Picard, Max. The World of Silence. review

 

Chicago: Regnery, 1989. (U.S. ed., English translation)

This classic work is so filled with aphoristic passages that it is easy to lose sight of the larger premise. That premise, that silence is not the absence of noise, the absence of something, but is a phenomenon in itself, was startlingly clear only when this work first appeared in 1948.

As a German Swiss Catholic theologian, Picard is strongly influenced by the Catholic phenomenologist Gabriel Marcel, who wrote the preface to this edition, but also by related philosophers such as Heidegger, and by the whole thrust of lyric German poets like Rilke and Holderlin. Equally strong, however, is the influence of the post-war atmosphere of cautious post-modern conservatism, at home in, say, Gilson, Maritain, and Thibaud - reconstructionists and rehabilitators of a broken world.

To Picard the theologian, then, silence is to be contrasted with language, the gift of consciousness that distinguishes the rational being from the universe, capable of silence and noise. Silence is the context of consciousness, language is the expression of creation. Picard sees language not as the product of the evolution of consciousness but as the gift of God, a divine jump-start for consciousness.

Through the many short chapters of his work, Picard offers impressions of the role of silence in balancing human effort and conserving virtue. But Picard's insistence on the supremacy of language versus the noise of modern technology (from construction noise to the radio) is a weak protest against time and change.

While Picard is to be commended for rescuing silence from its philosophical enemies, several resources for breaking the paradox that he proposes may be found elsewhere. For example, Ricouer's transcendence of modernity as a path, or the Zen limnology that breaks the absolutized boundary of language with silence. There are other channels into which we can navigate without depending upon language or our present "reality."

We can see Picard's hesitancy in a passage in the chapter "Nature and Silence":

The silence of nature is a conflicting silence from the human point of view. It is a blessed silence because it gives man an intuitive feeling of the great silence that was before the world and out of which everything arose. And it is oppressive at the same time because it puts man back into the state in which the word might be taken away from him again into that original silence.

But isn't this exactly what death is, this "taken away from" and return to "original silence"? This state must be explored not because it can be posited but because it suggests the natural restful state of the universe, wherein lies the consciousness we enjoy, wherein is found God. But Picard's orthodoxy makes him wary of approximating his discovery of silence, pushing it metaphysically or theologically to reveal itself. This is the ultimate irresolution of an otherwise breakthrough work.

This work is invaluable in inoculating us against the fear of silence, in seeing silence as a natural state, in preparing us for a life of silence if we choose, the beginning of a mysticism of silence and solitude, and a death which is, after all, silence.

Picard's compelling and even beautiful passages in favorite chapters such as "Nature and Silence," "Poetry and Silence," "The Plastic Arts and Silence," and "Illness, Death and Silence" show us that Picard has a solid instinct. Here are three samples.

Chinese pictures are like figures in a moonlit mist over the world of silence, woven from moon threads over the silence.

The seasons move in silence through the changing year. Spring does not come from winter; it comes from the silence from which winter came.

In the fables of the Golden Age we are told that men understood the language of all animals, trees, flowers, and grasses. That is a reminder of the fact that in the first language that had just come from the fullness of silence, there was still the all-containing fullness.

¶

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In the world of the mind, silence can have at least the following significances:

1. Dialogue, as a form of movement of the mind, is an alternation of speech and silence. Not knowing how to keep silence means, in these conditions, holding your mind in one place, maintaining a foolish monologue, revolving within the finite circle of your own mind. It means verbal hemorrhage, logorrhea.

2. Silence is, in another sense, an autodidactic principle, a necessary step in every Bildung or paidee. It is the period of "delivery of goods," of spiritual regeneration, recharging of batteries, and so on. In any cultural biography there must be moments when you do not produce, but only consume culture, when you must keep silence. Failing to keep silence in this case means tautologizing, beating time on the spot, dying from the inability to renew your own substance.

3. Silence can also appear either as a form of recognition of powerlessness in the face of the task of speaking the essential, or as a recognition of the fact that you have nothing essential to say. Heidegger writes: "Before speaking, man must listen again to the voice of Being, at the risk that under the sign of this demanding call he may have little, and seldom anything at all to say. Only in this way is the priceless character of its essence restored to the word, and to man a place to live in the truth of being." So failing to keep silence in this case means remaining on the surface of things, speaking superfluously, introducing inflation into the verbal space.

4. Silence can be a form of dignity of the mind, a form of protest. You go into silence when those around you are speaking too much and unworthily. Failing to keep silence in this case means participating in the spread of the immorality of the word.

5. Finally, "learning to keep silence" may be understood as a behavioral corrective based on negative experience of the effects of speech. Silence thus becomes the expression of acquired wisdom translated into prudence.

THE PÄLTINIS DIARY
A Paideic Model in Humanist Culture
GABRIEL LIICEANU

Symbols

 

Probably it will elucidate the drift of these foregoing obscure utterances, if we here insert somewhat of our Professor’s speculations on Symbols. To state his whole doctrine, indeed, were beyond our compass: nowhere is he more mysterious, impalpable, than in this of “Fantasy being the organ of the Godlike;” and how “Man thereby, though based, to all seeming, on the small Visible, does nevertheless extend down into the infinite deeps of the Invisible, of which Invisible, indeed, his Life is properly the bodying forth.” Let us, omitting these high transcendental aspects of the matter, study to glean (whether from the Paper-bags or the Printed Volume) what little seems logical and practical, and cunningly arrange it into such degree of coherence as it will assume. By way of proem, take the following not injudicious remarks: — 

“The benignant efficacies of Concealment,” cries our Professor, “who shall speak or sing? SILENCE and SECRECY! Altars might still be raised to them (were this an altar-building time) for universal worship. Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together; that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the daylight of Life, which they are thenceforth to rule. Not William the Silent only, but all the considerable men I have known, and the most undiplomatic and unstrategic of these, forbore to babble of what they were creating and projecting. Nay, in thy own mean perplexities, do thou thyself but hold thy tongue for one day: on the morrow, how much clearer are thy purposes and duties; what wreck and rubbish have those mute workmen within thee swept away, when intrusive noises were shut out! Speech is too often not, as the Frenchman defined it, the art of concealing Thought; but of quite stifling and suspending Thought, so that there is none to conceal. Speech too is great, but not the greatest. As the Swiss Inscription says: Sprechen ist silbern, Schweigen ist golden (Speech is silvern, Silence is golden); or as I might rather express it: Speech is of Time, Silence is of Eternity.

“Bees will not work except in darkness; Thought will not work except in Silence: neither will Virtue work except in Secrecy. Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth! Neither shalt thou prate even to thy own heart of ‘those secrets known to all.’ Is not Shame (Schaam) the soil of all Virtue, of all good manners and good morals? Like other plants, Virtue will not grow unless its root be hidden, buried from the eye of the sun. Let the sun shine on it, nay do but look at it privily thyself, the root withers, and no flower will glad thee. O my Friends, when we view the fair clustering flowers that overwreathe, for example, the Marriage-bower, and encircle man’s life with the fragrance and hues of Heaven, what hand will not smite the foul plunderer that grubs them up by the roots, and, with grinning, grunting satisfaction, shows us the dung they flourish in! Men speak much of the Printing Press with its Newspapers: du Himmel! what are these to Clothes and the Tailor’s Goose?

“Of kin to the so incalculable influences of Concealment, and connected with still greater things, is the wondrous agency of Symbols. In a Symbol there is concealment and yet revelation; here therefore, by Silence and by Speech acting together, comes a double significance. And if both the Speech be itself high, and the Silence fit and noble, how expressive will their union be! Thus in many a painted Device, or simple Seal-emblem, the commonest Truth stands out to us proclaimed with quite new emphasis.

“For it is here that Fantasy with her mystic wonderland plays into the small prose domain of Sense, and becomes incorporated therewith. In the Symbol proper, what we can call a Symbol, there is ever, more or less distinctly and directly, some embodiment and revelation of the Infinite; the Infinite is made to blend itself with the Finite, to stand visible, and as it were, attainable there. By Symbols, accordingly, is man guided and commanded, made happy, made wretched: He everywhere finds himself encompassed with Symbols, recognized as such or not recognized: the Universe is but one vast Symbol of God; nay if thou wilt have it, what is man himself but a Symbol of God; is not all that he does symbolical; a revelation to Sense of the mystic god-given force that is in him; a ‘Gospel of Freedom,’ which he, the ‘Messias of Nature,’ preaches, as he can, by act and word? Not a Hut he builds but is the visible embodiment of a Thought; but bears visible record of invisible things; but is, in the transcendental sense, symbolical as well as real.”

“Man,” says the Professor elsewhere, in quite antipodal contrast with these high-soaring delineations, which we have here cut short on the verge of the inane, “Man is by birth somewhat of an owl. Perhaps, too, of all the owleries that ever possessed him, the most owlish, if we consider it, is that of your actually existing Motive-Millwrights. Fantastic tricks enough man has played, in his time; has fancied himself to be most things, down even to an animated heap of Glass: but to fancy himself a dead Iron-Balance for weighing Pains and Pleasures on, was reserved for this his latter era. There stands he, his Universe one huge Manger, filled with hay and thistles to be weighed against each other; and looks long-eared enough. Alas, poor devil! spectres are appointed to haunt him: one age he is hag-ridden, bewitched; the next, priest-ridden, befooled; in all ages, bedevilled. And now the Genius of Mechanism smothers him worse than any Nightmare did; till the Soul is nigh choked out of him, and only a kind of Digestive, Mechanic life remains. In Earth and in Heaven he can see nothing but Mechanism; has fear for nothing else, hope in nothing else: the world would indeed grind him to pieces; but cannot he fathom the Doctrine of Motives, and cunningly compute these, and mechanize them to grind the other way?

“Were he not, as has been said, purblinded by enchantment, you had but to bid him open his eyes and look. In which country, in which time, was it hitherto that man’s history, or the history of any man, went on by calculated or calculable ‘Motives’? What make ye of your Christianities, and Chivalries, and Reformations, and Marseillaise Hymns, and Reigns of Terror? Nay, has not perhaps the Motive-grinder himself been in Love? Did he never stand so much as a contested Election? Leave him to Time, and the medicating virtue of Nature.”

“Yes, Friends,” elsewhere observes the Professor, “not our Logical, Mensurative faculty, but our Imaginative one is King over us; I might say, Priest and Prophet to lead us heavenward; or Magician and Wizard to lead us hellward. Nay, even for the basest Sensualist, what is Sense but the implement of Fantasy; the vessel it drinks out of? Ever in the dullest existence there is a sheen either of Inspiration or of Madness (thou partly hast it in thy choice, which of the two), that gleams in from the circumambient Eternity, and colors with its own hues our little islet of Time. The Understanding is indeed thy window, too clear thou canst not make it; but Fantasy is thy eye, with its color-giving retina, healthy or diseased. Have not I myself known five hundred living soldiers sabred into crows’-meat for a piece of glazed cotton, which they called their Flag; which, had you sold it at any market-cross, would not have brought above three groschen? Did not the whole Hungarian Nation rise, like some tumultuous moon-stirred Atlantic, when Kaiser Joseph pocketed their Iron Crown; an implement, as was sagaciously observed, in size and commercial value little differing from a horse-shoe? It is in and through Symbols that man, consciously or unconsciously, lives, works, and has his being: those ages, moreover, are accounted the noblest which can the best recognize symbolical worth, and prize it the highest. For is not a Symbol ever, to him who has eyes for it, some dimmer or clearer revelation of the Godlike?

“Of Symbols, however, I remark farther, that they have both an extrinsic and intrinsic value; oftenest the former only. What, for instance, was in that clouted Shoe, which the Peasants bore aloft with them as ensign in their Bauernkrieg (Peasants’ War)? Or in the Wallet-and-staff round which the Netherland Gueux, glorying in that nickname of Beggars, heroically rallied and prevailed, though against King Philip himself? Intrinsic significance these had none: only extrinsic; as the accidental Standards of multitudes more or less sacredly uniting together; in which union itself, as above noted, there is ever something mystical and borrowing of the Godlike. Under a like category, too, stand, or stood, the stupidest heraldic Coats-of-arms; military Banners everywhere; and generally all national or other sectarian Costumes and Customs: they have no intrinsic, necessary divineness, or even worth; but have acquired an extrinsic one. Nevertheless through all these there glimmers something of a Divine Idea; as through military Banners themselves, the Divine Idea of Duty, of heroic Daring; in some instances of Freedom, of Right. Nay the highest ensign that men ever met and embraced under, the Cross itself, had no meaning save an accidental extrinsic one.

“Another matter it is, however, when your Symbol has intrinsic meaning, and is of itself fit that men should unite round it. Let but the Godlike manifest itself to Sense, let but Eternity look, more or less visibly, through the Time-Figure (Zeitbild)! Then is it fit that men unite there; and worship together before such Symbol; and so from day to day, and from age to age, superadd to it new divineness.

“Of this latter sort are all true Works of Art: in them (if thou know a Work of Art from a Daub of Artifice) wilt thou discern Eternity looking through Time; the Godlike rendered visible. Here too may an extrinsic value gradually superadd itself: thus certain Iliads, and the like, have, in three thousand years, attained quite new significance. But nobler than all in this kind are the Lives of heroic god-inspired Men; for what other Work of Art is so divine? In Death too, in the Death of the Just, as the last perfection of a Work of Art, may we not discern symbolic meaning? In that divinely transfigured Sleep, as of Victory, resting over the beloved face which now knows thee no more, read (if thou canst for tears) the confluence of Time with Eternity, and some gleam of the latter peering through.

“Highest of all Symbols are those wherein the Artist or Poet has risen into Prophet, and all men can recognize a present God, and worship the Same: I mean religious Symbols. Various enough have been such religious Symbols, what we call Religions; as men stood in this stage of culture or the other, and could worse or better body forth the Godlike: some Symbols with a transient intrinsic worth; many with only an extrinsic. If thou ask to what height man has carried it in this manner, look on our divinest Symbol: on Jesus of Nazareth, and his Life, and his Biography, and what followed therefrom. Higher has the human Thought not yet reached: this is Christianity and Christendom; a Symbol of quite perennial, infinite character; whose significance will ever demand to be anew inquired into, and anew made manifest.

“But, on the whole, as Time adds much to the sacredness of Symbols, so likewise in his progress he at length defaces, or even desecrates them; and Symbols, like all terrestrial Garments, wax old. Homer’s Epos has not ceased to be true; yet it is no longer our Epos, but shines in the distance, if clearer and clearer, yet also smaller and smaller, like a receding Star. It needs a scientific telescope, it needs to be reinterpreted and artificially brought near us, before we can so much as know that it was a Sun. So likewise a day comes when the Runic Thor, with his Eddas, must withdraw into dimness; and many an African Mumbo-Jumbo and Indian Pawaw be utterly abolished. For all things, even Celestial Luminaries, much more atmospheric meteors, have their rise, their culmination, their decline.

“Small is this which thou tellest me, that the Royal Sceptre is but a piece of gilt wood; that the Pyx has become a most foolish box, and truly, as Ancient Pistol thought, ‘of little price.’ A right Conjurer might I name thee, couldst thou conjure back into these wooden tools the divine virtue they once held.

“Of this thing, however, be certain: wouldst thou plant for Eternity, then plant into the deep infinite faculties of man, his Fantasy and Heart; wouldst thou plant for Year and Day, then plant into his shallow superficial faculties, his Self-love and Arithmetical Understanding, what will grow there. A Hierarch, therefore, and Pontiff of the World will we call him, the Poet and inspired Maker; who, Prometheus-like, can shape new Symbols, and bring new Fire from Heaven to fix it there. Such too will not always be wanting; neither perhaps now are. Meanwhile, as the average of matters goes, we account him Legislator and wise who can so much as tell when a Symbol has grown old, and gently remove it.

“When, as the last English Coronation [*] I was preparing,” concludes this wonderful Professor, “I read in their Newspapers that the ‘Champion of England,’ he who has to offer battle to the Universe for his new King, had brought it so far that he could now ‘mount his horse with little assistance,’ I said to myself: Here also we have a Symbol well-nigh superannuated. Alas, move whithersoever you may, are not the tatters and rags of superannuated worn-out Symbols (in this Ragfair of a World) dropping off everywhere, to hoodwink, to halter, to tether you; nay, if you shake them not aside, threatening to accumulate, and perhaps produce suffocation?”

    * That of George IV. — ED.

The Works of

THOMAS CARLYLE

Learning from Silence

Pico Iyer: Aflame, Learning from Silence. New York: Riverhead, 2025.
Pico Iyer is not a stranger to the themes of silence and stillness, but always on his own terms, little reference to standard resources and thinkers on the topics, often reducing his writing to subjective experiences, interlocutor’s comments, and anecdotal reports amounting to the overheard and observed.

Iyer is a seasoned travel writer, with several novels, plus essays collected into books. His interest in countries, cities, and places geographical and specialized (such as monasteries) is part of his job description, enhanced by his perpetual curiosity and desire to describe. But this curiosity leaves his experiences in silence and stillness difficult to convey. In The Art of Stillness (2014), the subtitle stretches the irony: “Adventures in Going Nowhere.” That project culminated in Iyer’s TED talk — not a self-effacing “nowhere” by most standards.

In Aflame: Learning from Silence (2025), Iyer revisits a favorite setting for personal retreat: the monastery of Big Sur, a Camaldolese monastery in northern California. The style is relaxed, the retreatants are secular, and the agenda is self-determined, presenting motel-like individual rooms for withdrawal and quietude. The retreat is not quite Catholic (symbols without theology), and not quite Zen (given the optional nature of ritual and schedule), but parallels a loose version of an à la carte restaurant where everyone’s psychological taste is accommodated.

Aflame includes occasional references to writers: Merton, Camus, Henry Miller, Leonard Cohen, Thoreau, Emily Dickinson.

In an early anecdote, given Iyer’s regular visits to Big Sur over the years, Iyer’s mother asks him the “name of these people you are staying with,” and about his dogged interest in the Camodolese. Are they friendly? she asks. Iyer replies, “Tremendously. They don’t ask anything of visitors other than a ‘spirit of quiet and recollection.’ Most of the people visiting are women. I don’t think many of them are Catholic.” Then Iyer’s mother gets to her real question.

“You’re not going to get converted?” “No fear of that,” I say, and she smiles back, knowing her only child well enough to see that he’s far too prone to run in the opposite direction.

After Iyer’s many solo stints at Big Sur over the years, his wife Hiroko finally accompanies him to a retreat. Together they had visited many religious retreat-houses (Hindu, Buddhist, and other) but she agrees that Big Sur is different. “True Heaven,” she remarks when asked her verdict. Iyer writes: “By which, I think she means, no words; and the people around us do not as a rule seem to be looking for enlightenment or transport or mystic truth. They’ve simply found a place to renew themselves in quiet.”

While finding quality-time isn’t the entire issue in Aflame, it nearly is. Or, perhaps, it's dilettantism. Iyer isn’t doing research or interviews (just occasional conversations with monks and visitors); he is presumably testing the viability of silence and stillness—but not solitude. At least, this version of silence and stillness, which leaves much to the imagination of the aspirant. Iyer’s writing is elegant, engaging, breezy, chatty, and a little restless; he is extroverted, sensitive, and empathetic. As a veteran travel writer of decades, Iyer is skilled at observing minutiae and can paint landscapes big and small. Aflame is rich in both, from the details of conversations to the grand backdrop of California wildfires that surrounded Big Sur.

In an ironic way Iyer would probably appreciate the Taoist saying: “The farther you travel, the less you know.” Aflame is warm but not a mystic’s “living flame” (to quote John of the Cross); and it is not silent enough to accomplish “learning from silence.”

https://www.hermitary.com/bookreviews/iyer.html

The lost art of silence: reconnecting to the power and beauty of quiet - Introduction

 There is a Taoist saying that claims “those who know, do not speak; those who speak, do not know,”[1] and I wanted to find out if this was still relevant today and if we do indeed need silence to help solve the world’s problems. All of humanity shares this secret silent interior, whether they know it or not, and the ways of discovering that interior are diverse and exciting. By examining the many facets of silence, this book will invite you to develop and embrace periods of silence in your life by means you had previously possibly not thought about. I’ll consider my own relationship with silence—which is far from straightforward—and I suspect my own yearnings for silence, as well as my doubts and fears, will chime with those of many others. Nothing about silence is clear-cut. So although I believe that silence is essential, sometimes I find its pursuit a struggle. Silence can force you to confront yourself, which is why many people do everything they can to try to avoid it—often filling their world with vacuous sound. Silence can be transformative—when it snows, the landscape becomes hushed; when machines stop operating, a quietness descends. But silence inevitably also has a dark side, and the exploration of that leads into murky places.

Is silence just the absence of sound? Or does it have a deeper, more profound meaning? Does silence ever really exist? Silence comes before sound—it is not just the cessation of sound; it is there already. The word comes from the Latin silentium, meaning “to abstain, to forbear from speech.” The first use of the word silence in an English text and as an English word dates from 1225 and appears in the text Ancrene Riwle, written at the request of three noble anchoresses: “In silence and in hope shall be our strength.”[2] The dictionary states that it is “the fact of abstaining or forbearing from speech or utterance; the state or condition resulting from this; muteness, reticence, taciturnity.”[3] This initial meaning seems to put rather a negative gloss on the word, but it continues: “The state or condition when nothing is audible; complete quietness or stillness; noiselessness,” which is more appealing.

Where is this boundary between the visible world and the audible world? And if there is a boundary, what and where is it? You can close your eyes and become part of the audible world, leaving the visible behind, but how much harder it is to block out the world of sound. If we think about sound, it is an imposition and, as the British writer Robert Macfarlane points out in Underland, “We cannot see behind ourselves, but we can hear behind ourselves. From all directions, sound flows in.”[4] We’re all so wordy today that just sitting in silence with another person can feel awkward. In the nineteenth century, the philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard wrote that if he were a physician and he had just one thing to prescribe for all the world’s problems, it would be silence: “And even if it were blazoned forth with all the panoply of noise so that it could be heard in the midst of all the other noise, then it would no longer be the Word of God. Therefore, create silence!”[5]But why is it that we crave silence? Or what is it in us that needs silence? Silence certainly enhances our powers of attention, and it is a break and rest from the stimuli of the external world. Of course, noise and silence are inextricably linked—the yin and the yang—but do we really only appreciate silence as an absence of sound? I don’t think so. I think it’s far more important than that; as Mahatma Gandhi noted, “It has often occurred to me that a seeker after truth has to be silent.”[6] This makes total sense to me—for how can we possibly grow in depth if we are being constantly distracted by external noise? Silence can stop a rush to judgment. As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said in the last sentence of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one should be silent.”[7] To discover a unity and connection with all creation, one has to experience being alone and isolated. By learning to appreciate silence and its benefits, one also learns to truly listen—and when one is truly listening, one begins to hear. The more one can listen, the more one really begins to hear others with compassion and kindness. Often if somebody is grieving or has had bad news, all the person requires is a listener. Words seem, and are, mostly inadequate, and a solution at the time is the last thing needed; it is listening that is important.

Doing mundane tasks in silence can be an anchor to being in the present. As the psychologist and spiritual leader Ram Dass is quoted, “The quieter we become, the more we hear.”[8]Finding silence is never easy, as we are having to compete with not only exterior sounds but also an almost constant interior dialogue that judges, analyzes, compares, and questions. But if we can get past this barrage, there is a quiet place definitely worth the search.

Sarah Anderson

Schopenhauer - On noise and sounds

 

§378

Kant wrote an essay on the living forces,a but I would like to write a dirge and a threnody on them, because their all too excessive use in knocking, hammering and ramming has been a daily pain to me my whole life through. Of course there are people, indeed quite a few who smile at this, because they are insensitive to sounds; but these are the same ones who are also insensitive to reasons, thoughts, poetry and works of art, in brief, to spiritual impressions of any kind, due to the tough and unyielding texture of their brain matter. On the other hand, in the biographies or other accounts of personal utterances of almost all great writers, for instance Kant, Goethe, Lichtenberg,1 Jean Paul, I find complaints about the anguish caused to thinking men by noise; indeed, if such information is missing in any one case, then it is merely because the context did not lead to it. I interpret the matter as follows: just as a large diamond cut into pieces is equal in value only to so many small ones, or an army shattered to pieces and dissolved into small units is no longer capable of anything, so too a great mind is no more capable than an ordinary one as soon as it is interrupted, disturbed, distracted and diverted, because its superiority is conditioned by concentrating all its powers on one point and object, as a concave mirror does all of its rays, and precisely this is prevented by the noisy interruption. This is why eminent minds have always abhorred every kind of disturbance, interruption and diversion, especially those of a 680 violent nature through noise, whereas others are not especially bothered by this. The most sensible and intelligent of all European nations has even called the rule ‘never interrupt’b its eleventh commandment. But noise is the most impertinent of all interruptions, since it breaks up and indeed breaks down even our own thoughts. But where there is nothing to interrupt, noise is of course not particularly sensed. – Occasionally I am tormented and bothered by a moderate and constant noise before I am clearly aware of it, in that I sense it merely as a constant hindrance to my thinking, like dragging a weight with my foot, until I realize what it is. –

But transitioning now from the genus to the species, I have to denounce as the most irresponsible and scandalous noise the truly infernal whip-cracking in the echoing streets of the cities, which robs life of all peace and all pensiveness. Nothing provides me with a clearer notion of the obtuseness and thoughtlessness of mankind than the condoning of this whip-cracking.2 This sudden, sharp, brain-numbing crack, which cuts to pieces all contemplation and murders every thought, has to be painfully felt by everyone who bears anything resembling a thought in his head; therefore each of those cracks must disturb hundreds in their mental activity, however inferior it may be in quality, but they chop through a thinker’s meditations as painfully and disastrously as the executioner’s blade severs the head from the body. No sound cuts through the brain as sharply as this damned whip-cracking; the very tip of the lash can be felt in the brain, affecting it like a mimosa when it is touched, and lasting just as long. With all due respect for most sacred utility, I still do not see why a fellow who hauls off a load of sand or manure should therefore be granted the privilege of nipping in the bud every successively emerging thought in the heads of ten thousand people (for a half hour along a city route). Hammer blows, dogs barking and the screaming of children are appalling, but only the crack of a whip is the real murderer of thoughts. It is designed to crush 681 every good and pensive moment that someone might have here and there, and as the most horrific of all sounds it would only be excusable if no other means were available to drive draft animals.3 But quite the contrary: this damned whip-cracking is not only unnecessary but even useless. For the intended psychic effect on horses is completely blunted and missing because they have become desensitized by the constant misuse of the whip; they do not quicken their pace in response, as can be seen especially in the case of coachmen looking for fares and whipping constantly even though driving at the slowest pace, and the slightest touch of the whip is more effective. But assuming that it would be unavoidably necessary to remind the horses of the presence of the whip by using this sound, then a sound a hundred times weaker would suffice, since it is well known that animals notice even the slightest, indeed scarcely noticeable signs, audible as well as visible, of which trained dogs and canaries provide the most amazing examples.4 Accordingly this situation turns out to be nothing but a case of pure impudence, indeed5 of insolent scorn on the part of society that works with its arms directed against those who work with their heads. That such an infamy is tolerated in cities is a crude barbarism and an injustice, all the more so as it would be very easy to prevent by a police-mandated knot at the tip of every whip cord. It cannot hurt for the proletarians to be reminded of the mental work of the class standing above them, for they have a boundless fear of all mental work. But now a fellow who rides through the narrow streets of a populous city with free post horses or on a free cart horse, or for that matter walking along beside the animals6 and incessantly cracking his fathoms-long whip with all his might, clearly deserves to stand down immediately in order to receive five earnestly delivered blows with a stick – all the philanthropists in the world, along with the legislatures that for good reasons abolish all corporal punishment will not persuade me otherwise. But we can often enough see something even more egregious than this, namely a coachman walking 682 the streets alone and without horses, yet incessantly cracking his whip; so habituated has this man become to whip-cracking, as a result of irresponsible coddling.7 With all this universal tenderness for the body and all its gratifications, is the thinking mind the only thing that never gets the least consideration, nor protection, let alone respect? Coachmen, porters, errand boys and so on are the beasts of burden of human society; they should by all means be treated humanely with justice, fairness, consideration and care, but they should not be allowed to obstruct the higher endeavours of the human race through impudent noise. I would like to know how many great and beautiful thoughts these whips have already cracked out of the world. If it were mine to command, then an indestructible association of ideasa would be created in the minds of coachmen between whip-cracking and getting a beating.8 – We would hope that the more intelligent and finely sensitive nations will make a start on this as well, and then by way of example the Germans could also be brought along.*,9 Meanwhile, Thomas Hood (Up the Rhine) says of them: ‘For a musical people, they are the most noisy I ever met with.’b But that they are so is not based on the fact that they are more inclined to noise-making than others, but on the insensitivity stemming from the obtuseness of those who have to hear it, who are not disturbed in any thinking or reading simply because they are not thinking, but merely smoking instead, which is their surrogate for thinking. The universal toleration of unnecessary noise, for instance of the extremely ill-mannered and vulgar slamming of doors, is nothing short of a sign of the general obtuseness and thought vacuum of their minds. In Germany it is positively as though the plan were for no one to come to their senses on account of noise, such as pointless drumming, for instance.10Finally now as regards the literature dealing with the subject treated in 683 this chapter, I have only one work to recommend, but it is a beautiful one, namely a poetic epistle in terza rima by the famous painter Bronzino, entitled On Noises.a For here the anguish one has to endure from the many kinds of noise of an Italian city is described in detail, with both humour and wit, in a tragic-comical style. This epistle can be found on page 258 of the second volume of Burlesque Works of Berni, Aretino and othersb apparently published in Utrecht in 1771.

a [Gedanken von der wahren Schätzung der lebendigen Kräfte (Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces), 1747]

b [Schopenhauer’s English]

anexus idearum

b [Quoted in English]

aDe’ romori, a Messer Luca Martini

bOpere burlesche del Berni, Aretino ed altri

* According to a ‘Bulletin of the Munich Animal Protection Society’ of December 1858, in Nuremberg superfluous whipping and whip-cracking are most strictly forbidden.

Parerga and Paralipomena II

The Search for Silence

Many people have searched for silence; it is an ancient and a universal quest. It pervades the whole of human history: Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists, Pythagoricians and, of course, Christians, Catholic and perhaps even more Orthodox, have felt the need for and the benefits of silence; and this desire has been felt beyond the spheres of the sacred and the religious. I lack the skills, consequently, to describe it in its totality. Yet I cannot completely ignore something that is fundamental to a history of silence in the West. I shall confine myself to certain quests for silence made in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Those who have subsequently felt the desire for silence have referenced them, explicitly or not.

Silence was at this period seen as a necessary precondition for a relationship with God. Meditation, interior prayer, indeed all prayer, required it. Since antiquity, the monastic tradition had transmitted an ars meditandi which emerged from the cloisters in the sixteenth century and which then constituted an internal discipline accessible to the laity. Onto this was grafted the ancient moral philosophy, that of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, for example, with which the humanists were familiar. This led to advocacy of a struggle against distraction, a concentration of the attention, a meditative quest closely dependent on silence. This process, which led to the wide dissemination of the silent oratio interior that has been so well described by Marc Fumaroli, is crucial to a history of silence.

In 1555, the Jesuit father Balthazar Alvarez wrote a treatise with the title Tratado de la oración de silencio. He believed that the oración de la presencia de Dios, the ‘prayer of the presence of God’, made it possible to accede to the oración de silencio, ‘the prayer of silence’: ‘Then, in the heart, everything is silent, nothing disturbs it, it is the silence in which one hears only the voice of God who instructs and reveals’; this is why one must welcome him ‘in silence and in tranquillity’.1The Dominican Luis de Granada proposed a method of inner prayer which would influence people as diverse as Charles Borromeo and Philip Neri, founder of the Oratory. It consisted of imagining an ‘inner, silent picture’ of the ‘visible and tangible features of an act in the life of Christ’. ‘A veritable conversation between the sinful self and the sacred scene’ could then begin, and Christ and the other persons in the picture, by their gestures and their looks, ‘silently appeal for a reflection on the self’. Such an inner prayer, constantly repeated, would create, he believed, a habitus of ‘silent movements’ which would penetrate all actions.2However, it is the thinking of Ignatius Loyola that had the strongest and deepest influence at this period. His message was based on silence. ‘God bestows, God trains, God accomplishes his work, and this can only be done in the silence that is established between the Creator and the creature’; ‘he who approaches his Creator and Lord and who reaches him’, he is someone who lives in silence.3

Living in Manresa, in Catalonia, Ignatius Loyola spent seven hours a day in interior prayer. At mealtimes, when he ate with others, his custom was never to speak, although he listened, in order to use what was said by the guests as material for the encounter with God that would follow the meal.4He saw the spiritual exercise as a way of meditating, of praying, of examining one’s conscience and of engaging in the ‘contemplation of place’. This required silence, which happened naturally during the ‘exercise of night’. One example will help us to understand this exercise performed in silence and which allowed the imagination free play: when eating, said Loyola, ‘let him imagine he sees Christ our Lord and His disciples at table, and consider how He eats and drinks, how He looks, how He speaks’.5

In a long text on the different ways of praying, Ignatius Loyola spelled out how one should match words to breaths in order to achieve consolation and conquer the desolation provoked by evil spirits. These, he said, enter the soul ‘with noise and commotion’, whereas the good angel enters peacefully and ‘silently’.6This brings us to the mystics. John of the Cross, describing the tranquil night, formed of calm and of solitude in God, emphasizes the importance of silence in mystical rapture. ‘In the calm and silence of night and in this knowledge of divine light, the soul discovers . . . a certain correspondence with God.’ A sublime musical harmony is established, which ‘surpasses all the concerts and all the melodies in the world’, and this music is called by the soul ‘silent music’ because it is ‘a calm and peaceful knowledge, without sound of voices, and therefore one enjoys the sweetness of the music and the tranquillity of the silence’. Further, ‘even though that music is silent to the natural senses and faculties, it is sounding solitude for the spiritual faculties’.7

Later, he describes the benefits of contemplation of the ‘hidden and secret wisdom of God’: ‘[W]ithout sound of voices . . . as in the silence of quietness of night, apart from all that is sensible and natural, God teaches the soul.’8 In a word, the silence of the spirit is a necessary condition for God to enter the soul. It ‘cancels all rational and discursive activity, thereby enabling direct perception of the divine word’.9We may also, in discussing silence and mysticism, consider the experience and writings of St Teresa of Avila, in particular her description of the ‘castle of the soul’. Here, God is reached only in silence through the ‘ears of the soul’, at night.

The Carthusian rule was based on silence and solitude, completed by a specific book-based education. This, writes Gérald Chaix, made it possible to adhere (inhaere) to God ‘with all one’s heart, with all one’s soul and with all one’s might’.10 The exterior silence which features in the Carthusian rule and practices is simply a means of reaching an interior silence, that of the mind (mens) and of the heart (cor). Purged of all worldly imagination, the mind then thinks solely of God. Though only a procedure for attaining this relationship, the exterior silence imposed by the rule, like solitude, must be scrupulously observed. So also must the renunciation of the study of eloquence in favour of reading works that taught silence and devotion. Gérald Chaix concludes that this ideal of solitude and silence, though perfectly adapted to the age of the Reformation and Counter Reformation, was subsequently found increasingly baffling, and the Carthusians appeared ‘fools for God’.11In the seventeenth century, as the external world turned away from silence, two notable personalities gave it a major role in the practice of contemplation: Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet and, more radically, the abbot of Rancé, the reformer of la Trappe. The former repeatedly emphasized in his works the grandeur and the necessity of silence. Bossuet based his exhortations on a passage from the Apocalypse: when the angel broke the Seventh Seal, there was a profound silence in heaven and, during it, ‘the angels paid tribute to and venerated the supreme majesty of God. What does this mysterious silence which the angels created in heaven mean?’ he asked. That ‘every creature, whether in heaven or on earth, must hold their peace, and refrain from speech so as to adore and venerate the grandeur of God.’ Hence he urged: ‘Every so often, be silent, in imitation of the angels’;12 ‘you will never regret having remained silent’.13In this exhortation intended for the Ursulines of Meaux, Bossuet maintains: ‘It is only in silence and in the avoidance of useless and distracting speech that [God] will visit you through his inspirations and his grace, and that He will make his presence felt within you.’14 Exhortations of this type were a leitmotif of his preaching. He recalled the words of St James, who asked that everyone be quick to listen and slow to speak.15‘There has to be perfect silence and recollection to hear internally the voice of God’;16 and again addressing the Ursulines of Meaux: ‘one loses much through the absence of silence’,17 the desire to speak deflects from God. In religious houses, ‘the absence of silence leads to all the faults against charity’.18 Except when responding to Pilate, Jesus, during his Passion, ‘maintained a perpetual silence’ – imitate him, urged Bossuet. Where does it come from, this intense eagerness to speak, he asked? It prevents introspection.19Vivid examples reinforced these messages. In the ‘Second Panegyric upon St Benedict’, Bossuet wrote that, in the solitude of the ‘horrible and frightful [desert] to which he withdrew, an awful and terrible silence [prevailed], which was interrupted only by the cries of wild beasts’.20 It was to encourage him to shun the licentiousness of his youth that God gave him ‘an uncultivated and uninhabited land, a desert, a silence, a solitude . . . a dark and awful cavern’.21 Later, St Bernard, having renounced the world at the age of 22, become ‘extraordinarily enamoured of secrecy and solitude’, reflecting that the Cross had closed the mouth of Jesus, said to himself: ‘I will condemn mine to silence.’22 At Clairvaux, when some monks found the ‘long and horrible’ silence of the monastery too harsh, Bernard told them that, ‘were they to think seriously about the rigorous examination the great Judge would make of their words, they would not have much difficulty in remaining silent’.23In his ‘Meditation on Silence’, intended for the Ursulines of Meaux, Bossuet is more specific. There were, he believed, three types of silence: ‘the silence of rule, the silence of prudence in conversation, and the silence of patience in affliction’.24 In thirty years, Jesus spoke only once in the Temple. ‘If he said not a word, it was to teach us to remain silent.’25 In the monastic orders, the rule fixed the times and hours of silence. Some even ‘maintained a perpetual and profound silence, and never spoke’. The founders of orders had believed ‘that silence cut out many sins and faults’. They had also ‘foreseen that devotion and the prayerful spirit could not exist without silence’.26 Silence was necessary, lastly, to maintain charity, peace and union among the brothers and sisters alike. Whoever wished to reform a monastery, he added, must begin with silence and banish the ‘desire to communicate’.

To practise the silence of prudence was to avoid the faults against charity, and to demonstrate a ‘wise discretion’. To practise the silence of patience was to ‘suffer in silence under the eye of God’; because ‘it is silence that sanctifies our crosses and our afflictions’.27 One should to this end reflect on the attitude of Jesus during the flagellation and the crowning of thorns. It had been said that Christ was the ‘victim of silence’. He had demonstrated and consecrated this during his Passion.28 Silence protected against anger, it was the best way to conquer the passion of vengeance and it was a way of overcoming the ‘desires of curiosity’; and, Bossuet concluded, ‘by faithfully keeping silent, you will be victorious over all your passions’.29At Soligny, the abbot of Rancé introduced and insisted on silence, to which he devoted his 29th constitution. Many messages of Bossuet echoed the views of Rancé, his friend. The abbot believed that silence went with solitude, which would, without it, be vain. Silence was part of the spirit of penitence and it sanctioned separation from men. It was a sign of rupture and detachment. It was a precondition for forgetting the self, proof that bodily concerns had been put aside. Above all, silence was a precondition for prayer, it was a preparation for listening to the divinity. It facilitated spiritual exercises and access to other languages than speech: that of the interior, that of the hereafter, that of the angels.

Rancé also argued that silence favoured meditation on the vanities. It made it easier to measure on a daily basis the passage of time. It anticipated the silence of the tomb. It prepared, consequently, for eternity, which wiped out time. It was this that made Chateaubriand regard the silence of Rancé as terrible, in its length and its depth. On the point of death, the abbot cried: ‘I have only a few moments to live; the best use of them I can make is to pass them in silence.’30 He was true to his word.

from: A History of Silence From the Renaissance to the Present Day

by Alain Corbin

The world without silence

Nothing has changed the nature of man so much as the loss of silence. The invention of printing, technics, compulsory education—nothing has so altered man as this lack of relationship to silence, this fact that silence is no longer taken for granted, as something as natural as the sky above or the air we breathe.

Man who has lost silence has not merely lost one human quality, but his whole structure has been changed thereby.

Formerly silence covered all things: man had first to break through the covering of silence before he could get close to an object, and the silence protected even the thoughts he wanted to think himself. Man could not throw himself directly at things and ideas: they were shielded by the silence surrounding them, and man was protected from moving towards them all too quickly. The silence was stationed in front of things and ideas. It was there objectively. It was encamped there like a defending army. Man moved slowly and quietly towards ideas and things. The silence was always present between the movement from one idea to another, from one thing to another.
The rhythm of the silence punctuated the movement.

Every movement become a special act: the silence, the primitive rock of silence had to be removed before one could move forward. But then when one had arrived at an idea, one was really there with the idea, and the idea or the thing really existed for the first time. The concrete reality was, as it were, created in the direct personal encounter with man.

Today man no longer moves deliberately to ideas and things. They are absorbed into his own emptiness, they rush at him, they swirl around him. Man no longer thinks, he has his thinking done for him. Cogito, ergo sum has been replaced by cogitor, ergo non sum.

The earth was once no less occupied than it is today, but it was occupied by silence, and man was unable to seize everything in it as it was all held fast by silence. Man did not need to know everything: the silence knew it all for him. And as man was connected with the silence, he knew many things through the silence.

The heaven of silence no longer covers the world of ideas and things today, restraining them with its weight and pressure. Where it used to be there is now an empty space, and things are as it were drawn up by suction into the space where the silence used to dwell. Things are exposed, uncovered and pressing upwards. More and more things are constantly pushing their way upwards, and that is the real ‘‘revolt of the masses””, this rebellion of things and ideas that are no longer held down by the pressure of silence.

Man is not even aware of the loss of silence: so much ıs the space formerly occupied by the silence so full of things that nothing seems to be missing. But where formerly the silence lay on a thing, now one thing lies on another.  Where formerly an idea was covered by the silence, now a thousand associations speed along to it and bury it.

In this world of today in which everything is reckoned in terms of immediate profit, there is no place for silence. Silence was expelled because it was unproductive, because it merely existed and seemed to have no purpose.

Almost the only kind of silence that there is today is due to the loss of the faculty of speech. It is purely negative: the absence of speech. It is merely like a technical hitch in the continuous flow of noise.

There is still perhaps a little silence; a little is still tolerated. Just as the almost completely exterminated Indians are still allowed a little living space in their miserable reservations, so silence is sometimes allowed a chink of space in the sanatoria between two and three in the afternoon: “An hour of silence” and in the “two minutes’ silence’ in which the masses must be silent ‘‘in remembrance of...’ But there is never a special silence in memory of the silence that is no more.

It is true that silence still exists as a true silence in monastic communities. In the Middle Ages the silence of the monks was still connected with the silence of other men outside the monastery. Today the silence in the monasteries is isolated; it lives literally only in monastic seclusion.

from the book The World of Silence by Max Picard

The nature of silence

 

Silence is nothing merely negative; it is not the mere absence of speech. It is a positive, a complete world in itself.

Silence has greatness simply because it is. It is, and that is its greatness, its pure existence.
There is no beginning to silence and no end: it seems to have its origins in the time when everything was still pure Being. It is like uncreated, everlasting Being.

When silence is present, it is as though nothing but silence had ever existed.

Where silence is, man is observed by silence. Silence looks at man more than man looks at silence. Man does not put silence to the test; silence puts man to the test.

One cannot imagine a world in which there is nothing but language and speech, but one can imagine a world where there is nothing but silence.

Silence contains everything within itself. It is not waiting for anything; it is always wholly present in itself and it completely fills out the space in which it appears.

It does not develop or increase in time, but time increases ın silence, It is as though time had been sown into silence, as though silence had absorbed it; as though silence were the soil in which time grows to fullness.

Silence is not visible, and yet its existence clearly apparent. It extends to the farthest distances, yet is so close to us that we can feel it as concretely as we feel our own bodies. It is intangible, yet we can feel it as directly as we feel materials and fabrics. It cannot be defined in words, yet it is quite definite and unmistakable.

In no other phenomenon are distance and nearness, range and immediacy, the allembracing and the particular, so united as they are in silence.

Silence is the only phenomenon today that is ‘‘useless”’.

It does not fit into the world of profit and utility; it simply is. It seems to have no other purpose; it cannot be exploited.

All the other great phenomena have been appropriated by the world of profit and utility. Even the space between heaven and earth has become a mere cavity for aeroplanes to travel through. Water and fire have been absorbed by the world of profit; they are only noticed in so far as they are parts of this world: they have lost their independent existence.

Silence, however, stands outside the world of profit and utility; it cannot be exploited for profit; you cannot get anything out of it. It is “unproductive’’. Therefore it is regarded as valueless.
Yet there is more help and healıng in silence than in all the “useful things”. Purposeless, unexploitable silence suddenly appears at the side of the all-too-purposeful, and frightens us by its very purposelessness. It interferes with the regular flow of the purposeful. It strengthens the untouchable, it lessens the damage inflicted by exploitation. It makes things whole again, by taking them back from the world of dissipation into the world of wholeness.

It gives things something of its own holy uselessness, for that is what silence itself ıs: holy uselessness.

Above all things, it is necessary that one should leave untouched the virgin soil, divinely built according to pure law. (Hôlderlin)

Here in silence ıs the Holy Wilderness, because the wilderness and the building of God are one. There is no movement here to be regulated by the law: existence and activity are one in silence. It ıs as though the whole orbit of a star were to be suddenly concentrated into a single light: that is the unity of existence and activity concentrated ın silence.

Silence gives to things inside it something of the power of its own autonomous being. The autonomous being in things is strengthened in silence. That which developable and exploitable in things vanishes when they are in silence.

Through this power of autonomous being, silence points to a state where only being ıs valid: the state of the Divine. The mark of the Divine in things is preserved by their connection with the world of silence.

from the book The World of Silence
Max Picard

On the river of tears man travels back into silence

Within the realm of creative silence the individual does not notice any opposition between himself and the community, for the individual and the community do not stand against each other, but both face the silence together.

The difference between the individual and the community ceases to be important in face of the power of silence.

In the modern world the individual no longer faces silence, no longer faces the community, but faces only the universal noise. The individual stands between noise and silence. He is isolated from noise and isolated from silence. He ıs forlorn.

In a world in which silence is still an active force, solitude is not dependent on subjectivity, does not derive from subjectivity. Solitude stands before man as something objective, even the solitude within himself; it stands before him as the objective silence. The saints who followed the way of solitude did not find themselves, but the objective solitude of silence, of which their own inward solitude only seemed a small part. The saint took solitude upon himself as if it had come to him from another and he took it as a matter of course. Therefore solitude for the saints was not the result of great exertion like the “inward’ solitude of today. On the contrary, it was a token of relationship with the great objective world of silence and with its objective solitude. Therefore the saints received more from the solitude than they could have received from their own inner solitude alone, for it was in fact not merely their own solitude: it was outside themselves and more than their own solitude could ever have been. Where solitude is merely a part of the inwardness of the isolated individual it consumes and diminishes the individual.

A man who still has the substance of silence within himself does not need to be always watching the movements of his inmost being, does not need consciously to order everything, since much is ordered without his conscious knowledge by the power of the substance of silence, which can modify the contradictions at war within.

Surh a man may possess qualities that are incompatible and yet avoid a crisis, for there is room for contradictions within the substance of silence.

Life then not torn apart into the polarities of faith and knowledge, truth and beauty, life and spirit; the whole of reality appears before man, and not merely the conceptual polarities. Human lıfe is not determined by the incompatible choices of Either-Or but by the mediation of the polarities. The substance of silence stands between the contradictions and prevents them from fighting each other. The one element in the contradiction must first travel over the broad, appeasing surface of silence before it can reach the other. The substance of silence mediates between the incompatible polarities.

It is only here that man ıs raised above hıs own inner contradictions, and only here that he has humour. For in the face of silence the contradictions lose their conspicuousness, are swallowed by the silence. T'o achieve a sense of humour,

one must have the infinite cheerfulness and confidence which are necessary ın order to rise above the contradictions of one’s own personality and not to be unhappy and bitter about them. (Hegel)

If there ıs no substance of sılence within, the contradictions are exposed to analysis and discussion. ‘‘ Happiness and contentment’' vanish and humour ceases.

Man is better able to endure things hostile to his own nature, things that use him up, if he has the silent substance within. That is why the peoples of the East, who are still filled with the substance of silence, endure life with machines better than the peoples of the West, whose silent substance has been almost completely destroyed.

Technics in itself, life with machines, is not injurious unless the protective substance of silence is absent.

Unamuno says that Goethe did not develop all the possibilities that were in him. A sentence like that could only be said in a world that has lost all relationship with silence. It has been forgotten that the possibilities that are not fully realized nourish the substance of silence. Silence is strengthened by them and gives of this additional strength to the other potentialities that are fully realized.

What falls into the substance of silence is the share that silence has in the things of human life. That is still a part of silence. Sometimes in conversation a man holds something back inside himself, he does not allow it to come out in words; it is as though he feels he must keep back something that really belongs to silence.

It often happens that a whole nation may not realize certain potentialities for a long period in its history. For instance, the gift of poetic creation may remain dormant. But the potentiality is not destroyed, it is simply not realized. It may be resting and recuperating in the silence. Yet there is beauty in such a silence, the beauty that comes from the all-permeating silence of unwritten poetry.

There is no silent substance in the world today. All things are present all the time in an atmosphere of noisy rebelliousness, and man, who has lost the silence in which to sink the all-too-many, all-too-present multitude of things, allows them to evaporate and vanish in the all- consuming emptiness of language.

The silent substance that relieves man of the oppressiveness of things is lacking in the world today. In order to relieve him of the burden in another way, the attempt is made to classıfy the individual and bring him into touch only with those things that suit his mental constitution.

This is the new method in education. Do not teach the child anything that does not suit its particular mental constitution. But in a world where the substance of silence ıs known to be still active, there is no danger in teaching a child things not immediately congenial to its particular temperament. The child can be allowed to expand beyond the structure of its own mind into the realm of, for example, Latin and Greek, for which it may not seem to have any aptitude. The silent substance in the child assimilates the foreign material, fuses it with the other contents of the mind, broadens the whole nature of the child, and extends its mental frontiers. Proper education and proper teaching are based on the substance of silence.

We have said above that the man who lacks the substance of silence is oppressed by the all-too-many things that crowd in upon him every moment of his life today.

He cannot be indifferent to the fact that new things are being presented to him every moment, since he must somehow enter into relationship with them. There must be an emotional reaction to each new object so that he can respond, and it is part of the nature of man that he should respond to the object before him. When too many objects crowd in upon him and he has within no silent substance into which a part at least of the multitude of objects can disappear, the resources of emotion and passion which he has at his disposal are insufficient to meet and respond to all the objects. The objects then lie all around him menacingly and without a proper home. To save man from this invasion and congestion of the too-many objects that are beyond his powers of assimilation, he must be brought into relationship again with the world of silence, in which the many objects find their true order automatically, in this world of silence where they spread themselves out into a balanced unity. 

When the substance of silence is present in a man, all his qualities are centred in it; they are all connected primarily with the silence and only secondarily with each other. Therefore it is not so easy for the defect of one quality to infect all the others, since it is kept in its place by the silence. But if there is no silence, a man can be totally infected by a single defect so that he ceases to be a man and becomes so entirely identified with the defective quality that it ıs as though the defect and the evil it represents were covered merely by a human mask.

The silent substance is also the place where a man is re-created. It is true that the spirit is the cause of the re-creation, but the re-creation cannot be realized without the silence, for man is unable wholly to free himself from all that is past unless he can place the silence between the past and the new.

Today, with the lack of silence, man cannot be re-created; he can only develop. That is why so much value is set on ““development’’ today. But ““development’’ takes place not in silence but in the to-and-fro of discussion.

The substance of silence is necessary for re-creation, and it is also necessary for happiness. Happiness, which comes down to man from the realm of mystery, is glad to find its way into the breadth of silence. There is an immeasurability in happiness that only feels at home in the breadth of silence. Happiness and silence belong together just as do profit and noise.

Where the resources of silence have been exhausted, everything about a man is calculated in terms of profitability. Profitability and loudness give a man a right to possessions and office today. But in a world where silence was still present far and wide, Cicero said in a speech for Pompeius that he ought to be given the supreme command in the war against pirates not only because he had proved himself a good soldier but above all because good fortune was with him.

Grief and silence also belong together. Grief achieves a poise in the breadth of silence. The force of the passions is lost, and grief, purged of passion, appears all the more clearly as pure grief. The lamentation in grief is transformed into the lamentation of silence. On the river of tears man travels back into silence.

from the book The World of Silence by Max Picard

Alain Corbin -The Tactics of Silence

 The Tactics of Silence

Let us now leave the silence intended to aid meditation and inner reflection to focus on the role of silence in social relations, on its advantages and disadvantages, its relationship to the shaping of the self-image and its contribution to the search for distinction; in a word, on the tactics advised by the moralists and, more generally, by all who have reflected on the benefits and harms of silence in a non-solitary life.

The art of keeping quiet had been the subject of many works and had given rise to numerous aphorisms by the end of the sixteenth century. True, spirituality was often an element in these. The muteness of Jesus in the Gospels posits silence in society as a virtue; thus Ignatius Loyola proposed an art of saying nothing modelled on the silence of Christ. In 1862, you could still read in the Dictionnaire de théologie morale that silence should, above all, be regarded as a virtue: it implied speaking only to the purpose, ‘little rather than much, because it is difficult to speak much without blurting things out and sinning’, and ‘the sin is mortal because you are unable to keep a secret and you say things prejudicial to others’.1Antiquity provided examples of significant silences. Solomon, in the book of Proverbs (17:28), tells us that ‘he that shutteth his lips is esteemed a man of understanding’. Ajax, in Erebus, responds with a tragic silence when Ulysses speaks of their quarrel over who should inherit the armour of Achilles, which had led to his suicide. Dido, in the same place, answers Aeneas with a silence of terrifying power. And silence had been abundantly praised by the Stoics.

Aristotle believed that silence always brought its own reward. Seneca made it a virtue of the wise. Publilius Syrus produced many maxims on the subject. According to him, ‘you should remain silent, or your words should be more valuable than your silence’. Dionysius Cato said: ‘There is no danger in keeping quiet, there may be in speaking.’

In the early modern period, the opinion that you risked less by saying nothing than by speaking was constantly reiterated. It derived from the model of the courtier. The conviction that speech was risky was in accord with the precepts that regulated court society. Thus, the great texts which, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, dealt with the art of maintaining silence illustrate the civilizing process described by Norbert Elias. They were all of a piece with the internalization of norms that characterized it.

It was the Oráculo Manual y Arte de Prudencia (The Courtier’s Oracle or The Art of Worldly Wisdom) of Baltasar Gracián rather than the more famous Book of the Courtier of Baldesar Castiglione that was the matrix for the art of remaining silent. Nevertheless, Castiglione touched on the subject here and there in his book. He advised the courtier never to talk too much. It was dangerous rashly to embark on a conversation without being asked in the presence of a great prince. The grandee might well, in such a situation, refuse to answer so as to shame the one who had spoken out of turn. He would thus show himself to be the master of silence. The courtier should always think before saying what came into his head. Those who let their ‘loquacity . . . go beyond bounds’ become ‘silly and pointless’. Before breaking a silence it was wise to pay heed to the place where you were, the occasion and the necessary modesty. During the course of the conversation, you should now and again fall silent so as to allow the other to speak and ‘reflect in order to reply’.2The Courtier’s Oracle, by the Spanish Jesuit Baltasar Gracián, was written in 1647 and had been translated into several European languages, including English and French, by the end of the seventeenth century. Gracián reflected at greater length on the tactics of silence, which he called the ‘holy of holies of worldly wisdom’, that is, moderation and discretion. The wise man should know how to exercise self-control. Here, Gracián was influenced by Seneca and Tacitus as well as by the Spanish maxims then much in vogue. When you met someone you didn’t know, you should first test the ground. You should never talk about yourself and you should never complain. Above all, it was unbecoming to speak because you liked the sound of your own voice.3To talk, that is, to form a relationship with someone, was an art, ‘a school of knowledge and good manners’; it was how a man showed his worth.4 ‘He who is quick to speak is always on the point of being conquered and convinced.’ Gracián went further: ‘The things you want to say ought not to be said; and the things that are good to say are not good to do.’5 The man of discretion should keep quiet when there was danger in speaking the truth.

True, ignorance frequently took refuge in the sanctuary of silence; the ‘defective’ found it advantageous to keep quiet because silence ‘presented him as a man of mystery’. Another good reason to avoid talking was that the heart without a secret was ‘an open letter’. Gracián went so far as to say: ‘You should speak as if you were dictating your last will and testament.’6 His book was contemporary with a series of treatises on the art of saying nothing which appeared between 1630 and 1684 and were aimed at forming the honnête homme or ‘gentleman’. Yet, writes Marc Fumaroli, his manual remained throughout Europe the undisputed classic of the best education. The wise man kept sufficiently aloof to satisfy the requirement to preserve an element of silence with regard to himself, while also avoiding the ridiculousness of pontificating. The art of saying nothing was also, says Fumaroli, a way of keeping others in suspense and of manipulating the elements of ‘appetite, curiosity, and surprise’.7 That said, the art of prudentia was, as a tactic, far from easy.

Many moralists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries followed in this tradition. At this period conversation acquired huge importance. It involved alternating contemplative silence and wide-ranging conversation, without, as Montesquieu wrote, doing much listening. La Rochefoucauld observed that ‘silence is the safest option for he who mistrusts himself’. He notes that people spoke little when not driven to speak by vanity. ‘It requires great skill to speak, but no less to say nothing’, and he distinguished three types of silence: eloquent, mocking and respectful. At all events, it was better to listen and never to force yourself to speak. It was important for coquettes and the old, in particular, to keep quiet, given their tendency to chatter thoughtlessly.8 According to Mme de Sablé: ‘Speaking too much is such a major fault that, when it comes to conversation, while what is good is brief, it is doubly good, and you gain by brevity what is often lost by garrulity’; and, she added, ‘to be able to discover the inner self of another and conceal your own is the mark of a superior mind’.9M. de Moncade opined that ‘if people only said useful things, there would be deep silence in the world’.10 La Bruyère noted that those who engaged in games of chance maintained ‘an absolute silence’ together with a level of attention of which they would have been incapable in other circumstances.11 Dufresny described with amusement the introduction of a newcomer to the court: ‘He did nothing and said nothing. He was a wise man, they said. In fact, there was wisdom in his modesty and in his silence; because if he had done something or said something, they would have known he was only a fool.’12The year 1771 saw the appearance of L’Art de se taire, by the Abbé Dinouart, a book destined for a large readership. In it, the author recapitulated with clarity, force and in detail all that had gone before. His main message was that ‘men are never more in possession of themselves than when in silence’.13 Given the attention it attracted, I shall look at his treatise in some detail. Dinouart distinguished eleven types of silence: prudent, artful, complaisant, spiritual and stupid, not forgetting the silences which were a mark of approval, of disdain, of humour, of caprice and of political acumen. His aim was to compose a treatise of Christian civility, which distinguished him from his predecessors. Further, he hoped to extend prudentia beyond the court to the world of Parisian salons and men of letters, in order to counteract the philosophical spirit, rationalism and materialism. He repeated an old opinion, found in the Télémaque of Fénelon, to the effect that the art of good government entailed maintaining silence. The sovereign, more than anyone, was never more in possession of himself than in silence.

Commenting on Dinouart’s treatise, Antoine de Baecque adds the link that it establishes between silence and a rhetoric of the body. To be silent, in society, went together with measured gestures, a reserved manner, a certain facial expression and the art of the minimal which constituted this rhetoric. Émile Moulin, writing in 1885, said that, in society, when a man said nothing, his silence would have no value or expression without its natural and indispensable auxiliaries, that is, physiognomy, attitude, bearing and gaze.14 To return to Dinouart, he urged that one should hold one’s tongue as a Christian, as a man of the world, as a politician and as a strategist, which, writes Antoine de Baecque, was effectively a return to the civility of the gentleman as propounded in the preceding century. Some of the abbé’s aphorisms sum up his strategy: ‘one should cease to remain silent only when one has something to say which is more valuable than silence’; ‘one only ever knows how to speak well if one has previously learned to remain silent’; ‘the wise man has an expressive silence’.15 By contrast, the mass of the people, ‘gross and stupid’, do not know how to keep quiet. This is due to their want of education, their insolence and their superstition. As for silence in literature, many authors would have done well to be inspired by it and to have published nothing.

That said, wrote Émile Moulin, it can happen in society that silence is not a tactical move but simply the consequence of a trait of character, namely, ‘taciturnity’. Molière has a character say of the Diafoirus son: ‘You would see him, never saying a word.’ Émile Moulin offered a whole spectrum of individuals who were permanently silent. Ahasuerus, according to Racine’s Esther, was mute; William of Orange was surnamed the Silent. To which should be added the timid who lacked self-confidence. This led Moulin to present a series of silences which are not quite tactics and which do not correspond to the list established by Dinouart: the silences of ‘inertia’, of ‘sangfroid’, of ‘incredulity’, of ‘doubt’, of ‘irony’ and of ‘bearing’ (adopted by those who don’t understand what is going on), and not forgetting the ‘silence of delicacy’, silence in the presence of the old, and the silences of ‘respectful reserve’, of politeness, of resignation and of ‘dolorous sympathy’.16In the nineteenth century, Senancour’s Obermann criticizes those ‘conversations which multiply words and do not deal with things’.17 The eponymous hero of Benjamin Constant’s novel, Adolphe, living in Göttingen and desperately bored, doomed by his shyness to silence, sometimes feels the urge to talk, but is held back by his disappointment with the society in which he moves, where a contemptuous silence replaces mockery.18On 23 September 1854, Eugène Delacroix expounded at length in his Journal on the advantages of opting to remain silent in conversation and in ‘other human relationships’. His psychological analysis added depth to the earlier precepts. Unfortunately, he wrote, ‘nothing is harder than such restraint for men who are dominated by their imagination. Men with subtle minds who are quick to see every side of a question find it hard to refrain from expressing what they think.’ Nevertheless, ‘everything is to be gained by listening. You know what you wish to say to the other man, your mind is full of it, but you cannot know what he has to say to you . . . but how is it possible to resist giving a favourable idea of one’s mind to a man who seems surprised and pleased to hear what one is saying?’ And, ‘fools are more easily carried away by the empty pleasure of listening to their own voices . . . they are less interested in informing their readers than in dazzling them with their brilliance.’19 (...)

from:A History of Silence

From the Renaissance to the Present Day

Alain Corbin

Translated by Jean Birrell

Nisargadatta Maharaj - Silence & Peace

Quote from the book I Am That

When you understand that names and shapes are hollow shells without any content whatsoever, and what is real is nameless and formless, pure energy of life and light of consciousness, you will be at peace -- immersed in the deep silence of reality.
*
All the objects of consciousness form the universe. What is beyond both, supporting both, is the supreme state, a state of utter stillness and silence. Whoever goes there, disappears. It is unreachable by words, or mind. You may call it God, or Parabrahman, or Supreme Reality, but these are names given by the mind. It is the nameless, contentless, effortless and spontaneous state, beyond being and not being.
*
M: No desire ever arises in my mind.
Q: Are you then unconscious?
M: Of course not! I am fully conscious, but since no desire or fear enters my mind, there is perfect silence.
Q: Who knows the silence?
M: Silence knows itself. It is the silence of the silent mind, when passions and desires are silenced.
*
M: Emptiness again refers only to consciousness. Fullness and emptiness are relative terms. The Real is really beyond -- beyond not in relation to consciousness, but beyond all relations of whatever kind. The difficulty comes with the word 'state'. The Real is not a state of something else --
it is not a state of mind or consciousness or psyche -- nor is it something that has a beginning and an end, being and not being. All opposites are contained in it -- but it is not in the play of opposites.
You must not take it to be the end of a transition. It is itself, after the consciousness as such is no more. Then words 'I am man', or 'I am God' have no meaning. Only in silence and in darkness can it be heard and seen.
*
All subsides and the mind merges into silence.
*
M: Unmanifested, manifested, individuality, personality ( nirguna, saguna, vyakta, vyakti); all these are mere words, points of view, mental attitudes. There is no reality in them. The real is experienced in silence. You cling to personality -- but you are conscious of being a person only when you are in trouble -- when you are not in trouble you do not think of yourself.
*
Humility and silence are essential for a sadhaka, however advanced. Only a fully ripened jnani can allow himself complete spontaneity.
*
M: Non-distinction speaks in silence. Words carry distinctions. The unmanifested ( nirguna) has no name, all names refer to the manifested ( saguna). It is useless to struggle with words to express what is beyond words.
*
M: Non-distinction speaks in silence. Words carry distinctions. The unmanifested ( nirguna) has no name, all names refer to the manifested ( saguna). It is useless to struggle with words to express what is beyond words.
*
The seed of spiritual life grows in silence and in darkness until its appointed hour.
*
I am infinite peace and silence in which nothing appears, for all that appears --
disappears.
*
Q: All I know is that sometimes the mind works and sometimes it stops. The experience of mental silence I call the abeyance of the mind.
M: Call it silence, or void, or abeyance, the fact is that the three -- experiencer, experiencing, experience -- are not. In witnessing, in awareness, self-consciousness, the sense of being this or that, is not. Unidentified being remains.
Q: As a state of unconsciousness?
M: With reference to anything, it is the opposite. It is also between and beyond all opposites. It is neither consciousness nor unconsciousness, nor midway, nor beyond the two. It is by itself, not with reference to anything which may be called experience or its absence.
Q: How strange! You speak of it as if it were an experience.
M: When I think of it -- it becomes an experience.
*
Q: Is the practice of silence as a sadhana effective?
M: Anything you do for the sake of enlightenment takes you nearer. Anything you do without remembering enlightenment puts you off. But why complicate? Just know that you are above and beyond all things and thoughts. What you want to be, you are it already. Just keep it in mind.
Q: I hear you saying it, but I cannot believe.
M: I was in the same position myself. But I trusted my Guru and he proved right. Trust me, if you can. Keep in mind what I tell you: desire nothing, for you lack nothing. The very seeking prevents
you from finding.
Q: You seem to be so very indifferent to everything!
M: I am not indifferent, I am impartial. I give no preference to the me and the mine. A basket of earth and a basket of jewels are both unwanted. Life and death are all the same to me.
Q: Impartiality makes you indifferent.
M: On the contrary, compassion and love are my very core. Void of all predilections, I am free to love.
*
Questioner: I have come to be with you, rather than to listen. Little can be said in words, much more can be conveyed in silence.
Maharaj: First words, then silence. One must be ripe for silence.
*
M: Whatever you may have to do, watch your mind. Also you must have moments of complete inner peace and quiet, when your mind is absolutely still. If you miss it, you miss the entire thing. If you do not, the silence of the mind will dissolve and absorb all else.
*
Be like an infant with nothing standing between the body and the self. The constant noise of the psychic life is absent. In deep silence the self contemplates the body. It is like the white paper on which nothing is written yet. Be like that infant, instead of trying to be this or that, be happy to be. You will be a fully awakened witness of the field of consciousness.
*
My Guru told me: that child, which is you even now, is your real self ( swarupa). Go back to that state of pure being, where the 'I am' is still in its purity before it got contaminated with
'this I am' or 'that I am'. Your burden is of false self-identifications -- abandon them all. My Guru told me -- 'Trust me. I tell you; you are divine. Take it as the absolute truth. Your joy is divine, your suffering is divine too. All comes from God. Remember it always. You are God, your will alone is done'. I did believe him and soon realised how wonderfully true and accurate were his words. I did not condition my mind by thinking: 'I am God, I am wonderful, I am beyond'. I simply followed his instruction which was to focus the mind on pure being 'I am', and stay in it. I used to sit for hours together, with, nothing but the 'I am' in my mind and soon peace and joy and a deep all-embracing love became my normal state. In it all disappeared -- myself, my Guru, the life I lived, the world around me. Only peace remained and unfathomable silence.
*
No particular thought can be mind's natural state, only silence. Not the idea of silence, but silence itself. When the mind is in its natural state, it reverts to silence spontaneously after every experience or, rather, every experience happens against the background of silence.
*
M: All that needs doing can be done in peace and silence. There is no need to get upset.
*
Without the knowledge of the knower there can be no peace.
Q: How does one come to know the knower?
M: I can only tell you what I know from my own experience. When I met my Guru, he told me: 'You are not what you take yourself to be. Find out what you are. Watch the sense 'I am', find your real self'. I obeyed him, because I trusted him. I did as he told me. All my spare time I would spend looking at myself in silence. And what a difference it made, and how soon!
*
M: It is enough if you do not imagine yourself to be the body. It is the 'I-am-the-body' idea that is so calamitous. It blinds you completely to your real nature. Even for a moment do not think that you are the body. Give yourself no name, no shape. In the darkness and the silence reality is found.
*

Q: I find that awareness brings about a state of inner silence, a state of psychic void.
M: It is all right as it goes, but it is not enough. Have you felt the all-embracing emptiness in which the universe swims like a cloud in the blue sky?
Q: Sir, let me first come to know well my own inner space.
M: Destroy the wall that separates, the 'I-am-the-body' idea and the inner and the outer will become one.
Q: Am I to die?
M: Physical destruction is meaningless. It is the clinging to sensate life that binds you. If you could experience the inner void fully, the explosion into the totality would be near.
Q: My own spiritual experience has its seasons. Sometimes I feel glorious, then again I am down. I am like a little boy -- going up, going down, going up, going down.
M: All changes in consciousness are due to the 'I-am-the-body' idea. Divested of this idea the mind becomes steady. There is pure being, free of experiencing anything in particular. But to realise it you must do what your teacher tells you. Mere listening, even memorizing, is not enough. If you do not struggle hard to apply every word of it in your daily life, don't complain that you made no progress. All real progress is irreversible. Ups and downs merely show that the teaching has not been taken to heart and translated into action fully.
*
Q: But when you look at yourself, what do you see?
M: It depends how I look. When I look through the mind, I see numberless people. When I look beyond the mind, I see the witness. Beyond the witness there is the infinite intensity of emptiness and silence.
*
M: When the words are spoken, there is silence. When the relative is over, the absolute remains. 

*

The silence before the words were spoken, is it different from the silence that comes after? The silence is one and without it the words could not have been heard. It is always there -- at the back of the words. Shift your attention from words to silence and you will hear it. The mind craves for experience, the memory of which it takes for knowledge. The jnani is beyond all experience and his memory is empty of the past. He is entirely unrelated to anything in particular. But the mind craves for formulations and definitions, always eager to squeeze reality into a verbal shape. Of everything it wants an idea, for without ideas the mind is not. Reality is essentially alone, but the mind will not leave it alone -- and deals instead with the unreal. And yet it is all the mind can do -- discover the unreal as unreal.
Q: And seeing the real as real?
M: There is no such state as seeing the real. Who is to see what? You can only be the real -- which you are, anyhow. The problem is only mental. Abandon false ideas, that is all. There is no need of true ideas. There aren't any.
*
You might have been delivering a lecture for two hours; where has it gone when it is over? It has merged into silence in which the beginning, middle and end of the lecture are all together. Time has come to a stop, it was, but is no more. The silence after a life of talking and the silence after a life of silence is the same silence. Immortality is freedom from the feeling: 'I am'. Yet it is not extinction. On the contrary, it is a state infinitely more real, aware and happy than you can possibly think of. Only self-consciousness is no more.
*
Do understand that the mind has its limits; to go beyond, you must consent to silence.
*
What makes us progress?
M: Silence is the main factor. In peace and silence you grow.
*
Q: Has the witness name and form, or is it beyond these?
M: The witness is merely a point in awareness. It has no name and form. It is like the reflection of the sun in a drop of dew. The drop of dew has name and form, but the little point of light is caused by the sun. The clearness and smoothness of the drop is a necessary condition but not sufficient by itself. Similarly clarity and silence of the mind are necessary for the reflection of reality to appear in the mind, but by themselves they are not sufficient. There must be reality beyond it. Because reality is timelessly present, the stress is on the necessary conditions.
*
Our life is full of contradictions. Yet we cling to it. This clinging is at the root of everything. Still, it is entirely superficial. We hold on to something or somebody, with all our might and next moment we forget it; like a child that shapes its mud-pies and abandons them light-heartedly. Touch them -- it will scream with anger, divert the child and he forgets them. For our life is now, and the love of it is now. We love variety, the play of pain and pleasure, we are fascinated by contrasts. For this we need the opposites and their apparent separation. We enjoy them for a time and then get tired and crave for the peace and silence of pure being.
*
intensity, meaningfulness, harmony; what more do you want?
Q: Nothing more is needed, of course. But you are talking of the knowable.
M: Of the unknowable only silence talks. The mind can talk only of what it knows. If you diligently investigate the knowable, it dissolves and only the unknowable remains. But with the first flicker of imagination and interest the unknowable is obscured and the known comes to the fore-front. The known, the changeable, is what you live with -- the unchangeable is of no use to you. It is only when you are satiated with the changeable and long for the unchangeable, that you are ready for the turning round and stepping into what can be described, when seen from the level of the mind, as emptiness and darkness. For the mind craves for content and variety, while reality is, to the mind, contentless and invariable.
*
Q: What can take me beyond the person? How to go beyond consciousness?
M: Words and questions come from the mind and hold you there. To go beyond the mind, you must be silent and quiet. Peace and silence, silence and peace -- this is the way beyond. Stop asking questions.
*
Q: Beyond the mind is silence. There is nothing to be said about it.
M: Yes, all talk about silence is mere noise.
*
M: That which cannot change, remains. The great peace, the deep silence, the hidden beauty of reality remain. While it can not be conveyed through words, it is waiting for you to experience for yourself.
*
In peace and silence the skin of the 'I' dissolves and the inner and the outer become one.
*
M: Keep quiet, undisturbed, and the wisdom and the power will come on their own. You need not hanker. Wait in silence of the heart and mind. It is very easy to be quiet, but willingness is rare. You people want to become supermen overnight. Stay without ambition, without the least desire, exposed, vulnerable, unprotected, uncertain and alone, completely open to and welcoming life as it happens, without the selfish conviction that all must yield you pleasure or profit, material or so-called spiritual.
*
You need not ask anything, nor do anything. Such apparently lazy way of spending time is highly regarded in India. It means that for the time being you are free from the obsession with 'what next'. When you Are not in a hurry and the mind is free from anxieties, it becomes quiet and in the silence something may be heard which is ordinarily too fine and subtle for perception. The mind must be open and quiet to see. What we are trying to do here is to bring our minds into the right state for understanding what is real.
*

M: Before you can accept God, you must accept yourself, which is even more frightening. The first steps in self acceptance are not at all pleasant, for what one sees is not a happy sight. One needs all the courage to go further. What helps is silence. Look at yourself in total silence, do not describe yourself. Look at the being you believe you are and remember -- you are not what you see. 'This I am not -- what am l?' is the movement of self-enquiry. There are no other means to liberation, all means delay. Resolutely reject what you are not, till the real Self emerges in its glorious nothingness, its 'not-a-thingness.'
*
Questioner: You keep on saying that I was never born and will never die. If so, how is it that I see the world as one which has been born and will surely die?
Maharaj: You believe so because you have never questioned your belief that you are the body which, obviously, is born and dies. While alive, it attracts attention and fascinates so completely that rarely does one perceive one's real nature. It is like seeing the surface of the ocean and completely forgetting the immensity beneath. The world is but the surface of the mind and the mind is infinite.
What we call thoughts are just ripples in the mind. When the mind is quiet it reflects reality. When it is motionless through and through, it dissolves and only reality remains. This reality is so concrete, so actual, so much more tangible than mind and matter, that compared to it even diamond is soft like butter. This overwhelming actuality makes the world dreamlike, misty, irrelevant.
Q: This world, with so much suffering in it, how can you see it as irrelevant. What callousness!
M: It is you who is callous, not me. If your world is so full of suffering, do something about it; don't add to it through greed or indolence. I am not bound by your dreamlike world. In my world the seeds of suffering, desire and fear are not sown and suffering does not grow. My world is free from opposites, of mutually distinctive discrepancies; harmony pervades; its peace is rocklike; this peace and silence are my body.
*
Q: If my real self is peace and love, why is it so restless?
M: It is not your real being that is restless, but its reflection in the mind appears restless because the mind is restless. It is just like the reflection of the moon in the water stirred by the wind. The wind of desire stirs the mind and the 'me', which is but a reflection of the Self in the mind, appears changeful. But these ideas of movement, of restlessness, of pleasure and pain are all in the mind.
The Self stands beyond the mind, aware, but unconcerned.
Q: How to reach it?
M: You are the Self, here and now Leave the mind alone, stand aware and unconcerned and you will realise that to stand alert but detached, watching events come and go, is an aspect of your real nature.
Q: What are the other aspects?
M: The aspects are infinite in number. Realise one, and you will realise all.
Q: Tell me some thing that would help me.
M: You know best what you need!
Q: I am restless. How can I gain peace?
M: For what do you need peace?
Q: To be happy.
M: Are you not happy now?
Q: No, I am not.
M: What makes you unhappy?
Q: I have what I don’t want, and want what I don’t have.
M: Why don’t you invert it: want what you have and care not for what you don’t have?
Q: I want what is pleasant and don’t want what is painful.
M: How do you know what is pleasant and what is not?
Q: From past experience, of course.
M: Guided by memory you have been pursuing the pleasant and shunning the unpleasant. Have
you succeeded?
Q: No, I have not. The pleasant does not last. Pain sets in again.
M: Which pain?
Q: The desire for pleasure, the fear of pain, both are states of distress. Is there a state of unalloyed pleasure?
M: Every pleasure, physical or mental, needs an instrument. Both the physical and mental instruments are material, they get tired and worn out. The pleasure they yield is necessarily limited in intensity and duration. Pain is the background of all your pleasures. You want them because you suffer. On the other hand, the very search for pleasure is the cause of pain. It is a vicious circle.
Q: I can see the mechanism of my confusion, but I do not see my way out of it.
M: The very examination of the mechanism shows the way. After all, your confusion is only in your mind, which never rebelled so far against confusion and never got to grips with it. It rebelled only against pain.
Q: So, all I can do is to stay confused?
M: Be alert. Question, observe, investigate, learn all you can about confusion, how it operates, what it does to you and others. By being clear about confusion you become clear of confusion.
Q: When I look into myself, I find my strongest desire is to create a monument, to build something which will outlast me. Even when I think of a home, wife and child, it is because it is a lasting, solid, testimony to myself.
M: Right, build yourself a monument. How do you propose to do it?
Q: It matters little what I build, as long as it is permanent.
M: Surely, you can see for yourself that nothing is permanent. All wears out, breaks down, dissolves. The very ground on which you build gives way. What can you build that will outlast all?
Q: Intellectually, verbally, I am aware that all is transient. Yet, somehow my heart wants permanency. I want to create something that lasts.
M: Then you must build it of something lasting. What have you that is lasting? Neither your body nor mind will last. You must look elsewhere.
Q: I long for permanency, but I find it nowhere.
M: Are you, yourself, not permanent?
Q: I was born, I shall die.
M: Can you truly say you were not before you were born and can you possibly say when dead:
‘Now I am no more’? You cannot say from your own experience that you are not. You can only say
‘I am’. Others too cannot tell you ‘you are not’.
Q: There is no ‘I am’ in sleep.
M: Before you make such sweeping statements, examine carefully your waking state. You will soon discover that it is full of gaps, when the min blanks out. Notice how little you remember even when fully awake. You just don’t remember. A gap in memory is not necessarily a gap in consciousness.
Q: Can I make myself remember my state of deep sleep?
M: Of course! By eliminating the intervals of inadvertence during your waking hours you will gradually eliminate the long interval of absent-mindedness, which you call sleep. You will be aware that you are asleep.
Q: Yet, the problem of permanency, of continuity of being, is not solved.
M: Permanency is a mere idea, born of the action of time. Time again depends of memory. By permanency you mean unfailing memory through endless time. You want to eternalise the mind, which is not possible.
Q: Then what is eternal?
M: That which does not change with time. You cannot eternalise a transient thing -- only the changeless is eternal.
Q: I am familiar with the general sense of what you say. I do not crave for more knowledge. All I want is peace.
M: You can have for the asking all the peace you want.
Q: I am asking.
M: You must ask with an undivided heart and live an integrated life.
Q: How?
M: Detach yourself from all that makes your mind restless. Renounce all that disturbs its peace. If you want peace, deserve it.
Q: Surely everybody deserves peace.
M: Those only deserve it, who don't disturb it.
Q: In what way do I disturb peace?
M: By being a slave to your desires and fears.
Q: Even when they are justified?
M: Emotional reactions, born of ignorance or inadvertence, are never justified. Seek a clear mind and a clean heart. All you need is to keep quietly alert, enquiring into the real nature of yourself.
This is the only way to peace.