The Power of Silence

This book, the author’s “thanks to silence” as the most under-used and underrated personal resource (p. 237), is unusually important, offering a journey to, and through, a silent world, and that within an environment drowning in noise. After all, silence is the realm where God exists. (p. 15) Without silence closeness to God is unimaginable (p. 124), it being a higher form of speaking, without forming words, helping one to learn who one really is. In fact, silence as the first language of God (p. 132), is a much better communicator than words. (p. 38) No man-made sound, even Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s, can equal silence. (p. 141) Silence is extremely important even in music (p. 45), not as anti-music but as its second language. (p. 50) Indeed, silence before and after a concert is its integral part. For Western societies, chattering away without inhibition, remaining still is not attractive. Psychotherapists do value silence as “productive” and actors when playing Harold Pinter or Samuel Beckett are trading in silence as much as in speech. But current culture essentially is a flight from it. Noise gives people a feeling of security and protects them from themselves.