Visualize you’re sitting in a noisy cafe. People are chattering, there’s music playing, the staff are busy taking orders, and the kitchen’s cooking. All of a sudden the music stops along with everything else stop. A beautiful silence begins. This silence is natural and unforced, no one wants to talk, everyone is apart of this nothingness. The peace, power, and beauty nourish and fill your soul. And then, the music starts up again and everyone begins talking again.
Hopefully I’ve somewhat conveyed the power of silence to you. When sounds are made, they arise from this silence, this stillness; they sit on top of it for a while, and eventually return back to nothing again. Silence and Stillness are the ‘reality’ of nature, with sound being the interruption of it. Society, however, seems to have forgotten this simple truth, with anything being better than nothing.
Everywhere you go there’s either ‘background music’ or a background TV on, anything so the ‘sound of silence’ remains unheard. This relegation of Music and TV to the background is somewhat ironic and a little bit backwards. The artists who create music and shows have specific emotions they wish to express over the mediums. Their messages are now falling on unconscious ears, which are only conscious that something’s there. The topic of society, it’s silence or stillness has been covered in a Dharma talk by Gil at Zencast. It was Gil’s talk and the timing of my own experience that have led to this post. I suggest you check out this profound talk.
People often seem to talk unskillfully, adding words that further dilute their message, just to avoid this silence. Speech, however, should be meaningful and useful, not something to cover up the reality of silence. What’s also unrealized by insistent talker, is that greater than 50% of the communication experience takes place, using nonverbal channels including body language and posture.
Silence is not just in the physical, external world, it’s also something to work towards internally, with our mind. The purpose of our meditation practice is to develop this internal silence, by allowing us to turn the chatter down inside our minds. This then allowing us to get back to our fundamental nature of silence or stillness. Infinitesmile has a great video embedded below on developing our internal stillness or spaciousness as they call it.
May you find stillness in your daily life, over this weekend, take the time out take find it. Turn off the radio or the TV, listen to the beauty of silence. There’s nothing to fear in it, be open to the nothingness and feel it’s peace, and beauty. Let the silence heal and nourish you.
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Hi Wade.
Great post and very timely for me.
I have long believed in the power of the word and this relates directly to the power of silence.
(As an aside: the electricity went out yesterday and suddenly the tension in my neck went away. I was reminded of how the “real” world actually sounds. It was great!)
So… it has taken so much focus and time to learn to speak with positive truth and to say nothing, no matter how simple or profound, that would compromise my own personal integrity.
The new challenge, now that speaking with integrity has become a habit, is to quiet the mind and teach it to do the same thing as my mouth does.
How many times have I attacked myself in my mind? How many times has the noise reverberating in there come back to haunt me?
I will now attempt to quiet the ego, to stop playing back the recordings of painful words said to me by others.
I must be the “me” that I truly always have been and not the me that the harsh voices say I am.
This post is surreal Wade.
It actually brought me to a point of complete stillness.
My last thought… “Don’t speak unless you can improve on the silence.”
With that in mind I have nothing more to say… except ‘Blessings my friend’