Speak Now or Forever Hold Your Peace
Welcome to the God of Honeybees podcast. I’m Justin Herb
In this episode, I want to talk about how to reshape the way we think about a common phrase: “Speak now, or forever hold your peace. ”
But first, let’s start with some announcements.
Work on the book is going well. The first printed version is on its way, and then I’ll send it to the author who has agreed to read it and share her thoughts with me. Like I said in the last episode, I’m not going to name-drop because I don’t know if the author would appreciate that, but I do want to tell you that I am very excited to receive her feedback because I thoroughly enjoyed her work.
Also, I still have some stickers that I want to send you for free! They are bad ass stickers from stickermule.com with our logo on them. The next 8 people to sign up for the email newsletter at godofhoneybees.com will receive a free sticker with a personal thank-you note from yours truly. On top of that, the email newsletter also provides additional information on any resources that I reference in the show. For example, in the last episode, I talked about using rocks for meditation, and in the email for that episode, I included a link to a video of a speech by Indian philosopher J. Krishnamurti as well as a free online documentary about a study involving our consciousness and the connection to water. So the email newsletter is the absolute best place to get access to all the content and more from the God of Honeybees podcast.
Now, with that taken care of, let’s get on with the episode.
A few mornings ago, my wife said to me, “speak now, or forever hold your peace.” Usually I wouldn’t have thought twice about it, but maybe because I’ve been listening to meditations so much lately, or perhaps because I’ve been occupying my time with my book more, this phrase hit me in a different way. So, I want to go through it piece by piece.
Do you remember yesterday? Of course you do. Pick any event that you remember about that day — what the weather was like; something that pissed you off; did your shoes fit?; was the coffee in the breakroom strong enough? Where do these events exist? Can you take something you remember about yesterday, grab hold of it, and bring to now? Can you grab the weather from yesterday and hold it in front of you? See, the only thing about yesterday that exists is your neurological record that those events happened, or in other words, your memory of yesterday. Your memory is the only place you can find anything about yesterday.
It’s interesting then that we give so much weight to our thoughts about yesterday. Often times, we are so preoccupied with the past and what happened in it and how we could have changed it, yet yesterday doesn’t exist except for in our memories of it. We can’t change it at all, so why do we spend so much time worrying about yesterday? In the last episode, when we talked about using rocks for meditation, we touched on why we should practice looking without identifying or labeling. Looking at the world around us in this way is an idea I first heard from Krishnamurti. In a nutshell, he explains that only by looking without categorizing can we dissolve the illusory delineation between observer and observed. A two-fold product of dissolving the boundary between observer and observed is firstly the slowing of mental chatter. This mental silencing is because you are learning that thought is simply a tool to use in the world — just like your other senses.
The second product from dissolving this boundary is the peace you feel from the slowing of mental chatter and the subsequent loss of anxiety. This shows you that anxiety comes solely from thought. Thoughts about yesterday or tomorrow create the illusion of passing time, indicating that something is moving with or without you, so you’d better get your act together. Simply by observing our world without putting it into boxes can lead us down a path that ends with the realization of our true nature and the nature of our existence.
Now, how much time should we spend concerning ourselves with yesterday or tomorrow? These reconstructed or hypothetical realities are creations of our mind. The moment we exist in as we sit and think about these other realities will soon become a yesterday as well; shifting into a reconstructed reality that we can’t do anything about. How much more important, then, is it to talk about now? To think about now? Where are you right now? Your thoughts are mere results of input stimuli categorized and organized by your mind. If you smell a pungent odor, your mind categorizes that smell to let you know that you’re smelling a skunk. If you touch something that is both cool and smooth, your mind organizes those two sensations and lets you know that you’re touching water. When there is a lot of sensory stimuli, the mind can get overwhelmed with trying to categorize and organize everything that it’s experiencing. Let that sensory input relax for a moment. Think about right now. Speak about now. Speak now.
Next, the choice to engage the goings-on around you is, of course, your choice. This is one beautiful aspect about our existence; we are simply awareness and we can choose to participate in the game. We can choose to engage in the context our bodies are in, or we can choose to not engage at all, to not identify with the stimuli. This is a fruit of true growth — being able to increase the space between stimulus and response. We have the capacity to recognize that we are the witness to these things, watching them like clouds passing by, but we can also recognize that these clouds come and go. Whatever instance you find your mind and body in will come and go. You can choose to engage it, or rest in awareness and watch the goings-on around you for what they really are: clouds passing by. It is at this point that you can truly play the game because you don’t think you are the game. You can hold your peace.
So if I might suggest an adjustment to the phrase to help keep this concept in mind, let it be this: speak about now, and forever hold your peace.
Recognize that the past and future only exist in thought. And that it is thought that creates the sense of anxiety because thought centered around the past and future creates the idea of time. Focus on now and be at peace.
Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed it. And here’s the thing; this is a conversation. I’m talking to you directly, and I want to hear from you! This podcast is hosted on Anchor. If you get the app, you can actually leave me a voicemail with your thoughts and questions. Or you can tweet me @GOHPodcast, hit me up on Instagram @godofbeespodcast, or send an email to godofbeespodcast@gmail.com. The best way to access all the content I provide or reference to is to sign up for the email newsletter! You can sign up at godofhoneybees.com and get special content that doesn’t show up anywhere else, direct links to any source I reference in the episode, and a fancy PDF version of the show for later reading or sharing! Also, if you like the concepts presented in this show, you would probably enjoy my book, The God of Honeybees. I dive deeper into these concepts and how they relate to my background, and I would love to share that with you! Consider signing up for just $5 a month to help keep the project going and help me get the book to my editor at patreon.com/godofhoneybees.
Special thanks to Patience Uhlman of 29pilgrims.com for editing and providing additional content for this piece.
