only from silence

Only from silence can the new come to be

I am rather shocked by how little most people seem to value silence. For me it is the most precious thing in the world. I'm recording this in Himachal Pradesh in the north of India, up in the mountains, and the guest house that I like to stay at here is overlooking a very peaceful valley. Often the only sounds to be heard are birdsong, and perhaps the wind in the trees. And yet many people visiting such a place are playing music. This is partly with the advent of the smartphone – that ubiquitous companion that has become such a central part of most people's lives. And one of the many things they can do with their smartphones is play music. Now in a busy city where there's a lot of rather ugly background noise, I can understand if one wants to try and drown it out with some music. But why would you want to drown out silence?

I can only conclude that many people find silence unbearable. And so far I've talked about sounds in the outside: music, noise, but as ever, what is true of the outside is also true of our inner world. And I think, for most people, an inner silence is also unbearable. Why else do we become so habituated to a nonstop inner chatter of thoughts? It's as if each of us has his or her own TV chat show running from dawn till dusk, all the waking hours, and perhaps on into sleep and dreams as well. Now everyone knows that TV chat shows are merely trivia. They are there to distract us from perhaps rather painful realities of our daily life. We can numb out in front of the TV.

And something similar is happening with these habitual thoughts, going round and round in the head. It's also our own version of that trivia, of no real consequence. But most of us would rather be preoccupied with that trivia than feel the deep silence that is the alternative. And this is rather a pity because something radically new can only come from that silence. We might come up with something that seems new, through thinking. But really that thought process is a regurgitation of our knowledge, of information that we've sucked up from the world around us, perhaps reconfigured a little bit, slotted into our own little personal story, and then brought back out in thoughts or words. It's not going to be radically new, perhaps a slightly different flavour of something that's gone before, or more often a simple repeat.

Our spiritual journey is really about making space for the radically new, something so new that we cannot imagine it beforehand. And that sort of newness requires space. It requires the space of silence, in order for it to come into being. It's as if a little seedling wants to grow in a rainforest. if the existing trees are already taking all the space and all the light, that little seedling is never going to grow. It needs a clearing. And so it is with our spiritual essence. For it to grow, it needs the space of silence, at least some of the time. And into that space, and from that space, it will grow. And this – our spiritual essence, our buddha nature – this is what will feel radically new to us.

But for that to really come into our life as a lived daily experience, we must first start to value silence. We must value silence in the outer world. And also, more importantly, we must value the silent spaces in our own consciousness, the gaps between thoughts, those moments of stillness when suddenly, even if only for the briefest moment, we glimpse the deep mystery, the suchness that is all around us and within us too. This is the gift that silence is offering us. Let us accept the gift. We are insane to reject it. So let us welcome silence.