Silence, Poetry, Philosophy — Two Meditations

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A Meditation on Silence

For thousands of years, prophets, mystics, spiritual seekers, and monastics have known of the value of silence. Over this period a huge literature has explored silence and proven its value to healing, personal knowledge, and spiritual development.

Recently, I watched a short video about Silence. The video offered a justification for Silence by referring to recent studies of the health benefits to be gained from actively seeking periods of silence.

I was dismayed by this. It seems that we need scientific data to justify something that thousands of years of wisdom and practice has already confirmed.Yet, this short video made no reference to this enormously rich and rewarding wisdom literature. Instead, it justified silence with appeals to scientific data. Silence, like Yoga, are practices developed and proven centuries ago; they never needed science’s imprimatur!

If you incorporate silence into a planned, daily, programme of functional activities with the objective of some health benefit, you are in effect executing a scheduled instruction set. In principle, a robot could be programmed to execute the same instruction set.