The Noise Box

Just stop for a minute and realize that you are not free unless you really have removed this box that you carry around you all the time.

There’s a box, and this box is full of a lot of noise, a lot of imagination that is not even your imagination—somebody else’s imagination, a lot of ideas. And in fact, this is who you think you are! This is “you!” And this box is the greatest hurdle possible in truly knowing yourself.

You need to know yourself. If you don’t know yourself, you don’t know anything, really! Because it is this being that processes what it knows, or what it thinks it knows. When it does not know itself, the processing is happening by information that has been put there by other people, not you!

The noise that you hear between your ears in perfect silence is the noise that other people have put between your ears. That includes your beloved parents.

We’re not talking about, “You have to hate your parents to get rid of the noise”—no, no. They did it for a very good reason, because that’s what happened to them. That was their reasoning. That’s the reasoning that they’ve always followed.

So, whatever happened to them, they did it to you. And their parents did it because their parents did it. So this is something of your great-great-great, great-great-great, great-great-great, great-great-great, great-great-great, great-great-great, great-great-great, great grandfather’s gift. And I would say grandmother too, but I forgot how many times I said great-great-great.

But that’s the noise. And wherever you go, this noise goes with you. And you can silence all the other noises but you can’t silence this noise—because it’s there. And it defines your good and it defines your bad. It defines your right and it defines your wrong.

It’s you, your life, your existence. You are the major player in this. And if you can understand that, that’s everything.

– Prem Rawat