The Sound of Silence.

Background Photo: Beautiful Nakuru Town from Nairobi Wire

 The real transformation of a society will come only in love, in work and in stillness.
    - Gustav Laundauer

Lately, there has been so much talk about finding inner peace and joy. How, then, can this be achieved? One of the requirements for authentic peace and joy is inner stillness. If someone told you that it’s possible to be silent in your mind, you will brush them off because we have been used to so much noise in our everyday life that we can’t be still. We can’t imagine our minds in total silence; yet learning to be still, wielding stillness, is among the greatest arts of living.

 Silence is the most important and difficult of disciplines.

We are, daily, bombarded with images and sounds that stimulate our minds left, right and center. These images animate us and keep us thinking over and over, and over again. A walk outside and you are exposed to very many billboards that remind you to keep thinking about stuff. It’s always a competition for your attention. You think about stuff that doesn’t even concern you, you think all the time, even when you don’t want to. Our inner world is polluted with thought noise which is reflected in our outside world. The only time we stop thinking is when we are asleep. Sleep compels us to the crucial silence that life needs. When we are awake, the excessive noise silences life’s sublets and its most beautiful signals, like our own breathing, because we don’t know how to tune into our inner realms of silence.

When I started meditation, I recommended silence to myself like a drug. 1x3 Doses of Silence. I intended to be silent three times in a day, just for five minutes. And so, I decided that it would be before each main meal I were to take.

Whenever I tried it, there was a nauseating feeling in my stomach, followed by a strong urge to throw up. I wanted to puke, really bad. My chest felt like it wanted to collapse. Everything felt strange, all of a sudden, and my body felt like I was in a strange place that I had never been to before. In those five minutes of meditation, all I could hear was my own thoughts over and over again and not silence.

Most of the time you are the thinker, the one who thinks. Taking the position of silence means you watch yourself think, you watch your thoughts as they happen in the background of silence. When you separate yourself and watch from the position of silence, you see things quite differently. Back then, leaving this realm of mental noise, by focusing on the silence in my mind, felt like I was losing my identity.

We have invested our whole lives identifying with our mental patterns and our bodies. When you start asking yourself who you are, you realize that you are not the body or the mind but something beyond that.

Our everyday activities reflect how much we have been used to noise. It has penetrated our lives in such a way that we can’t keep still. Our designs of silence are in the absence of everything that produces noise. Bereft of the noise that is common in our lives, a fear lurks. There is something unsettling when we imagine our lives without that person/thing/object/profession/etc., which keeps us busy with noise.

But we are wrong and our fears baseless; silence is not the absence of sound but the presence of an inward-listening awareness, an attunement of the mind’s ears and an orientation of the spirit towards

a certain inner stillness. We don’t have to go into the Amazon forest to experience silence; we can do it in our everyday life. This is possible if we learn to pay attention to the silence in the background of everything we do and the thoughts in our minds.

Everything happens in the background of silence. If there wasn’t a silent dimension in our minds, we wouldn’t hear ourselves think. The only background for noise is silence. And it’s this awareness of silence that we should be aware of. It helps us enlarge our view of life and its goodness.

In the beginning, God must have created sound first out of the silence that He was in because the vast space is nothing but silence.

Most singers have a ritual that before they hit the stage to perform, they must be in a state of the most absolute condition of silence. This silence acts as a guide through their interior.

When you are deeply rooted in your inner silence, you learn how to communicate without words. You start to sense the sound of your own breath, the movement of your muscles and your thoughts. And in so doing, taking time to be quite and meditate, the sound of the buzzing life becomes a joy.

Get in tune with your silence.

 The Sound of Silence. 

By Mystic Venus