Becoming Silent and Still

Toward the Silence of the Innermost Center

TrackThe Ultimate Alchemy, Vol. 2

In stock
"Silence is meditation, and silence is basic for any religious experience. What is silence? You can create it, you can cultivate it, you can force it, but then it is just superficial, false, pseudo. You..."
"Silence is meditation, and silence is basic for any religious experience. What is silence? You can create it, you can cultivate it, you can force it, but then it is just superficial, false, pseudo. You..."

Osho continues:
"A modern musician and composer, John Cage, has said many times that silence is impossible. You can have musical sounds, you can have nonmusical sounds; you can have sounds you like and sounds you don't like. When you don't like sounds, they become noise; when you like noise, it becomes music. But you cannot have silence – Cage says you cannot have silence.

"He reports one incident. He thought previously, before this incident, that silence is a possibility, but he had not meditated over it. Once he entered a hall in Harvard University built particularly for some scientific engineering purposes. The hall was absolutely soundproof and anti-echo, absolutely. He entered the hall. He has an ear for sound, he is a great musician, one of the greatest of this century. In that hall he began to hear two sounds: one a high sound, the other a low sound.

"He asked the engineer-in-charge, 'You say this hall is absolutely soundproof, you say it is anti-echo, but I hear two sounds: one high and one low.'

"The engineer said, 'The high sound is your nervous system working and the low sound is your blood in circulation.'

"Cage says, 'That day I became absolutely certain that, unless I die, silence is impossible.'

"Silence is impossible in the outside world. And your nervous system is part of the outside world, not of the inside. And your blood circulation is part of the outside world, not of the inside. The real inside is absolutely silent. If you allow me I will say: the absolute point of silence is the inside.

"Sound is outside, silence is inside. Silence and inside are synonymous. If you move out, then you move in sound. If you move in, then you move in silence. And unless you reach a point where no sound is…or, as the Zen masters say, the soundless sound, or as the Hindu yogis have always called it, anahat nada, the uncreated, soundless sound. But one need not use these paradoxical words. It will be easy to understand with simple words. Outside is sound, inside is silence, soundlessness.

"But Cage is right. If you are thinking in terms of objective silence, there is no possibility."
More Information
Publisher Osho International
Duration of Talk 96 mins
File Size 22.79 MB
Type Conversa Individual
Edition/ Version 2