A Hymn To Silence

 

Silence is substance. The material world is made out of vibrating energy. But what is the energy that vibrates? No-thing. The empty vacuum of perfect silence. 

 

St. John of the Cross said, "Silence is the first language of God." The 2nd Century Gnostic Valentinus wrote, "The real Virgin Mother is mystical eternal silence." Rumi tells us, "When I am silent, I fall into the place where everything is music." Ammaji adds, "In meditation, silence is the Mother." And Anias Ninn: "I love your silences, they are like mine."

 

Silence cannot be thought. Thinking a thought about silence is not silence. Of course our silence should not suppress or negate thinking. But in the radiant quietness of Truth, the veil of thought becomes transparent, and silence outshines the mind. Then silence is freedom from thought.

And if you are an activist, do not doubt that your action is empowered from a place of silence. Plunge into action 101%, and you will feel at the peak of action a depth inside you that is utterly still, utterly silent.

 

I don't need freedom of speech nearly so much as I need freedom of silence. Let me liberate silence from every shackle of shame, from every self-image that mutes me through the words of others. True silence is not the repression commanded by authority and fear. That is not silence at all, but only a stifled scream. True silence is the music of repose, which flows through all my apparent boundaries, suffuses every particle of this body, the cell walls, the breeze in the meadow, rivers and streams, forests, mountains, clouds, the space about the moon, the aura of the day star. My intimate silence overflows the rim of the Milky Way. 

 

Silence is the fertile womb of darkness, the causeless astonishment that bubbles at the root of the cosmos. The silence of the invisible sap, odorless yet permeating stem, leaf, petal and pollen with a fragrance of ecstasy. The soft silence of divine love, soaking through the edges of things, melting, uniting them in Wholeness, without destroying their forms. Each form is but a wave on the ocean of the Ineffable, yet silence is the depth.

 

When I am truly awake, my flesh is the comb, silence is the honey in every cell. I can taste it, taste the golden void in each atom. Silence is the glory of night, the luminous nectar of blackness, in whom the effervescent stars are suspended like the sparkle in wine. Most abysmal of all is the silence between my thoughts, my true home, "intereor intimo mea," more intimate to me than I am to myself.

 

Silence is the oil pressed out and overflowing from matter. And matter is solidified silence. Silence is never anywhere else but here, the eternity in each moment. Silence is the soul of this breath, the muse of the universe, essence of presence prior to the Word. In the groundless caverns of meditation, silence crystalizes into diamond, more adamant than any fleeting quark or neutrino composing the stuff of the physical world. For at the quantum level of the cosmos, this world is a mist, ever vanishing in the dawn of silence. 

 

No need to seek or attain it. Just sink deeper into your heart, the center that has no circumference, the Being that has no opposite. Here, in unutterable vastness beyond the mind - or rather, not beyond but before, even before the thought of "I" - here in bewildered beauty, dissolve into Truth, and the Truth will set you free.

 

What is Truth? This is exactly what Pontius Pilate asked Jesus at his trial. How did Jesus answer? He was silent. Silence is Truth. I cannot know the truth: I Am the truth. Vibrations of silence do the speaking. All things are made of silence, "Om Tat Sat." And that thou art, "Tat Tvam Asi."

 

Now, a meditation from 7th Century Syrian Saint, Isaac of Nineveh:

"Above all things,
love silence.
Out of your silence
will arise something
that will draw you
into deeper silence.
If you practice this,
inexpressible light
will dawn upon you."

 

Hubble space photo, Sombrero Galaxy