Silence

I had a moment of enlightenment today. Why I deign to call it “enlightenment,” I’m not sure. It seems quite self-evident. The enlightenment is this: The reason why so many religious and spiritual communities around the world value silence is because, in silence, you can hear your thoughts. And while for many religious and spiritual communities, the goal is to quiet the mind to experience oneness with God (Supreme Being, Higher Power, Jehovah, Yahweh, etc.), practicing silence also forces us to listen to our thoughts and to see when they are not kind, useful, true, or compassionate.

This insight occurred to me in a place of worship. Fittingly, it happened as I was letting my mind wander from the service. At a given moment, a thought flashed through my mind. The thought was unkind. It was not a detrimental thought. It was not an earth-shatteringly evil thought. But it was unkind. Were I to have said this thought out loud, had I shared it with another person, that person would have likely laughed. This is because we–human beings–laugh at others’ expense. But had I shared this thought, I would have created negative energy and communicated unkindness. I would have delighted in having made someone laugh, but at what expense? At the cost of breaking silence to mete out into the world a thought that was not at all valuable.

This was my lesson for today.

Of course, as I consider the ocean of silence that one might ultimately experience some day as a byproduct of meditation, I think how terrifying the thought of that silence is. What might it be like to be swallowed whole by such silence? What might it be like to surrender to it? In various religious and spiritual traditions the goal is the dissolution of the ego because it is the ego that stands in the way of unity with others, of melding completely with humankind. Such dissolution must be terrifying because it means not only having to accept others as they are, but accepting yourself, including the notion that others would, indeed, accept you/me wholly as you/we are, in brokenness, with faults.