Obsessive Thoughts
The natural rhythm of our minds, indeed our whole lives is arising out of silence. Think about the normal course of your day. You arise from the silence of sleep; events, life, experience unfolds, arises in your consciousness. Your day is a process of relating, reacting, doing or evading that which arises during the waking hours. After each event, each experience, the mind naturally returns to silence. That is unless you are following the obsessive, self-interested, self-preserving process of self-reflective thought.
Obsessive thoughts and thought patterns are the biggest barrier to the Pure Silence. Silence is like a gentle stream flowing from its source to the ocean. As self-reflective thoughts accumulate, they are like rocks and boulders in the streams course which prevent the flow from continuing. What occurs is a build up, a damming effect. We all know what happens when fresh flowing water is suddenly stopped - it begins to turn stagnant, it is caught in a dead pool which has no oxygen, no capacity to sustain much life. It has become a dead zone.
If you understand that you are the silence and that thoughts are merely forms of matter and energy arising in your mind, your brain, you can quite surely understand that obsessive thinking and all its effects and companions like fear, hatred, prejudice, desire, greed, apathy, rage, depression and all the others is the antithesis to the gentle, natural silent state within our minds.
Obsessive thinking, which is thought run amuck, which has no usefulness, can be let go of right now. If you gently direct your awareness to the space before, between and after these thoughts, these forms, you will see what is always there, present in you, despite any thought. Dwell in that place for just a moment and see what wonder is discovered. Then look back to your spinning thoughts and realize what they mean - absolutely nothing at all.