Silence

For society silence is an abomination, for the individual it is bliss.

Outer silence, the absence of noise, although increasingly rare, can be purchased if necessary by trips to remote places. Even then, there may be the sounds of overhead air traffic, animal noises, and the like. Total absence of outside noise can occur, but it is very rare.

Inner silence, the absence of thought, desires, emotional disturbances, and sensory stimulation, is rarer than complete outer silence. Our default state is to be agitated, to be wrapped up in our thoughts, punished by unpleasant emotional states, always desiring, and overwhelmed by sensory input. Modern society, with its abhorrence of silence, provides the monkey mind with any number of distractions; social media, movies, gaming, consumerism, small talk, and so on. When satiation has been reached, we crave oblivion, and again, society provides no shortage of routes to oblivion, the most common being alcohol.

It is worth considering the high price that must be paid for inner silence. Our desires have to be quietened, and this alone is a mammoth undertaking. It also requires a great deal of understanding. The worst thing we can do is meditate without understanding. This is just another desire to reach some preferred state. The diminishing of desires comes through the realization that there is nothing worth desiring. In other words, life is seen as no longer offering anything of value, and as such, we become free from clinging and grasping. To see the futility of life is an absolute prerequisite, and for most, this will be a journey too painful to contemplate. Abandoning the belief that tomorrow will be better than today, that the next relationship, the next job, or the next vacation will satisfy our longing, is too much to ask of most people.

Emotional turbulence comes about primarily through satisfaction, or otherwise, of our desires. Since our most primitive desire is the desire to exist, anything that enhances or diminishes our power in life will cause an emotional reaction. To quiet this emotional turbulence means we come to not care. As small things in a very large universe, there will always be things that affect us adversely, or in some cases, positively. Either way, if our desires have reduced and if we know how to deal with our emotional states, there will be increasing periods of emotional calm.

As with emotions, our thoughts are mostly taken up with issues around our survival status; money, relationships, property, status, and so on. If these things are no longer important, the thoughts become less turbulent and easier to calm.

To achieve inner silence, even on rare occasions, is the result of an understanding of the futility of all desires and the meaninglessness of living in a world of transient things. There are people who claim to have rejected life but who never know inner silence. It is because their rejection is probably the result of hurt and anger, and as such, they unconsciously wish things to be other than they are; another desire.

I’ll leave the last words to Valentin Tomberg:

Concentration without effort—that is to say, where there is nothing to suppress and where contemplation becomes as natural as breathing and the beating of the heart—is the state of consciousness (i.e. thought, imagination, feeling and will) of perfect calm, accompanied by the complete relaxation of the nerves and the muscles of the body. It is the profound silence of desires, of preoccupations, of the imagination, of the memory and of discursive thought. One may say that the entire being becomes like the surface of calm water, reflecting the immense presence of the starry sky and its indescribable harmony. And the waters are deep, they are so deep! And the silence grows, ever increasing. . what silence! Its growth takes place through regular waves which pass, one after the other, through your being: one wave of silence followed by another wave of more profound silence, then again a wave of still more profound silence. . . Have you ever drunk silence? If in the affirmative, you know what concentration without effort is.