sound yields to silence

When sound yields to silence

There is great peace

Earlier I was reading a book by Thich Nhat Hanh, a great Buddhist master, and at one point in the book I came across this phrase: sound yields to silence. It was a translation of some words from a Vietnamese song. When I read these words, sound yields to silence, they resonated in me, but not the words themselves. Their effect was to silence the words, silence the words on the page, and silence the words in my mind.

And in that silence my body was awash with peace. Energy flooded through me without any blockages, without any tightness anywhere in my body. There was a great relaxation, and it felt something like an orgasm. This release of the words, of the concepts, of the idea of me. And just as with a good orgasm, I was thrust into a space of deep, profound relaxation, peace, and a melting of my being, so that for a while there was no sense of being separate. There was no sense of I at all. There was just this intoxicating peacefulness. And this is it.

This is our home. When we are in this state of peacefulness, totally at ease, there is no problem, there is no separation, there is no anguish, no struggle. There is nothing to be done, nothing to achieve, nowhere to go. And this, this magical state of being, which is in each and every one of us, at least in potential form, this state comes to us. It comes to us out of the blue. We cannot force it. We cannot demand it, for it comes when sound yields to silence. And for our part, the best we can do is to nurture silence; to see that all that sound, all that noise, the noise of the mind, the noise of thoughts of words, all that sound is what keeps us from the great peace.

May sound yield to silence.