The Creative Balance Between Sound and Silence
Carlos Cardoso Aveline
How far can we actually listen to reality and observe facts?
The average citizen is threatened by the intense flow of his own personal opinions. He risks becoming psychologically deaf. One must have a degree of detachment, in order to be able to pay attention to life and learn something from it.
It is inevitable at any given time to have a point of view from which to see things.
However, one’s perspective must be regularly reexamined so as to improve its accuracy. If we look at reality from a noble standpoint, this may displease and irritate quite a few individuals and power structures. Listening to facts and learning from them is often politically incorrect.
Discernment is needed for one to avoid mere routine and blind skepticism. By refusing to concentrate on the negative aspects of life, we preserve our liberty and stay away from the fragmented levels of consciousness.
It is not necessary to always have an opinion about every issue. It is important to admit we do not know the things we ignore, so that we can search for the truth about them. Narrowness and ignorance inspire those who pretend to know it all, about anything. Wise people carefully examine reality once and again, before forming an opinion. And what gives us a right to exert criticism is the noble intention that we may have, of healing the diseases of human soul and correcting our mistakes, individually and collectively. That demands self-sacrifice, for one’s intention will be misunderstood by many.
The practice of silence is valuable: noise prevents us from listening. One saves psychic energy by resisting the pressure exerted by premature opinions. We must avoid the energetic loss that takes place whenever we talk to someone who is not interested.
If I say nothing for some time, I may be able, later on, to transmit the whole idea in a few words, and in a better documented way.
“The unexamined life is not worth living”, said Socrates. And we might add:
“The unexamined sentence is not worth saying”. [1]
When I speak, I must talk about things that are valuable to me and examine to what extent I’m actually being heard. It is often more effective to speak through actions than words. True sages teach by example. Facts and actions should come before words, whenever possible.
The Unworded Reality of Bliss
Part of the search for wisdom consists therefore in living the Void, listening to the silence and contemplating the Nothing.
For these are but names of the door to Plenitude, to the music of the Spheres and the Universal Law.
When the lessons we learn are truly divine, most worded thoughts may look like tiresome, boring, and precarious.
There are times when the pilgrim searches for the Silence as his own and highest temple, and the practice is correct. At other times, Silence comes to him with the strength and authority of his own conscience, and suspends much of his worded levels of awareness. Then the best thing to do is to accept looking at the outer world as if it were behind an invisible Karmic glass, while we experience the unworded reality of inner peace.
NOTE:
[1] In courses of Journalism, it has been said that “editing texts consists in eliminating words” and “any word that can be deleted should be so”.
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The above article corresponds to two texts published in the May 2016 edition of “The Aquarian Theosophist”, pp. 1-2. They had no indication as to the name of the author.
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