Silence

The school bell rang. A few 100 students poured out of the school gate but made no noise. In a second or two I realized that nature had robbed them of their ability to speak and hear.

There is an outer silence and an inner silence. Outer silence can be brought about by force. Inner silence breaks because of force. The dichotomy is that to convey silence you have to create a sound, sound of a word ‘silence’ or ‘shanti’ or ‘shhhh.’

There is a concept called Signal to Noise ratio (SNR) in Communication Systems. Mobile phone has some SNR which is the capability to detect the signal in spite of having noise in the surroundings. When your car windows are closed you need a lesser volume on your music system but if the windows are open music disperses in the outside noise. In former case SNR is high and in latter its low. When we were small we heard music of existence, of nature. A little noise didn’t matter much. We grew and we educated ourselves with too many things. That education imparted should have improved the signal strength but looks like it went on adding only noise. Noises of ‘me’, ‘my’ and ‘I’. My education, my job, my position, my money.. Just close your eyes and observe how the sounds of me-my-I keep screaming at the top of their voice. We have cautiously nurtured them. Every action of body and mind is mixed with the noises of ‘I’. The strongest of the Signal of existence has been totally submerged in the Noise of ‘I.’ The Signal tries hard to surface above the Noise in the form of good music that we hear, good book that we read, some inspiring speeches, ppt’s in forwarded emails. Subsequently, Noise takes over. As we age only Noise stays with us. It engulfs us and forms a hard unbreakable shell. Then our mind knows the word ‘silent’ and heart knows its deeper significance but the shell of noise is so thick that we rob ourselves of our natural ability to hear, the deeper experience of silence.

The lines below kept intentionally blank are meant for you to write your own meaning and understanding of noise and silence.







Peace!