What the World May Need Most is . . . Silence
by Joseph Dispenza
If you listen in the middle of the night, the desert landscape is actually rumbling.
A tremendous amount of sound is being pumped out from distant cities, highways, power transmission lines, industry and mining.
- Scientist Gordon Hempton, in a study to track sound
Some years ago, I lived for a year in silence. Since then, as you might expect, I have been keenly sensitive to noise.
I returned recently from a twelve-city tour promoting my new book, The Way of the Traveler. The tour gave me the opportunity to connect with the material in the book - namely, that we can raise quite ordinary travel to the level of spiritual practice...if we simply are mindful of hooking into the great mythological paradigms of "the journey." Seen in this way, every trip we take can be a hero's journey - and can be the hero of our own epic adventure.
During most of the tour I felt somewhat heroic, but not in the Homeric sense of the term. My personal heroism was about having to endure the great hardship of...noise.
Ours is a tremendously noisy culture. Traveling, one never gets away from it, whether it's the blaring stream of announcements over the loudspeaker system in the airport, or the roar of traffic sounds going into and out of cities; shuttles that take you to and from terminals are not only deafening in themselves, but often feature loud, tinny musical accompaniment inside -adding insult to injury.
Noise is all around us, like a blanket of interference sound designed to block from the outside anything interesting and important that might be going on inside. It's pervasive enough to be "invisible," if that can be a word to describe sound. But if you close your eyes for a few seconds right now and just listen, you are likely to come up with plenty of sounds that, together, could be called noise.
So it was interesting to me, and ironic, that throughout the book tour, the first question out of the mouths of media interviewers and readers had to do with the year I spent in silence. Maybe I was asked about it because, with so much noise around us all the time, the one thing that really stands out is silence. It's the only physical comfort in this satiated, saturated, sodden culture that seems to have eluded us. We may be interested in silence because it is a novelty - and therefore, something to pay attention to.
My own experience with silence was wonderful. It was the first year of monastic life - which I lived for eight years. This first year was called the "canonical year" (after canon, or church, law) or the novitiate year. I lived silence under a vow, which I took with about sixty other people at a monastery in a remote rural area of the country. The monastery's lifestyle was the same as was lived by the monks of the Middle Ages. For a year, we did not speak (which is silence from the inside) and, since we had no TV, radio, magazines, newspapers, or telephones, no one spoke to us (which is silence from the outside).
What happens when one is silent for a long period? The outer noise goes first, and then the inner noise starts to evaporate. Soon, quiet reigns everywhere, it seems. Time slows to a crawl. What is truly within begins to reveal Itself. Sound becomes a curiosity - natural sounds, like the flow of water or the sifting of the wind through trees, become seeds for contemplation. The profound peace that silence brings is hard to describe. It is the bliss of balance and completion on a very high level.
If I could go somewhere now and live a year in silence, I certainly would, without a moment's hesitation.
You and I may not have the spiritual luxury of retiring to monasteries at this point in our lives, but we do have the ability to cultivate the fundamental monastic practice of silence into our busy days. Lately, I have been trying to spend an hour a day in silence (no computer, no phone, no media, and no interruptions from the outside). This grounds me, and brings me peace and clarity.
You can create your own quiet inner monastery cloister. If you have the opportunity to practice an hour of silence sometime during the day, you may want to try it and see how it makes a difference for you. Like the monks of the Middle Ages, who lived the vow of silence, you may find that spiritual treasures you had not imagined will be revealed to you - not only in your silent time
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