The Radical Perceptual Shift — Part 4

Presence is experienced in a participative way, outside the mind. The [thinking] mind is, by nature, intent on judging, controlling, and analyzing instead of seeing, tasting, and loving. This is exactly why it cannot be present or live in the naked now. The [thinking] mind wants a job and loves to process things. The key to stopping this game is, quite simply, peace, silence, or stillness.. this was always seen as God’s primary language, “with everything else being a very poor translation,” as Fr. Thomas Keating wisely observes. I would even say that, on the practical level, silence and God will be experienced simultaneously — and even as the same thing. And afterward, you will want to remain even more silent. The overly verbal religion of the last five hundred years does not seem to understand this at all and tends to be afraid of any silence whatsoever. It cannot follow Jesus and go into the desert for forty days, where there is nothing to say, to prove, to think, or to defend.

Although we all use the phrase “peace of mind,” there is really no such thing. When you are in your [thinking] mind, you are never truly at peace, and when you are truly at peace, you are never in your mind. Don’t believe or disbelieve that statement either, just honestly observe yourself. Then you will know — but it will be an altogether new kind of knowing. 

Richard Rohr
from The Naked Now; Learning to See as the Mystics See
Chapter: But We Have to Make Judgements, Don’t We?