Silent Illumination and Contemplation

 During the Silent Illumination one day meditation retreat today, Venerable Guo Sheng emphasized the importance of balancing silence and illumination. I find this to be such an impressive metaphor which helps me to understand these two aspects as "wings on a bird". It also helps me to gauge whether I am swinging too far in one direction of "silence" or the other direction of "illumination".
  Sometimes the method of Silent Illumination might seem like sitting and just watching one's wandering thoughts. This isn't quite the case: if this approach were as simple as watching thoughts arising, it wouldn't be very much different from what people might normally do when they think or engage in discursive activity. Contemplation, as Guo Sheng Fashi mentioned, is not about thinking of something or treating it as a kind of static object; rather, it is more like a knowing which transcends subject and object. To put it simply, I know that I am breathing without necessarily having to analyze into which lung or part of my body my breath will go. In other words, contemplation is not about analysis, but more a kind of non-grasping knowing.
  When people normally engage in thinking, they are trying to grasp and give rise to agitated thoughts. One of the study group participants yesterday remarked that it's the difference between simply seeing a red sweater and then remarking on whether one likes the color red or not, or whether the sweater looks good on the other person. These latter statements are ruminations on what people are seeing, and they lack the simplicity of "just seeing". Similarly, many people go into stories about how they are attracted to one thing and repelled by another, not realizing that these stories come from grasping attitudes, not from things themselves. Even as simple a statement as, "boy, that ice cream looks so good; I want to buy one" is not a statement of objective truth, but more like a kind of reaction that comes from a grasping attitude. My sense of who I am comes from liking the ice cream or disliking the fact that I don't have one yet. What would happen if one were to simply look into the process of craving without spinning into stories about liking ice cream? This is where contemplation is different from analytical thought. Whereas the latter builds upon assumptions about what the self is and where it's located in space and time relative to something else, the former simply sees things as they stand in that moment, without trying to construct some kind of unnecessary bridge between self and other. Contemplation is a kind of knowing but without the need to grasp, define or divide.
  Another aspect of Guo Sheng Fashi's talk that impacted me was the idea that Silent Illumination acknowledges all things as parts of a greater totality. This is tricky: it's not about having an idea of "unity" (such as seeing everything as a picture). Rather, it's more about letting go of whatever comes up in mind thus allowing the phenomena to be seen as a part of a changing scene. How one practices this is even trickier, because it's not even about having an idea about totality. Totality itself is an idea that limits what a person can see because it is only one among a multitude of thoughts. The real totality is letting go of all concepts to know what is continually arising in mind at every moment. This is extremely hard to do because my habitual identity is to problematize dislikes (to make them seem like problems to be fixed) and to sentimentalize likes (to embellish desired things). These concepts clutter the mind and create very complicated relationships with things. Letting go of the habitual tendency to grasp, control and direct likes and dislikes is one of the key points about Silent Illumination.