The power of silence
The great problems of our world arise because we cannot enter into silence and still our chattering minds.
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Silence is the most important practice you can embrace. Religious or not, it reveals the depth of your being and your relation to the cosmos.
Only in silence can you unify the opposites: Suffering and bliss, seen without judgment, held together in harmony.
The great problems of our world arise because we cannot enter into that silence and still our chattering minds. We’re constantly distracted by noise. Noise breeds anxiety, sows division, and blinds the soul.
Noise drowns out silence, leaving us unable to see the harmony. We live in a noisy world.
So the world views suffering and pain as evidence against the Divine. How can God exist if evil exists? How can there be meaning when there is so much suffering?
But here’s the truth: Only fools drowning in shallow silence utter such nonsense. Such people think flutes can sing without first being carved by a blade’s sharp edges. They believe drums can thunder without their skin being stretched in tension under the maker’s hand.
They are like seeds planted by the wayside that crows devoured.
Shallow silence seals our lips but leaves our minds restless. Never touching the truth.
What we miss is the cosmos’s secret: Harmony woven from tension—light and dark, suffering and bliss, young and old, night and day, hot and cold, birth and death.
So, friends, you and I must dive into the deep waters of silence, below thought, beyond words. There where our false self recedes, we will find our true self and see the harmony of the cosmos.
As Sister Wendy Beckett wrote:
Silence is essentially a surrender to the holiness of the divine mystery, whether we use these words or not. An atheist, calming his or her spirit in the peace of silence, is irradiated by the same mystery, anonymous but transforming.1
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Sister Wendy Beckett, Meditations on Silence