The Importance of Silence

By Swami Nityamuktananda, 2011

The more complex our life becomes, the more noisy it becomes. We call it progress, but is it?

Most living environments are more noisy now than ever, with TV, Video Games, Radio, Traffic noise etc. and worth we plug our ears to hear even clearer… the noise, the waves, the vibrations that batter our brains through personal stereos, i-pods and so on. There is noise everywhere, even close to our eardrums! 

Research shows that more and more young people suffer from loss of hearing because from a young age they are exposed to loud noise. Noise is vibration is constant attack on our ears; and moreover every noise is a “bite” of information that has to be digested by our brain. Research has shown that the average person today needs one more hour of sleep  for the brain to digest all the stuff we put into it.

This is especially taxing for children, resulting in many variations of dis-eases such as Attention-deficit- Syndrome. We suffer from information overload and noise pollution which attacks our nervous system and causes mental and physical illness; just as any other kind of pollution. 

The word “noise” is connected to the word “nauseau” (Latin, sickness) and noxious ( harmful). There is good evidence nowadays that excessive noise has physiological and psychological effects. Causing hypertension, aggression, insomnia, high stress levels etc. even cardiovascular diseases.

 So it does not surprise that Silence, or what we deem as Silence. .. appeals to more and more people. Silence, appeals to many because it becomes synonymous with a simpler life. In our times we long to extract ourselves from the over load of our information age. 

The life-styles and noise levels of contemporary life leads us away from nature, where  people used to find peace.

It is as though in the Silence of Nature we can breath more freely. So we dream of going back to live in nature, like in the pre-technological days of yore, as many communities throughout the decades have done; however we forget one thing:

Even if we “chill out in nature, there is one culprit which will not be quieted; our own mind keeps chatting, spinning out millions of separate thoughts! 

We can sit in the most quiet beautiful forest, tend the most silent remote garden…and yet our mind flits from the most recent political news, to imagining the next thunderstorm, to all sorts of worries, desires, expectations and dreams. 

The strange thing is, although we long for the simplicity and harmony that Silence promises we can’t maintain it for long; and worth still : sooner rather than later we even start wondering why we should  settle for such a state, when there is a whole world out there to discover, so many countries to explore, so many flowers to see, so many people to enjoy, “so many blades of grass to count”. 

We even might think that the purpose of our lives is to gather more information, to understand more about the world, more about people and even ourselves. And so we build more concepts and more concepts… branching out into forever more knowledge, making our life more complicated; we call it richer…because  we have discovered: “billions of blades of grass.”  

We forget that all of that is “a numbers game and however high the number – it’s limited” However much of the infinite creation we see and understand… its limited, limited by our individual conditioning, by the ‘natural blinkers we wear’. 

Meanwhile we exhaust ourselves. A Remedy?  

Like every muscle in our body our mind needs to be trained to relax and to be silent.Such silence is rejuvenating, is empowering, is healing, is making whole. All wisdom traditions have some teaching about Silence, for with it we “breath out the dust of the world.” In many traditions, focus on a simple task is used as a method to practice silence. This can mean, to focus on the breath, on a word, on a candle or on a simple action like drinking tea (tea ceremony of the Zen tradition), “listening to the sound of water -  poured from a bamboo water ladle into a tea bowl.” 

With focus on such a simple acts like drinking tea, or observing the breath or focusing on a butterfly – we might discover a deeper connections between ourselves and life, we might see great natural beauty and become filled with awe for the ground of existence. When faced with such deeper wonder our mind becomes naturally quiet; it rests, there is no shunting of information back and forth, there is no movement, mind becomes silent. ….. ‘Silent’ here does not simply mean absence of speech, but refers to a deep state of awareness that goes beyond words and concepts. So there is the gross level of “no speech” that gives the mind the desperately needed rest ; and moreover when the desire to speak stops, the desire to think stops.

So silence is not simply referring to absence of noise or speech. There is always “noise”,  those who have spent, voluntarily or involuntarily a lot of time in sincere silence, “hear the vibrating energy first as the flow of their blood, the vibrating of their nervous system and finally of the vibrating of their own life energy: Noise will always be there! 

Speech is a deliberate vibration of energy carried by breath. It is more than noise. It is the attempt to bring the concepts from my mind…into your mind, using waves of sound; speech is thoughts transposed into physical action (vibration), fuelled by breath. Breath itself  is life-energy (prana), every time we speak we breath out prana (life-energy). Speech then is using/loosing life-energy! Silence than is preservation of the same. Hence Silence is rest - is regenerative.This is the first beneficial level of practicing Silence.

Let’s contemplate a different level: Sounds, words or concepts involve different activities and parts of the brain. Different areas are involved in processing words or concepts depending whether these are heard, seen (writing) or spoken.  Apart from the language processing area, each of these involves also areas for sound (auditory cortex), the visual cortex or the well-known areas that activate speech (Brocas and Werneckes). It means that a silent mind, is not a mind, that doesn’t speak…, nor a mind that doesn’t hear ‘noise”; but a mind that doesn’t process words or concepts! So the Silent mind is a mind that does not use the ordinary thinking mechanism of the brain. The thinking mechanism brings sensory processing together with memories and imaginings (or projections) and puts all that together into a concept, and uses “the little ingredient of awareness.” 

Making sense of a stream of words, spoken, heard or read… is a formidable complicatedbusiness, using immense energy. So again from a more scientific angle, silence conserves energy. Hence Silence can effectively be used as a tool towards healing; energy is conserved and thus available for repairing, where ever needed. 

There is a misperception that silence is cultivating an “inactive brain”  - a dull mind! It is not, that, on the contrary it’s a mind, that is highly aware but the awareness is open to receive knowing that is not bound by concepts and words- but free to receive higher vibrations of knowing. The silent mind is alert, positive, peaceful and expanded - free !Silence is living with awareness! Thitch Nath Than, the Vietnamese monk, speaks of the river of perception being illuminated by the sun of awareness. When the river of perception is smooth and even, flowing as one single stream, the sun of awareness is mirrored in it. When there are no ripples on the sea of mind, no wavelets sloshing, no waves crashing ….then there is Silence. Cultivating Silence as a spiritual practice is not draining that river…and making it a barren riverbed …but calming , smoothing the flow of the river.So when we talk of a spiritual practice of Silence, it has very little to do with the comatose state of deep sleep, or mental stupor, nor with forcing the sense-related thought-processes via the brain- into submission, No it addresses a different dimension, and that needs cultivating. I like the image of cleaning the ink-pot. 

To clean an ink-pot, we pour clean water into it…it dilutes and dilutes until the water that comes out is as clean as the water poured in.The clean water that we pour into the river of our mind can be pure attention, or a sacred word often called mantra. Again the use of either method is found across the globe in most ancient traditions. 

Yunus Emre, 13^th century Turkish dervish, writes about the power of such a sacred  word.: A single word can brighten the face

           Of one who knows the value of words.

           Ripened in silence, a single word

           acquires great energy for work….

Using one sacred word to achieve Silence of mind , or simply watching the breath for the same purpose, brings us in harmony with our innermost Being, it brings us in touch with a deeper layer of ourselves . This is the reason why wisdom holders in many traditions often ‘speak with Silence”, answer our questions “with silence”.  Ultimately that deepest Layer of our being cannot be described by words, words would limit  THAT to “my opinion”, “my tradition” , “my command of language” … yet that Ultimate Nature , the Absolute ( so many sholars, Mystics and Shamans from across the world  agree)  has no word to describe it, 

“in Silence alone it can reveal itself.” 

Just as it says in the well known “I Ching”: 

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao

The name that can be named is not the eternal name…

(and in the second stanza): 

Therefore the sage goes about doing nothing, teaching no-talking

As mentioned above, to get to that Silence many tools are used. Some cultures use art or simple household actions ; some cultures use visual images (Yantras, mandalas) and some logic and analysis (from the Vedas to Plato) ; some use song, or even dance, some use mantra and furthermore  most use prayer.What ever the tool , there are two main benefits of the practice of silence, to calm, clean, purify, heal mind and body and the experience which might lead to the discovery of the highest knowledge, the level of  pure Awareness….pure Being.

The interior process in many traditions has been called “Prayer”.  Prayer is as old as humanity, in it man addresses that which is higher than himself, it might be through worship of natural forces, it might be as communication with a formless power; it might be reached by a vision quest; or a silent “walk about” as the Australian Cousins would call it, who go to seek the Silence of Biami, the Spirit of Spirits, the Absolute power, or the “God of Gods” called That. Highest prayer is that which ends in Silence, words that end in Silence, or rather subtler and subtler vibrations that we deem Silence because they are beyond our perception, a mere reflection of the “Sun of Awareness” that illumines the flowing river, that we are. 

The Christian Mystics, such as Theresa of Avila or John of the Cross agree that the “interior prayer “or silence will teach us everything. Furthermore John Cassian and other early Christian mystics taught the silent prayer of one simple word (especially “Maranatha”, just like today’s nuns and monks of Ceile De - the monastic mixture of Celtic – Christians that is unique to Ireland.

John Main, contemporary  teacher of Silence said: “It is not just a matter of keeping our tongues still but much more of achieving a state of alert stillness of mind and heart…..it’s not the stillness of sleep, but rather of total awakened concentration.”  

That kind of sums up the tradition of Silence and prayer, which have the aim of gathering our dispersed minds and redirect its energy inward like looking back to the source. At that source, in that silence we find undifferentiated, singular potential, pure Being, ….or we could also say pure love, that love which some call “God”.But a god that is not dependent on any religion or form, on any dogma or approval –but is itself the power of Silence, the potential of All there is, before it becomes limited to the form of a words and concepts….which separate. In Silence we are one, with words there are many! This is what Quantum physics calls “consciousness’ the unified mind-field, Its refered to the God in the gaps….the in-between, the non-locality…the creative potential, the still-point; ‘this great absence, that is a presence’ The presence is in the absence of all concepts or ideas…potent Silence…Filled Silence….

It seems that Eastern thought, indigenous and Christian traditions, Yoga, Taoists all agree that we need to leave all concepts behind and practice Silence if we want to grow closer to the Absolute Reality, that we are.  

Let’s look at one more context, of this universal practice:

The Buddha was well known in contemporary ascetic circles for being in favor of silence and retreat. (Sattipathana), His appreciation of Silence went so far that he would readily dismiss nosy monks or lay supporters from his presence…he frequently explained that seclusion was a distinct quality of dhamma. The discourses report that even after full enlightenment, Buddha still went to solitary, silent retreats.

In the Tibetan tradition true inner Silence is said to put us in touch with Gnostic awareness, being and knowing which is inate wisdom. 

Silence is the song of the heart, said to be the threshold of the cave of the heart. In the Buddhist practice of Vispassana we find the “Noble Silence” ; a time where there is no speech, no signs, no television, no books or papers, no notebooks or diaries, ..no interactions….sometimes even no eye-contact , such Noble Silence kept over a prolonged period of time, is said to change the vision of the world.

And this is exactly what is needed in our troubled world… we need to change our vision, how we live, how we behave! Such change has to come from our inner understanding of our place in the universe. Each one of us, has to discover it within himself, nobody can tell you what it is. You have to empower yourself-by going back to who you originally are, without distractions. Such inner learning needs practice! 

To practice during the day every now and then to be quiet, - even just for Two Minutes! - and simply listen to our breath without distractions i.e. simple awareness of the breath, of the life-force within is a start to a more whole understanding of “life, the universe and everything”.