Silence is one of the realities that, paradoxically, is most talked about. It is a permanent theme on which you can write texts as beautiful as this one.
With dignity they know the forest and the rock to silence with you. Be the tree you love again, the one with wide branches: silent and attentive hangs over the sea. Where the solitude ends, the market also begins the noise of the great actors and the humming of the poisonous flies ... The world revolves around the inventors of new values, revolves without being perceived. But the people and fame revolve around the actors: this is how the world moves.
It is the invitation of Zarathustra, in Thus Zarathushtra spoke of F. Nietzsche, to share the silent solitude of nature, today more necessary than ever in a world that is increasingly noisy and disconnected from the natural. A world manufactured from certain instances that have brought an excess of verbalism and noisy signals, as well as ignorance and estrangement from oneself.
Such is the invention of the machine and its development with the penetration of inharmonic sound in the life of the individual. It is a product of industrialization, the era of heavy and raucous loud engines that spreads in many jobs. And that occupies the roads and streets of our cities with the heat of vehicle traffic. A noise in progressive increase, since the technological development of the information and knowledge society is not being more benign with this insidious host, which produces new and increasingly sophisticated acoustic forms. The intensification and diversification of this disturbing element has extended to all areas of private and public life. A discordant symphony of sounds coming from televisions, radios, mobile phones ... penetrates omnipresently at all times in the minds of citizens. While these same means of communication vulgarize and intensify, in turn, the voice and noise in the manufacture of reality and consciousness, with serial packages of homogenizing slogans.
The mass culture makes silence impossible and commercializes the dissonant acoustics, giving it diverse senses. So that noise has been linked in recent decades to different aspects of social life. It has become an expression of joy, although many times it is more of a crash and strident than a natural contentment. Such is, for example, the spokesmanship and the noise of mass sports. It has also infiltrated the party, so that the party is only such if it is accompanied by powerful decibels. It has also been considered the noise of youth. When the noise, in itself, is not a characteristic of any age, but an unnecessary interference, often artificial, with which the silent nature, as own as little recognized, of the human being is invaded and attacked.
There are certainly numerous forms and interpretations of silence as a sign, as varied as the intentions of the witness and the interpreter. This results in, among others, an affectionate, prudent, accepting, threatening, denial or ambiguous silence. However, talking about silence, and above all practicing it, has become something inappropriate or strange, being able to become a provocation in some contexts of Western culture. Think of many social gatherings in which silence is interpreted as impolite. Or, in another sense, what happens, still, in those cultures where the segregating silence imposed on women in mixed meetings persists. In the same way that in societies that say they are stripped of taboos, certain stigmatized diseases such as AIDS or mental illness are still signaled.
Who has always had the power to administer and regulate the word and silence is the Institution. The absence of the word in the monastic spheres of the medieval West - different from the self-imposed and chosen silence of spiritual hermitism - and in certain rituals, although these contexts are increasingly restricted, has been very well established. In the political sphere, citizens are also silenced, allowing them to speak only once every four years. And, in the healthcare context it often happens that there is no exchange value, since the valid word turns out to be the functional word that confirms the doctor in front of the patient who has lost the use of it. Also, the educational space is increasingly a dictated universe, where the freedom of professorship is restricted and explicit pre-established curriculums mute the possibility of other options.
Unmistakable is also the silence that is shown before the political or religious authority as an obvious sign of ritual respect or submission. It also emanates censorship or imposed silence. It is the forced mutism that makes silent the voices not accepted by the system, and the word pronounced by the adversary is dangerous.
There is also the unaccepted word, which is so often disregarded and ignored in everyday life. It is the word that is not heard, which the interlocutor translates into noise or lack of meaning. It happens every time someone says something but what is expressed is not taken into consideration or deprived of meaning. Fact well described by the expressions: as if it hears rain or enters through one ear and comes out through the other.
There are times when the word hinders and disappears in the intimate silence of lovers. Meher Baba speaks of this silence when he asks his disciples why people shout when they are angry. After hearing their responses, and not satisfying any of them, he explains that when two people are angry, their hearts go very far. To cover that distance they must shout to be heard. The more angry they are, the louder they will have to shout to hear each other over that great distance. Unlike when two people love each other, they don't even need to whisper, they just look at each other and that's it.
The truth is that we have become accustomed to this surrounding noise that has invaded our lives, without realizing that it affects our health and the way we manage the world, leaving no room to find oneself. Thus, it becomes more necessary than ever to get away from human noise, and imitate nature in the latent full silence under its natural sound. It is about living through introspection the mental silence, which goes beyond the mental constructions of the word. It is the mute look where thought fades, the conventional construction of the world, and discovers its unprecedented universe to human nature. The experience of this silence resembles emptiness in its fullness, is invisible, intangible and inaudible. It underlies in every sense, it seems that it annuls it when, in reality, without this mysterious silence there would be neither the experimenter nor the world.
Aitxus Iñarra: Professor at the University of the Basque Country
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