In Praise of Silence
A few words on the lack of words
In the Sufi tradition, a seeker on the spiritual path is called a murīd: literally, an ‘aspirant’. Meanwhile, the teacher is called the murshid: the ‘guide’, the source of wisdom and spiritual discipline.
This leads to an inevitable joke, a play on words available only in English. What’s the difference between the murīd and the murshid?
Sh(hhh)
That is to say: the difference between the student and the master is silence.
We already recognize the value of silence. What else do we desire when we ask for “peace and quiet”? And what, besides silence, would allow us to “hear ourselves think”?
And yet, silence doesn’t seem entirely comfortable to us, either. It exerts its own pressure, like the ‘vacuum energy’ theorized by modern physics: an energy inherent to nothingness, to the sheer presence of empty space.
Silence confronts us with feelings we’ve disavowed, with memories we’ve condemned, with realities from which, in the hustle and bustle of daily life, we seek to constantly distract ourselves.
We fill almost every waking moment with content: the chatter of podcasts, the flashes of images on our social-media feeds. For some of us, even taking a 5-minute pause to ourselves would…
