Listening to Silence

When you listen to silence, you enter into the domain and dimension of silence. Of course, in order to listen to silence, one must be silent. It is there we discover that the listener is silent, and, when absorbed in that deep listening, the listener is at one with silence. Silence becomes that one, and the one is revealed as silence. 

Every sound echoed, every song evoked, every word spoken, all arise from the timeless ocean of silence. When all is said and done, it is only silence that speaks, only silence that has the last word. This is why I say silence is the master's mantra. One can get caught up in all sorts of words, flights of fancy, special hymns, and incantations. True power lies in the silence.

True power resides in silence because the voice of truth is silent, and truth, like silence, never lies. As soon as there is a description of it, we have lost it. Truth is clouded by interpretation. To know the real truth, you must abandon conceptual thinking. You must see reality as it is, and to do that, you must recognise the non-dual unity of all phenomena. The problem is that the finite self cannot fully know the infinite. It is only the infinite that knows the infinite, and to come to that, the finite must at least momentarily cease. Let it cease in this silence and hear the echo of eternity roar through where once there was a thought of “me” and “mine”.

Although all sounds come from silence, the words we use to speak of silence are not silence itself. We could talk all day about it, define it in this way and that. We could debate its existence. To truly understand it, however, you must let it take you. Let it consume you; you must stop all the talking and let silence speak.

For many, silence brings a sort of anxiety. If this is you, then you are not alone. 

Observe our society: we constantly cover up the silence with noise. It's increasingly rare to hear the untouched sounds of the natural world. In our hands there are devices that bombard us with notifications, music, and streaming content, filling every moment and every space. Even the sanctity of the bathroom throne is not a quiet zone anymore. Our homes buzz with the sounds of appliances, televisions, computers, and ongoing conversations, mirroring the incessant hum of civilisation pervading our cities and suburbs that never quits and never quiets.

We are not anxious and afraid of silence, we are anxious and afraid because there is no silence. Because we have settled for chaos, for cacophony, for noise to distract us, and we confuse that distraction with the calmness we seek. Our nervous system is constantly seeking this distraction and so we pick up the phone and scroll and it soothes us for a time by numbing the feeling of living. This is not a remedy. The remedy that everyone is really searching for is peace. Silence is peace but it is a peace that comes into direct contrast to the tense noise of our distracted and bound-up mind. It challenges our addictions and asks us to be okay with life, right now. It asks us to come out of the illusion that we live in and listen to reality as it is unfolding.

When true quiet comes, we are ushered out into the open, laid bare and vulnerable, as if standing on ground that suddenly dissolves beneath our feet. It is because real silence brings us face-to-face with the vast openness of the present moment. Real silence is the ringing bell of reality at your door. It calls you into the unfiltered place of existence where you are utterly alive. The silence screams, “This is it!” It confronts us with the naked reality of life and our own mortality, which can, indeed, be terrifying.

No one can escape real silence. We might spend our entire lives running from it, filling our ears with melodies, clinging to the familiar tunes or distracted by the drums of delusion, but, eventually, the music will end. This is what instils fear in us: we identify too closely with the melody, attempting to grasp and hold onto it, but it is futile. Music, like all transient things, slips through our fingers. In the end, what remains is silence. We dread it, thinking it heralds suffering, but in reality, silence is not a grim reaper, it is a great liberator. It is freedom from the pain of holding what cannot be held.

To surrender to silence one must face this fear, to undergo a kind of mini psychological death. It’s a surrender to the vast, uncharted quietude where the “I” ceases to exist in its familiar form. This surrender is not a loss but a profound return to what was there all along. 

Silence is your home.