Swim in Silence

Tranquility

I don’t really know whether art can exist without a certain degree of tranquillity or spiritual poise; without a certain amount of quiet you can have neither philosophy nor religion nor painting nor poetry. And as one of the specialties of modern life is to abolish this quiet, we are in danger of losing our arts together with the quiet of the soul that art demands.

- Saul Bellow

Mozart on Silence

Saul Williams

You will sit in darkness,
Swallowed by silence,
Until the angel of solitude
Ignites your spine.

-Saul Williams

Saul Stacey Williams (born February 29, 1972) is an American singer, musician, poet, writer, and actor.

Inner Noise

The problem with listening, of course, is that we don’t. There’s too much noise going on in our heads, so we never hear anything. The inner conversation simply never stops. It can be our voice or whatever voices we want to supply, but it’s a constant racket. In the same way we don’t see, and in the same way we don’t feel, we don’t touch, we don’t taste.

Philip Glass, Listening to Philip Glass

Mental Silence Study

Meditation has two distinct meanings. One meaning of meditation refers to a psychological centering device such as mantra recitation, focus on the breath, mindfulness, or a visual focus. Psychological centering devices help one feel more relaxed and centered. The other meaning of meditation is the experience of complete mental silence. Traditionally, the purpose of centering devices is to achieve complete mental silence. Although the dual meanings of meditation have been documented since at least 1977, most studies involving meditation focus on centering devices and ignore the question of whether participants experience complete mental silence.

Remarkably, the experience of complete mental silence is practically unstudied in psychology. I believe that the experience of mental silence is more common than reference works on positive psychology suggest.

-Joshua Pritikin

I recently participated in Joshua's survey on the subjective passage of time and mental silence. I found it thought provoking and enjoyed going through it. You might enjoy it too. Take a look: http://tiny.cc/q2qmfw 

Divine Silence

The knowledge of God is received in divine silence.
-St John of the Cross

Silence Quotes

"Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation... "
-- Jean Arp

"We can do more work in the silence than we can by moving the lips and letting the mouth make a continuous noise. That interferes with our own thinking as well as with other people's. There is a stillness in a thinker's mind; there is a quietness in a thinker's presence, where even words are entirely unnecessary."
--Robert Beesley

"Silence is one of the hardest arguments to refute."
-- Josh Billings

"Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together."
--Thomas Carlyle

"Sound has spoiled the most ancient of the world's arts, the art of pantomime, and has canceled out the great beauty that is silence. "
-- Charlie Chaplin

"Silence is a true friend who never betrays."
--Confucius

"The more articulate somebody is, the more suspicious I am of them. I like to feel that the important things remain unsaid. "
-- Daniel Day-Lewis

"The words the happy say Are paltry melody But those the silent feel Are beautiful-- "
-- Emily Dickinson

"A properly kept silence is a beautiful thing; it is nothing less than the father of very wise thoughts."
--Diodicus

"Let thy speech be better than silence, or be silent."
--Dionysius the Elder

"Silence is the mother of truth."
--Benjamin Disraeli

"Sometimes the silence can be like thunder. "
-- Bob Dylan

"In the attitude of silence the soul finds the path in an clearer light, and what is elusive and deceptive resolves itself into crystal clearness. Our life is a long and arduous quest after Truth."
-- Mahatma Gandhi

"Nothing more enhances authority than silence. It is the crowning virtue of the strong, the refuge of the weak, the modesty of the proud, the pride of the humble, the prudence of the wise, and the sense of fools."
--Charles de Gaulle

"I have learned silence from the talkative, tolerance from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind, yet, I'm ungrateful to those teachers. "

-- Kahlil Gibran

"Silence is argument carried on by other means."
-- Che Guevara

"We in the "developed" world seem to have many auditory strategies that insulate us from the presence of silence, simplicity, and solitude. When I return to Western culture after time in desert, mountain or forest, I discover how we have filled our world with a multiplicity of noises, a symphony of forgetfulness that keeps our won thoughts and realizations, feelings and intuitions out of audible range."
--Joan Halifax

Silence

After her conversion to Christianity, the French Jewish writer Simone Weil found that she could use the Lord's Prayer to enter into a state of thoughtless awareness, mental silence or meditation.

“The effect of this practice is extraordinary and surprises me every time, for, although I experience it each day, it exceeds my expectation at each repetition. At times the very first words tear my thoughts from my body and transport it to a place outside space where there is neither perspective nor point of view. The infinity of the ordinary expanses of perception is replaced by an infinity to the second or sometimes the third degree. At the same time, filling every part of this infinity of infinity, there is silence, a silence which is not an absence of sound but which is the object of a positive sensation, more positive than that of sound. Noises, if there are any, only reach me after crossing this silence.”

- Simone Weil, Waiting on God.

The Power of Silence and Zero

“Humility collects the soul into a single point by the power of silence. A truly humble man has no desire to be known or admired by others, but wishes to form himself into himself, to become nothing, as if he had never been born. When he is completely hidden to himself in himself, he is completely with God.”

- Isaac of Nineveh (AD 600)

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A current affairs reporter was talking on TV about the Global Economic Crisis, and told viewers to brace themselves for "a whole lot of zeros", as she was going to talk about the 2.7 trillion dollars that have been lost on world markets. Seeing all those zeros after the 2 and 7 on the screen made me think about how important zeros are. Without nothing, nothing could exist. It's one of the apparent paradoxes of mysticism that to become truly nothing is to become everything.

One of my aunts mentioned that she has been reading a book called The Book of Nothing, in which the author reflects that Indian philosophy was unphased by the notions of zero and infinity, while Western schools struggled with them.

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PS think of how many zeros that would be if you converted 2.7 trillion US to Zimbabwean dollars!

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This 100 billion dollar note would buy a kilo of apples.

Listening to Silence

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"When thoughts become silent
The soul finds peace in its own source.
This is the mystery of Eternity."
-from the Maitri Upanishad

"Silence is a friend who will never betray"
-Confucius

"Give me Silence and I will outdare the night."
-Kahlil Gibran

"The effect of this practice is extraordinary and surprises me every time, for, although I experience it each day, it exceeds my expectation at each repetition. At times the very first words tear my thoughts from my body and transport it to a place outside space where there is neither perspective nor point of view. The infinity of the ordinary expanses of perception is replaced by an infinity to the second or sometimes the third degree. At the same time, filling every part of this infinity of infinity, there is silence, a silence which is not an absence of sound but which is the object of a positive sensation, more positive than that of sound. Noises, if there are any, only reach me after crossing this silence."
- Simone Weil, Waiting on God.


Listen to the Primordial Sound -
The thundering silence behind all things
Like the bellowing of a placid bull -
The voice and vehicle of the Self.
In the stillness of nocturnal forests,
In the midst of chatter and thought,
Attend! Attend! Attend!
-Jeronimus