Silence, or quiet?

A useful prompt from Messrs. Laurel and Hardy. We usually mean "not talking" when we talk about silence. Keeping quiet.

I can imagine few more terrifying things than total, absolute, zero-sounds silence. On earth, we can make rooms so effectively sound-dampened and insulated that if you go into one and don't talk, it's pretty close to absolute silence. An anechoic chamber.

 People really don't enjoy being in them. The record endurance in there is, apparently, 45 minutes. Total absolute zero silence I guess you'd get in space, because without atmosphere you can't have the vibrations we call sound. (I'm now going to doggy-paddle hastily back into my depth in the physics swimming-pool...)

So a silent retreat, a silent meditation, is simply a time during which we don't speak, and we seek therefore not to listen to words. On retreats, we are usually encouraged not to read much either. The final touch is to avoid extensive eye contact. Nothing wrong perhaps (views vary) with a quick friendly smile when passing someone in the corridor, but  too much direct gaze can break the...whatever it is that's going on in your head.

Is it scary, lonely, oppressive, to keep quiet for a day or two? I don't find it so, particularly if you are with a group of like-minded people similarly intent on it. It certainly has a gentle but powerful cumulative effect over a few days. The quiet can be broken - a "how's it going, anything to tell us?" discussion or a one-to-one chat half-way through I found very valuable. 

So it's not silence. Hearing natural sounds can be a great help, for example. I don't recollect anyone saying "curse that blackbird, singing away, he's broken the silence!" It's simply not talking, and not listening to much other than guidance at the start of or during a meditation. 

The effect is powerful but difficult to describe, other than it helps you to feel you are in the present moment. When I come out of silence, I often don't want to talk much for a bit, to ease myself gently back into the richness of verbal discourse (and its frequent and sometimes enjoyable banality, of course.)

Similarly, in ceremonies funereal or matrimonial, people sometimes shy away from the idea of a minute or two's silence; yet communal silence, when all present are thinking of the same person or people, can be very powerful, joining up those present at a different level, in a different way from speech. 

We shy away from silence, I think, because we are surronded by, conditioned by and perhaps addicted to verbal input. How often have you, sitting alone to eat, reached out for something, anything, to read? Just this morning I reached unthinkingly for the cereal packet. I mean, who cares about riboflavin anyway? I thought I needed words. How about just eating, and being with that?

Then there's the mobile phone. I'll just pop it beside me on the table because...I don't know why because. It is comforting. I exist. Someone is getting in touch, so I must mean something out there in the cosmos.

Well you do, but however powerful your mobile is (I love mine, too!) it can't tell you what you mean in the cosmos. Silence and meditation are much more likely to get you There. The phone can wait, monkey-mind!

You can't phone the Tao, and if you could, you'd just get - silence.