SILENT CONVERSATION

SILENT  CONVERSATION

Two old men, friends of many years standing, would meet in each other's house every day.  They would sit in perfect silence for a couple of hours, then the visitor would get up and leave, without a word of farewell.
The inevitable happened and, in the natural course of things, one of the old men died. "You must miss him a lot, " said a condoler to the survivor.  "I do," replied the bereaved friend. "What I particularly miss are the long conversations we used to enjoy with each other."
The story suggests that there are forms of communication which don't need the use of words. But more than that, it conveys a suitably wordless message that silence has its own subtle yet resonant vocabulary, if only we choose to learn its language.
Silence is not an absence of sound; it is the presence of meaning. When Swami Vivekananda during his visit to the western world was introduced to the actress, Sarah Bernhardt, known for her beauty and her seductive laugh, someone asked him if he had heard the actress's famous laughter. "No," said Vivekananda. "But she heard my silence."  It is said that Bernhardt was profoundly influenced by her meeting with the eastern sage.
 Learning to hear silence takes patience. A music composer who was congratulated on the elegant way in which he arranged the notes in his compositions replied, "The notes more or less take care of themselves; the difficulty lies in getting the silent bits right."
In an age of increasing electronic chatter - 24x7 television, mobile phones, Twitter, SMSs -  "getting the silent bits right" is becoming more and more difficult. And, for that reason, more and more necessary.
We don't have to go become hermits in the Himalayas, or seek the solitude of desert wastes, to find silence. In fact, the trick is in finding silence in the midst of our everyday, workaday lives, in the middle of conversations with each other.
Is this business of finding silence just another way of saying that we should turn a deaf ear to what others are saying to us? Quite the contrary. The true meaning of the language of silence lies not in exclusion but in inclusion; not in cutting oneself off from people or from what is around us, but in finding a different, deeper level of communication.
In legal terms, silence means consent. If, for example, you saw someone about to commit a criminal act and didn't warn the victim or raise an alarm, a law court could take your silence to mean that you gave your consent to the act and as such were an accomplice to it. This is a negative interpretation of the consenting nature of silence.
A positive interpretation of silence would be that it affirms a unity of consciousness as distinct from a duality. A seeker asked a spiritual master: "How can I transcend into the All?" The master made no reply. Every day, the seeker would ask the same question, and every day the master would maintain his silence.
Exasperated, the seeker finally asked the master, "What's the matter? Why don't you reply to my question that I've been asking every day?" The master said, "I have been replying to your question every day. But you talk so much that you don't hear my reply."
The seeker understood that the master's reply to his question was silence. Because silence provided the bridge across the chasm of duality caused by the use of two words: 'I' and 'All'. By seeking to become one with the cosmos, the spoken 'I' was separating itself from a wordless union which already existed, and which could only be realised when words like 'I' and 'All' were surrendered into silence.
"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent," said Wittgenstein. This silence beyond words that the Austrian philosopher referred to has been given different names on different signposts set up by spiritual masters to guide seekers. One of these synonyms for silence is meditation, another is prayer.
You don't need to go to an ashram  or a cave in the wilderness to meditate. You don't have to go to a shrine to pray. You can do either in your home, or your place of work during a spare moment. Perhaps, best of all, like the two friends in the story, you can do either of them when deep in silent conversation with someone else who is you by another name, just as you are the someone else by another name. And both are one in silence.