Silence is as important as anything, as much as air, water, light. It nourishes our soul.
By becoming silent, that does not mean that you have to stop speaking or go off to be alone and sit in a forest, although, being in solitude in the depth of nature is good for us too, just not always available in our daily lives. It means a silence from the daily distractions of the mind, the negative constant drain of words in our heads. The mental mindstream drags us relentlessly through the torrents of suffering both mental and physical.
When we are born, our default is to be conscious, awake, alive in this present moment, however, our conditioning creates the mindstream that distracts us and then we go to ‘sleep’ and are not aware of our real life that is now. Most humans spend most if not all of their lives asleep with the constant noise of words in the head, which they are attached too.
Once we start down the path of unlearning the conditioning to listen to the mind and its constant chatter, there become small gaps in thought, that gap is silence, and as we train our minds to be peaceful and as we attach less and less importance to our thoughts, the gap grows. So then the silence is longer and longer. The more we have silence, the more we are awake and aware.
This allows the real person that is truly us to be alive and allows the true soul to be. The real you and I are the person beyond thought, we are not the ego or story that the mind has created, we are the inner energy, the soul, the witness of thought, the knower of senses and the person who observes our emotions and reactions.
Silence can be everywhere and anywhere, we can create our own silence even in the noisiest place in the world, silence is inside us all, peace and calm are there, we just have to allow it to be by simply witnessing and not energising our endless thoughts.
The turbulence on the surface of the exterior world and the mind-dominated interior are only there if we energise it, if search deep within us, like the bottom of the lake or sea, there is always stillness, peace and silence.
Becoming silent is consciousness, is awareness, is life.
Philip Dodson 