The Sound of Silence
From silence, our true powers emerge - the powers to withdraw, to accommodate, to face the truth, to discriminate right from wrong, to tolerate and to co-operate.
What does ‘the sound of silence’ mean? It sounds like a paradox. Pure silence is something which is inward, focused and beyond sound. The sound of silence is when you are able to come from a place of stillness internally, and with that power, express yourself in life. It’s a very different way of living from living with a lot of noise in your head. This stillness is a mind-body thing. The stillness of the mind reflects into the body and the body reflects back onto the mind, very much a cyclical process. It’s worth understanding this, because sometimes, it’s difficult to tell why you are feeling peaceless, when the cause of your peacelessness is the past. Sometimes it is like a memory that is still reflecting back to you from the body.
It is very common for us to fill our lives with noise in order to avoid silence, though some people naturally have stillness in the mind. But very often, we have such a lot of unresolved worries, fears, desires in our minds that it’s very difficult for us to be still. This is so because it’s not a natural state to have those worries pulling at us. The really natural and healthy way to live is to do, what is necessary, come out into action and when you’ve done whatever is necessary, to be able to go back into stillness. So, you conserve your energy whenever it’s possible and you then have the stock of energy to use whenever it is needed.
If your job, your relationships, your tasks, your duties take too much of a grip on you so that they are pulling at you even though there’s nothing you can do about it, it’s as if they have mastered you, rather than you being the master of those tasks and things. They pull and drain your energy away from you. Even during our sleep, things have a grip on us, deep worries that trouble in a chronic way, unconsciously, 24 hours a day. This stimulates physiological mechanisms that arouse actions rather than the mechanisms of peace and energy conservation. The rest and repair mechanisms can’t work properly and we start to get exhausted, finding that we don’t have the strength to meet the challenges as we would like to do.
You are what you think
Patterns of thought we create have an impact on us physically. They say that you are what you eat, but a much more powerful understanding is that you are what you think. If you habitually think in anxious ways, angry ways, frustrated ways, feeling cheated ways, those kind of feelings actually start to imprint themselves on your being, and you become a person who is rather like that.
The understanding within the teachings of the Brahma Kumaris is that this is not the natural state of human beings. The natural state is to be tranquil, loving, peaceful and positive. From this position of strength, we can act in natural ways, but in today’s world, cultural, emotional and commercial pressures encourage us to become peaceless. In fact, we get so caught up in this peacelessness that sometimes there is a nervousness about letting the noise stop, because we realise that we are not actually in control of our mind. So, we may fill every little space in our lives with noise and stimulus in order to avoid facing up to the fact that we’ve lost control and we can’t actually be truly still inside.
It works the other way round too. If you habitually are experiencing thoughts of peace, strength, hope, confidence, then you become a person with that kind of positive power inside you. This is an amazing revelation, because it means that we can really change our characters if we feel the need to do that. Many of us don’t, many of us are pushed to our limits and beyond with the challenges that life offers us these days. In a way, it’s a good thing, because it’s forcing us to realise that we’ve lost what is most human about us, our ability to choose how to be.
Recharging your battery
The conventional thinking for many decades within psychology has been based on a more materialistic way of thinking, the idea being that conditions determine psychology, that we grow up with various defects because of poor conditions. However, the beauty of being a human being is that we have this power that what we observe to be missing, we can actually put that back in, by changing our habitual thought patterns to being more positive. It is remarkable that this is possible. I used to think that character is something completely fixed.
What is silence? Many would think of silence as the absence of sound. Silence, in the sense that I’m referring to it is much more than the absence of noise - it’s an inner power. A state when you are still inside because you are full. You have contentment. It’s like a battery being charged, when the battery of a car has run flat, then the car won’t function properly and the driver will be distressed with it. If the battery is well charged up, then the driver will feel confident with that car. It’s very similar with our own inner being, the times when we feel most distressed are when we feel that what is being asked of us by life, we don’t quite have the strength to meet those challenges. Silence is the means or technique whereby you can charge the battery of your being so that you are able to do more than you are otherwise able to do.
It’s also more than this. Why does silence permit this feeling of empowerment? A clue comes from the word atonement. Atonement is composed of the three words, ‘at one ment’ – which is when you are charged and feel complete, and not feeling that something is missing. This strength, confidence and positivity enables you to feel at one with everything around you, with life and the universe. Atonement in theology means atoning for your sins, as in removing them. Sins in this context comes from its Latin origin sinne, which means without. You have done actions that have drained you of power so that you are without the strength needed to do the things that you need to do. Atonement or at-one-ment, which comes through silence, is the means of making yourself complete, so that you cope better with relationships on all levels.
Powers of silence
Our distress and stress come from not having the resources to move effectively through life. Power of silence is a means of removing tensions and becoming stronger. This silence, strength allows you to cope with situations that otherwise would have defeated you. I would like to run through some powers that are so relevant to the issue of silence.
The first of these powers is the power to withdraw. There’s the image of the tortoise, which withdraws inside its shell when some threat comes to it, to protect itself so that it doesn’t suffer injury or loss. There are many circumstances in life where it’s important for us to be able to do that, to withdraw internally and allow some storm around us to rage, and yet not be hurt or destroyed by it. It’s the ability to move one’s mental energies from the outside and bring them into an inner space, which is the spiritual equivalent to what the tortoise does.
It is the practice of at-one-ment that gives you the strength to do that, when you go inside in effective silence, because you feel that who you are, your identity is dependent on something that is inside of you. Whereas if you’re too externally focused, all your mental energies and your sense of who are caught up with your job, your relationships, your possessions and then you are a hostage to fortune, because they will constantly be in a state of change. You cannot ultimately control the physical world around you, because people will come and go, jobs will come and go, one day you may get praise, the next you may be put down. It’s the nature of life that the things outside of you are constantly in a state of flux and it’s more so today then ever because of the rapid pace of change in society.
The second power is the power to accommodate or merge, and is illustrated by a river merging into an ocean. It is when you’re in relationship with others who maybe throwing unpleasant scenes in front you, but you have the strength to absorb that without being taken over by it. In other words, you are not influenced by their negativity, you are able to accommodate it like an ocean of strength. There are times when we feel more like this than at other times - someone says something that on another day would be ‘water off a duck’s back’, but on this particular day, it really gets at you because you are already feeling empty inside. This power comes when you habitually charge that inner battery with the power of silence.
Another major power is the power to face. There are times when you need to face up to unpleasant things, like a loss, perhaps over someone dear to you. An individual who has the art of charging themselves through silence power will be able to face the facts and move on. Another aspect of this power is to do what is appropriate in the face of danger rather than pretend that the danger isn’t there.
The next power is the power to pack up, there’s an illustration of a packed suitcase, being ready to move on. You have done everything that you can and you need to move on mentally. If there’s nothing more you can do, you leave that situation instead of holding onto something that has finished and passed and is now draining your energy.
Distinguishing true from false
Two more related powers are the power to discriminate and judge. The power of discrimination is described as a jeweller who can distinguish false jewels from the real ones. Where there’s a lack of silence power, one can often be deceived by external circumstances, but inner silence brings a good criterion for judging how to act. You start to learn that certain types of action, behaviour and relationship bring you closer to this stillness, whilst other things take you away from it and make you addicted to external things. Your discrimination becomes much better when you’re coming from a place of stillness inside. The power to judge implies that you can weigh your priorities well. You are not so influenced by inner needs that you can’t make the correct judgements.
Finally, the power to tolerate and the power to co-operate: these are called upon us so much in today’s world, where people’s tolerance is decreasing all the time - road-rage and air-age are just some of the symptoms. When you are able to tap into the power of silence, you’re able to overcome the feelings of negativity in yourself and in others. Instead of acting negatively, getting into an internal rage and multiplying the situation, the understanding is there that they are suffering. You can see this because of that coolness that you derived from silence power. The power to co-operate enables you to be more non-judgemental of others and more appreciative of their qualities. When you feel bad in yourself, there’s a tendency for your vision to go outwards and spot the weaknesses in others. There’s more of a generous outlook towards others, you’re aware of their problems. You’re not innocent which is dangerous, but you do not focus on them. So co-operation becomes easier and they become stronger as a result of this positive attitude.
The Sound of the Power of Silence
The sound of silence is when this inner truth is charging or when I express it. It’s not a passive state, it means a positive charge inside. It means that I am either receiving through inner silence, or giving, emerging silence power through one’s interactions. That’s the sound of the beautiful power of silence. There are other things that also help bring in this sound. The great faith traditions have helped, the atmosphere in a church, music that helps takes you upwards, great works of art that touch your soul and make you feel a wider part of humanity rather than someone isolated. The silence power flows through when you experience this beauty. People climb mountains, because they want the sound of silence. Again, it’s not just the absence of noise, it’s about learning about yourself. Often people love to go to beautiful spots where they can see a big range and somehow that expands the soul, so that it’s able to feel a wider sense of being rather than our little narrow self. These are all ways in which we have drawn on silence power naturally.
However, one can’t endlessly be listening to music or resorting to external devices. Therefore the key to accessing this power is change of awareness and understanding - the understanding that there is a source, a seed that is the essence of consciousness and that each one of us comes from that One, who we speak of as the Father or the Parent. And we are the children, because we come from that source which is an immensely powerful charge and, like a seed myself, I come to play a part in this physical world. But because I come from that place, my ultimate reality is that I am like that spiritual singularity, that source and the power within that is the power of silence.
Neville Hodgkinson, formerly medical and science correspondent of the London Sunday Times, is the author of AIDS: The Failure of Contemporary Science (Fourth Estate, London, 1996).
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www.innerspace.org.uk
Neville Hodgkinson
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