Today our topic is that rare commodity in 21st-century living—silence.
You live in a noisy world, constantly bombarded with loud music, sirens, construction equipment, jet airplanes, rumbling trucks, leaf blowers, lawn mowers, and tree cutters. These human-made, unnatural sounds invade your senses and keep silence at bay. In fact, you’ve been raised in a culture that not only eschews silence, but is terrified of it.
The car radio must always be on, and any pause in conversation is a moment of embarrassment that most people quickly fill with chatter. For many, being alone is a nightmare, and being alone in silence is pure torture. The famous scientist Blaise Pascal observed, “All man’s miseries derive from not being able to sit quietly in a room alone.”
There’s a momentary silence in the space between your thoughts that you can become aware of with practice. In this silent space, you’ll find the peace that you crave in your daily life. You’ll never know that peace if you have no spaces between your thoughts. The average person is said to have 60,000 separate thoughts every day. With so many thoughts, there are almost no gaps. If you could reduce that number by half, you would open up an entire world of possibilities for yourself.
It’s really the space between the notes that makes the music you enjoy so much. Without the spaces, all you would have is one continuous noisy note. Everything that’s created comes out of silence. Your thoughts emerge from the nothingness of silence. Your words come out of this void. Your very essence emerged from emptiness. Those who will supersede us are waiting in the vast void. All creativity requires some stillness. Silence reduces fatigue and allows you to experience your own creative juices.
I urge you to demand more and more time for silence in your life. One of the most effective ways to bring this about is to make meditation a daily practice. And remember, there’s no such thing as a bad meditation. Give yourself time to sit quietly alone. At first your thoughts will take off trying to convince you that this is a waste of time, that you should be out there being productive, and that you’ve got so many other things to do. Hundreds of other unrelated thoughts will pop in and out of your mind.
But you can weather this thunderstorm of mental protestations by sitting quietly and becoming the observer to all of this inner chatter. Eventually you’ll be able to move to the gaps between your thoughts and notice how peaceful you felt in that silent gap when you emerge from it. Try it right now. Use the Lord’s Prayer. First, concentrate on the word Our, and then Father. Try to go into the gap between the two words, Our and Father. Then do it again with Who art and in Heaven. Just slip momentarily into the gap, and notice how peaceful and exquisite you feel in that gap.
There are many opportunities to access silence. I try to meditate each time I stop at a red light. With the car stopped and my body inactive, frequently the only things still moving are the thoughts in my mind. I use those two minutes or so at the stoplight to bring my mind into harmony with my inert car and body. I get a wonderful bonus of silence. I probably stop at a red light 20 or 30 times a day, creating 40 minutes to an hour of silence. And there’s always someone behind me to let me know that my time is up by breaking the silence with a honking horn!
Anytime in your life when you’re feeling out of sorts in any way, go to nature and find silence and peace. Sending troubled teens to the wilderness to care for animals and commune with nature almost always brings them peace and serenity. Drug addictions disappear when young people are confronted with climbing a mountain or canoeing across a lake. People who have been diagnosed with terminal illnesses often find that months spent in a cabin in the isolated wilderness is the exact therapy they need, and sometimes the source of miraculous spontaneous remissions.
If you ever suffer from insomnia, walk barefoot on the grass for ten minutes before getting into bed. Nature has a marvelous way of healing many maladies. Try spending a day in an isolated spot, listening only to silence punctuated by the sounds of nature—the birds, the insects, the rustling of leaves, the wind. These are the sounds of healing that can offset the painful sounds of 18-wheelers, cement mixers, boom boxes, and the like.
Give yourself opportunities to be in the wilderness as a regular part of your life routine. Take a day each month or week or two to be alone in silence, communing with nature. This is the ultimate therapy, and it’s much less expensive than paying someone to listen!
When you’re at peace, you radiate a different kind of energy than when you’re stressed or depressed. The more peaceful you become, the easier you can deflect the negative energies of those you encounter. This is like having an invisible shield around you that nothing can penetrate unless it’s at a higher spiritual energy than your shield. A hostile current is greeted with a smile and an inner knowing that this is not your stuff. A person who attempts to bring you into their misery cannot succeed without your agreement. Your meditation practice keeps you immune.
Not only can you deflect the negativity of those around you, but your sense of peace will bring others into harmony with you. Studies have been done to measure the serotonin (a neurotransmitter in your brain that indicates how peaceful and harmonious you feel) levels of those in the vicinity of a large group of meditators. Amazingly, just being in the energy field of those who meditate raises the serotonin levels of the observers. These implications are startling. The more you achieve peacefulness through meditation, the more your peaceful state impacts those around you.
I find that my meditating not only calms me, but has a soothing effect on my family and those around me. But the primary benefit is that after a meditation, I find it almost impossible to be annoyed or negatively impacted by anything, because it brings me inner peace.