Fundamental Purity

Real Silence

SILENCE is meditation and silence is basic for any religious experience. What is silence? You can create it, you can cultivate it, you can force it, but then it is just superficial, false, pseudo. You can practise it, and you will begin to feel and experience it – but your practice makes it auto-hypnotic. It is not the real silence. Real silence comes only when your mind dissolves: not through any effort, but through understanding; not through any practice, but through an inner awareness.

We are filled with sounds, outside and inside. In the outside world it is impossible to create a situation which is silent. Even when we move to a deep forest, there is no silence – only new sounds, natural sounds. At midnight everything stops, but it is not silence – only new sounds, sounds you are not acquainted with. They are more harmonious, of course, more musical, but they are still sounds, not silence.

A modern musician and composer, John Cage, has said many times that silence is impossible. You can have musical sounds, you can have non-musical sounds; you can have sounds you like and sounds you do not like. When you do not like sounds, it becomes noise; when you like noise, it becomes music: but you cannot have silence. Cage said you cannot have silence!

He reports one incident; he thought previously, before this incident, that silence is a possibility, but he had not meditated over it. Once he entered a hall in Harvard University built particularly for some scientific engineering purpose. The hall was absolutely soundproof and echo-proof – absolutely. He entered the hall, but he had an ear so he found sound. He is a great musician, one of the greatest of this century. In that hall he began to hear two sounds: one a high sound, another a low sound.

He said to the engineer-in-charge, “You say this hall is absolutely soundproof; you say it is echo- proof. But I hear two sounds: one high and one low.”

The engineer said, “The high sound is your nervous system working and the low sound is your blood in circulation.”

Cage says, “That day I become absolutely certain that unless I die silence is impossible.”

Silence is impossible in the outside world, and your nervous system is part of the outside, not of the inside; your blood circulation is part of the outside world, not of the inside. The real inside is absolutely silent. If you allow me, I will say that the absolute point of silence is the inside. Sound is outside, silence is inside. “Silence” and “inside” are synonymous. If you move out, then you move in sound. If you move in, then you move in silence. You must reach a point where no-sound is, or as the Zen Masters say, the soundless sound. The Hindu yogis have always called it anahata nada; the uncreated sound of silence.

But one need not use these paradoxical words: it will be easy to understand with simple words.

Outside is sound, inside there is silence, soundlessness. But Cage is right. If you are thinking in terms of objective silence, there is no possibility of silence. If you are thinking of silence as being somewhere other than your inner center, then there is no possibility of it. But you can create a pseudo silence very easily. You can cultivate it, you can practise it.

For example, you can use any mantra. Constant repetition will give you a pseudo-feeling of silence, a false feeling of silence. Constant repetition of a mantra hypnotizes you. You begin to feel dull, your awareness is lost, you become more and more sleepy. In that sleepiness you may feel that you have become silent, but it is not silence. Silence means that the mind is dissolved through understanding.