When was the last time you really experienced silence? Maybe you were on holiday in the mountains, or walking through a forest, and became still for a moment as you appreciated the peace and quiet of your surroundings. And let’s not forget the stunning silence of the first pandemic lockdown. The reduced road and air traffic noise brought a satisfying peace and quiet to our cities. In the past, the world was not always filled with the same noise intensity. For tens of thousands of years, our ancestors led relatively peaceful and quiet lives, often intimately connected with nature and the world around them. Outside the developed world, there are still many people who lead quiet and peaceful lives.
The fact is that many of us don’t feel comfortable with silence. Interestingly, silence is a sign of danger for many social animals, for instance, birds become silent before a big storm. Whether it’s because we unconsciously sense danger or something else, as modern humans we’ve grown used to noise and tend to fill up any silent gaps in our experience with distracting sounds. So, we turn on the radio, play music on our smartphones, or have the TV on in the background to distract ourselves from the silence.
So, what is silence and why is it important? On one level silence is simply the relative absence of noise. Apart from in an anechoic chamber, which is a room that has been specially designed to absorb sound, we never hear total silence. Our bodies have sounds of breath, heartbeat, and digestion. Even our ears emit faint sounds called otoacoustic emissions that are produced from the inner ear as part of the natural hearing process.
On a different level silence is the space that contains all sounds. Like a bell ring, the nature of sound is to arise, sustain for a while then release back to silence. Even the continuous sound of air conditioning is eventually switched off to silence.
Our attention is automatically conditioned to hear sound in the foreground of our experience, so we tend to ignore the background silence as not interesting or important. In recent times, technologies like smartphone apps and automated notifications have accelerated our attention’s tendency to get caught up in content. So, it’s no wonder that if we’re asked to listen to silence, we find it very difficult.
Silence is fundamental in music, where it’s used to create rhythm, space, appreciation, and drama. The composer John Cage, famous for his “Four minutes, thirty-three seconds” of silence said, “There is no such thing as silence, no such thing as a lack of sonic energy or impulse.” Michael Pisaro, also a composer, said, “In silence, there is an infinite potential. This potential is the opposite of a steady state, it implies that things could change. “In John Cage’s composition, the musicians hold their instruments, but the performance is about the infinite possibilities of the sounds that arise in the silent environment.
It’s this same infinite potential that makes silence important, which is about shifting from a busy, noisy, limited, and disconnected state to a peaceful and open state full of possibilities. In this way, silence becomes a presence, rather than an absence.
Although it’s all too easy to get caught up in content, this aware presence is always available in the background of our experience. So, it’s up to us to discover and explore the potential of silence, where we can find the peace and wisdom to work more skilfully with our present-moment experience.
Suggested weekly practice
- Take a moment to notice the sounds around you and see if you can become aware of the latent silence beneath all sounds.
- Explore the link between silence, stillness, and space, which are all elements of being. For instance, you can imagine a lake with a still surface that takes up an expansive space but also has the quality of silence in its stillness.
- Try resting in background silence in your daily meditations as well as informal practice, like walking. Resting in the silence that all sounds arise from and release back into.
Guidance
Find somewhere undisturbed and sit in a comfortable, dignified and upright posture, where you can remain alert and aware.
There are two guided practices for this session. You can close your eyes, or lower your gaze while the meditations play.
- Play the first settling practice, then read through the session content, which you can print off if that helps.
- Then play the second practice to explore and experience both inner and outer silence as a source of infinite potential. During this guided meditation there will be periods of silence
Suggested weekly practice
- Take a moment to notice the sounds around you and see if you can become aware of the latent silence beneath all sounds.
- Explore the link between silence, stillness, and space, which are all elements of being. For instance, you can imagine a lake with a still surface that takes up an expansive space but also has the quality of silence in its stillness.
- Try including background silence in your daily meditations as well as informal practice, like walking. Resting in the silence that all sounds arise from and release back into.
