Internal Dialogue

The term Inner Dialogue was used by Carlos Castaneda to describe the constant mental dialogue we have with ourselves. It is at first glance what we "think about," but when we consider it more closely we realize it is rather something that CONTROLS US because we often can't direct it and, what is worse, we can't turn it off.

It consists literally of EVERYTHING WE THINK about during every waking moment: worries about countless everyday events, planning what to eat, how to do a task, what to wear, how to spend an evening, a tune running through our heads, what others think of us and what we think of them. Think about it and you'll realize you're ALWAYS thinking about something.

So why would anyone want to stop their inner dialogue? Most people don't ever think about what they think about, which sounds fairly ridiculous except that IT IS OF SUPREME IMPORTANCE for certain people who wish to develop past who they currently are into states of GREATER AWARENESS of themselves and the world.

Don Juan Matus, Castaneda's nagual teacher, called these kinds of people WARRIORS, and he defined INNER SILENCE as a peculiar state of being in which thoughts were CANCELLED OUT and one could function from a level other than that of daily awareness. He stressed that INNER SILENCE meant the SUSPENSION OF THE INTERNAL DIALOGUE - the perennial companion of thoughts - and was therefore a state of profound quietude.

It is called inner silence because it is a state in which perception doesn’t depend on the senses. What is at work during inner silence is another faculty that man has, the faculty that makes him a magical being, the very faculty that has been curtailed, not by man himself but by some extraneous influence.

Inner silence is the stand from which everything stems in a warrior.

In other words, EVERYTHING WE DO leads to that stand, which, like everything else in the world of warriors, does not reveal itself unless something gigantic shakes us.

Inner silence is accrued, accumulated. Each individual has a different threshold of inner silence in terms of time, meaning that inner silence must be kept by each one of us for the length of time of our specific threshold before it can work.

Inner silence works from the moment you begin to accrue it. What you are after is the final, dramatic, end result of reaching that individual threshold of silence.

Some need only a few minutes of silence to reach that coveted goal. Others, less talented, need long periods of silence, perhaps more than one hour of complete quietude, before they reach the desired result. The desired result is what is called STOPPING THE WORLD, the moment when everything around us ceases to be what it’s always been.

INNER SILENCE is the avenue that leads to a TRUE SUSPENSION OF JUDGMENT - to a moment when sensory data emanating from the universe at large ceases to be interpreted by the senses; a moment when cognition ceases to be the force which, through usage and repetition, decides the nature of the world.

The ultimate goal of the warrior is to achieve True Freedom. The result of being able to achieve inner silence for a certain amount of time is the ability to stop the world, a state where the sensory world we are all used to ceases to exist and is replaced by something utterly different, a process and STATE of AWARENESS. Achieving this state is the GATEWAY to accessing vast new worlds and ACHIEVING TOTAL FREEDOM, this state is the TRUE NATURE OF WO/MAN.

~ From the teachings of Carlos Castaneda / Don Juan