Introduction

This page contains miscellaneous ideas regarding Silent Concord and Noisy Discord.

Two Rooms

Imagine two rooms:

• In the Silent Concord room you will find shared silence and mutual presence.
• In the Noisy Discord room you will find all of the teachers, teachings, and students that have ever existed, exist today, and will ever exist. The teachers and their teachings struggle for supremacy over other teachers and other teachings.

Both rooms have a role to play. The rooms are best kept separate.

Why Engage in Silent Concord?

• discover new possibilities
• begin reconciliation with a bitter enemy
• become part of a community
• disengage, reflect, re-engage
• consider a specific problem
• satisfy curiosity
• improve self-understanding
• improve other-understanding
• sharpen sensitivity
• reduce stress / anxiety
• tap latent sources of strength
• enjoy a few minutes of silence
• independence training
• go deeper
• slow down
• stop

Having - Doing - Being

Is having the key to your happiness? What kinds of things can you have?

Is doing the key to your happiness? What kinds of things can you do?

Do you live in a society that celebrates having and doing? If so, why? Who benefits from a culture of having and doing?

What about being? If you began to value being more, would you start valuing having and doing less?

Comfort Maximization

Do you wake up in the morning, engage in personal comfort maximization all day, and then go to sleep in the evening? This model for living may be so familiar that you may never have considered any other way of living.

Silent Concord can be an opportunity to suspend your habitual, familiar methods of personal comfort maximization, consider alternative ways of living, and then re-engage the world with new possibilities at your disposal.

Language

There are two problems with the human use of language:

• It is all too easy to slap a label on something and then claim to understand it. Irresponsible use of language can trap you on a superficial level of understanding. For example, this website makes ample use of the word 'you'. What does this word really mean? What if 'you' are more than all of the labels you have slapped on your ego? What if 'you' are more than all that you claim to have and all that you claim to do?
• The same word or sentence can have different meanings for different people, leading to misunderstanding. For example, a person who spends an entire day in the forest witnessing the progression of the day from dawn to dusk will have a different understanding of the word 'day' than a person for whom a day has always been merely a backdrop for their continual drive to have and to do.

Verbal exchanges between participants are confined to Noisy Discord so that Silent Concord does not become an exercise in superficiality and misunderstanding.

Understanding

If you are given something to understand, one approach is to characterize it by its external characteristics. Another approach is to take it apart, see how each part works, and then see how each part relates to other parts to create the observed external characteristics. The latter approach provides a much deeper and richer understanding.

Silent Concord can be used to go beyond superficial external characterizations to deeper and richer understandings of entities of importance in your life. These entities can include yourself and other living beings.

Roles

What role should you play regarding your own mental processes - Researcher, Engineer, Assembler, Technician, or User?

Definitions:

• Researcher: Investigates and describes regularities present in the universe. Turns these regularities into parts. Describes the characteristics of these parts.
• Engineer: Selects parts and determines how they should interrelate to create a working machine based on part descriptions provided by the Researcher. Determines how the machine should be operated by the User. Determines how the machine can fail, and what steps should be taken to repair these failures. Provides machine assembly instructions to the Assembler, machine repair instructions to the Technician, and machine operation instructions to the User.
• Assembler: Produces a machine from the assembly instructions provided by the Engineer. Provides the new machine to the User.
• Technician: Receives machine repair instructions from the Engineer. Receives a broken machine from the User. Locates the faulty part, orders a replacement part, and installs it. Provides the repaired machine to the User.
• User: Receives a new machine from the Assembler or a repaired machine from the Technician. Operates the machine using the operational instructions provided by the Engineer. Receives the benefits resulting from the machine's operation. When the machine breaks, provides the broken machine to the Technician for repair.

What skill set is necessary to become a Researcher or Engineer regarding your own mental processes? Do you have this skill set?

You may assume any role that you choose during Silent Concord.

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