Essay: Silence

Silence is a contemplation of your surroundings and a way to gain a deeper understanding of the world. Silence is a learning experience; it allows us to get in touch with ourselves in an open calm atmosphere. Silence also allows us to gain a connection with our surroundings that would never exist otherwise. The reason that this connection never forms is because we are so busy and we never have ‘time’ to contemplate and gain a connection to our surrounding in silence. Silence not only gives us a connection to our surroundings in addition to giving us a profound understanding of our surroundings and ourselves. Silence is relaxing it can give us breathing room to deal with the troubles of everyday life. The fact that you push everything aside when you listen to silence allows you to be calm and ready to deal with the rigors of life. Silence is basically an awakening experience that gives us breathing room when we need it and a way to connect to our surroundings and ourselves.

Silence is difficult to get into sometimes. When I began the thirty-minute silence assignment this work is about it was really difficult to remain focused on the silence. I kept having the urge to grab a book and read it or to do something other than sit there. Eventually it got easier to remain in the silence, once I was completely immersed in the silence time just slipped by, to me it seemed that time was passing ever so slowly. When I went to check the time I discovered that nearly thirty minutes had passed. The really amazing thing about silence is that you enter this little world that includes only you, your surrounding, and the silence. This solitude allows you to view the world in a new perspective uncluttered with worries, thoughts, or stresses. During the course of the silence I felt a feeling that I should do something but in the back of my mind I knew that I had to experience the silence so I resisted that urge to do something other than sit in silence.

Being is silence is almost like floating in the middle of a pool underneath the water and just relaxing. I felt like I was within and endless void that stretched on forever. Though my mind was cleared and empty most of the time I felt like my mind had grown and expanded to fill the void that I sat within with the silence. I felt like my cluttered mind had been expanded and somewhat reorganized I felt as if my mind had been sharpened and I saw my house more clearly. The silence drew the whole world into a greater perspective for me. The silence was serene and expanded to the limits of my mind it was a really stirring feeling to fill my mind with silence. The most powerful thing that I felt during the silence was the feeling of an expanded mind and of a deep penetrating peace. The strange thing was that many of my thoughts where outside of me they where like bits of dust that where blown away almost as soon as they landed.

Silence creates and atmosphere that cannot be achieved in any other way but silence. It’s almost like floating in a cloud; of course I have had very little sleep lately so that’s probably why it felt like floating in a cloud. It just gives you that perspective that really opens your mind and lets you see things more clearly. Silence also makes you feel separate from other people. During that time that you connect yourself with your surrounding and yourself somehow you are distanced from others that distance is easy to overcome but it just feels odd to me to be distanced from people. The distance seemed huge after the silence was over but as soon as my sister talked to me somehow that distance vanished. Silence is great and all but I couldn’t imagine being raised like that. The ability to contemplate everything all of the time is good but not being able to talk to my parents would be strange and my life would be a lot harder and completely different. Being raised in silence would eventually expand the distance from people into an enormous gap that would be enormously difficult to cross.

In conclusion silence is a useful tool that can be used to relive stress and give you some breathing room to people with to many things on their minds. Silence is like a serene void surrounded by a shield that nearly keeps out thought. The downsides of silence are the distance that silence puts between you and other people and the proneness for it to cause sleep sometimes, for the most part though silence is very useful and a good way to strengthen the mind. While I sat in silence after I had overcome the temptation to read a book I began to feel a peace that flooded through me after I had cleared my mind that was really nice. When some time had passed I began to feel extremely tired and nearly fell asleep but just barely managed to escaped falling asleep. When the near sleep experience was over the time just flew by and at the end of the experience my tiredness had melted away. The only way that I think silence can be misused is if a father or parent figure forces silence upon their child and this forcing can possible cause the child to have a hard time talking to other people because of the forced silence. But for the most part I think that silence is a good tool to use and a good was to pass the time if you have nothing else to do because of the rate that time flies during the silence.