment. Shi-nè locates the practitioner “precisely in time and space.” The result is a shutter-release image: “At one moment a film is running — an epic, a thriller, a comedy, or a melodrama. Then — suddenly — it freezes on a frame of an ‘I,’ sitting in a room attempting to exist. … Every detail of this ‘I’ is both there and not there at the same time.” The moment is also a “momentless moment” because, sitting, one “can aimlessly observe the present mind-moment arising from the death of the previous mind-moment.” One “can both exist and cease to exist at the same time.”

  • The three obliterations. One can attempt to obliterate that point in time by:

    1. Mentally reliving the past
    2. Projecting possible future events
    3. Sinking into an oblivious drowse

    The alternative is to sit and be what we are in the moment. The three obliterations map one-to-one onto common failure modes of sitting — nostalgia, planning, sleep. Shi-nè is the refusal of all three as simultaneously available and simultaneously declined.

  • The chapter’s pivot sentence. “If we practice shi-nè, we begin to live our lives. If we do not practice shi-nè, our lives continue to live us.” (See Shi-nè: Ch.3 — Presence, and the Inversion of Living.) The “we/our lives” inversion is the rhetorical compression of what presence achieves: agency restored by way of non-doing.

  • Presence > positivistic meaningfulness. “This picture of shi-nè could be terrifically bleak in comparison to spiritually materialistic notions of ‘positivistic meaningfulness,’ but somehow shi-nè opens us to a wider sense of our humanity. We can discover that there is a greater meaning to be found in sheer presence than in the naïve affirmations of existence that pose as hope.”

  • Buddhism begins with hopelessness. “The Buddhism of all schools begins with the hopelessness of dualism. Before we open ourselves to the hopelessness of our own strategies, an explosion that shatters the parameters of hope and fear is inconceivable.” This is the chapter’s doctrinal statement — the dharmic entry is not uplift but the failure of dualism to deliver.

The Q&A — What It Adds

The Q&A is short but carries two load-bearing distinctions.

Active vs. Passive Imagination

The first question asks whether letting go of fantasy means imagination is “not kosher.” The authors laugh and refuse that reading. The distinction:

  • Passive imagination = daydreaming. “A state in which one is not present — not even in the daydream. This is a drowsy, vague state of being that scarcely leaves a memory of the daydream.” Rejected.
  • Active imagination = a state in which one is present. “A creative capacity that can be used as a resource for self-healing, visionary discovery, and artistic creativity. Buddhism is not anti-art, and shi-nè is not anti-imagination — it’s more a question of the relationship one has with one’s imagination.”

The hinge: if imagination is “employing one’s imagination as a means of establishing reference points,” it is incompatible with presence. If it is active, present, and non-reference-point-establishing, it is a resource. See Active and Passive Imagination for the full reading.

Footnote 2 defines envisionment — “the practice of internal seeing in which one identifies with symbolic foci of realization.” Envisionment is explicitly flagged as practice that comes later, “when we have connected more with the spaciousness of being.” Ch.3’s job is not to teach it; Ch.3’s job is to protect it by showing why shi-nè has to come first.

Psychological Prerequisites

The second question — can this sitting be too overwhelming? — is answered without hedging:

  • Silent sitting is not universally recommended. “For some people, we really wouldn’t recommend silent sitting at all. If people are at a stage of development where they’re in need of psychotherapy, then they should always be cautious of spiritual practices that threaten the personality structure. When someone’s sense of self-worth is extremely low, the experience of protracted periods of shi-nè could well be too overwhelming. It could be especially harmful for people at low levels of psychological health.”
  • Tantra and Dzogchen require more, not less, baseline health. “Involvement with spiritual practice and teachers, especially at the level of Tantra or Dzogchen, should really be avoided by people at low levels of psychological health. Unfortunately, people with interpersonally dysfunctional personalities are often drawn to this type of spiritual tradition, and such people would be very resentful if they were presented with such definitions of themselves.”

See Psychological Prerequisites for the full treatment. This is the first explicit safety gate in the book.

Architecture

Three beats:

  1. Embarkation — sitting as confrontation with “what I happen to be”; nothing lurking in the depths; solid-and-grounded redefined; the first attainment.
  2. Emptiness and imagination — the canvas/music/literature parallel; shi-nè as the white canvas of Mind; the momentless moment; the three obliterations; “we live our lives / our lives live us.”
  3. Q&A — active vs. passive imagination; psychological prerequisites.

The chapter sits after the hard pedagogy of Ch.2 (non-coercion, the three exercises) and before Ch.4’s “Nakedness and Perception.” It is the chapter that tells the reader what the sitting is for — not in terms of a delivered state, but in terms of the dismantled illusion of hope and the recovered authority to live one’s own life.

Sharp Points to Carry Forward

  • Presence is not aura. It is the simple, pinpointed fact of being where one actually is, with what one actually contains, during the interval one has agreed to sit.
  • The three obliterations are diagnostic. When the sitting is empty of “content,” the practitioner typically drifts into past, future, or drowse. Recognizing which is an act of presence.
  • “Our lives live us” is the diagnostic of unpractice. Ch.3 provides the polarity: either one practices and lives one’s life, or one doesn’t and is lived by it. No third option is offered.
  • Imagination is not the enemy. The active/passive cut determines whether imagination is reference-point production (obstacle) or creative presence-work (resource). This matters for later chapters’ envisionment practices.
  • The book’s first safety gate. Not everyone should sit silently. The gatekeeping is explicit, without euphemism: psychotherapy first if the personality structure is not strong enough to be threatened by what shi-nè exposes.

Footnotes the Chapter Anchors

  • [^1] The creative artistic impulse is not antithetical to shi-nè — footnote guards against a purism misreading of “fantasies and illusions die of hunger.”
  • [^2] Envisionment / visualization — “the practice of internal seeing in which one identifies with symbolic foci of realization.” First definition; flagged as later practice.

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