On 'silence' ...

I'm visiting family in Boston, since yesterday afternoon. I just sat down to blog and wondered aloud what I should write about today and Shivalik, my son, picked up his book on J. Krishnamurti's essays and flipping through it said: 'Write On silence - say something about silence'... so here's something on 'silence'.

When I was in my pre-teens and teen years I would memorize all the poems I liked. One of these was 'A Quiet Room' by Patience Strong. It went: 'If you have a quiet room then you are truly blessed; For only in a quiet room can a heart and mind find rest'... etc. The idea may sound very strange to some people, because our society is so addicted to noise. There seems to be such a constant need for it that if it isn't the piped in music in the offices; personal radios on people's desks; music from the internet on our computers; TVs blaring in homes, then it's people having their ipods, or similar devices, plugged into their ears.

The problem however is, that unless we, periodically, cut all external noise, we will never know what the deepest, most authentic part of us has to say to us. For it is only when we shut out the noise entering into us through our ears that we can hear the Voice inside - and which in turn deepens our connection to our intuition -- our intuition being our connection with Higher Consciousness.

The irony is that this is the very Voice, if we listened to it would guide us to have an experience of the Truth. But most of us don't want to hear, and in every possible way try to drown it out in external sounds.

And why would we do that? The sad truth is that first of all most of us aren't aware of this phenomenon because no one told us. The 'correct' and 'good' things we were taught by our caregivers when we were young, stemmed from religious ideas of wrong and right. Nobody told us the real and complete meaning of the saying that the so-called kingdom of heaven, lies within us. Sure we've heard this said, along with a plethora of other 'wise sayings', but the basic truths got obscured by their being manipulated over the centuries, one distortion at a time, till they got confused with forces outside our reach, supernatural phenomenon, and worse, superstition.

One common, and well-known way to 'listen' to the Voice within is, of course, through meditation - if it didn't sound like a boring discipline, indulged in by the 'yoga-types' :-) - not to denigrate those who do yoga (of who I am one), this wonderful practice is, to me, a form of active spiritualism - but all I want to say is that there are many interesting, non-disciplinarian ways to experience the stillness which will 'sharpen our hearing' to what is trying to express itself within us, and in listening to which, indeed, is where our salvation lies, for this is where our power lies. We are our own interpreters, but must know ourselves first... and in order to know ourselves, we absolutely must find silence -- first external and then internal. I'll suggest some practical and easy tools for creating this silence in tomorrow's post.

And now to check what at aspect of silence J. Krishnamurti has touched upon in his essay...

Kiki ;-)
P.S. My request to those who 'borrow' from this blog is to please give adequate credit to the source of the borrowed information - whether me, or books and people I quote from. Thank you.