TEDxSalford

Silence Is Golden

When I first heard about a man who’d travelled the world for 17 years, in silence and mostly on foot, I wondered what it would be like to just be silent for a single day. So I earnestly vowed to be silent and pay attention on my walk to work, down a lovely cycle path through the woods. I fell over at the first hurdle, when a work colleague said hello as soon as I walked in the building. To not respond would’ve been rude, so my day of silence lasted from waking up till I arrived at work, an unimpressive two hours. John Francis (nicknamed the planetwalker) fared much better.

On his 27th birthday in 1976 he stopped speaking just for a day, as an experiment. He’d been affected by an environmental disaster close to his home, that had caused him to think about the environment and his impact on it. He decided to give up using motorised vehicles, so where he was living in the States, his neighbours didn’t understand why he’d given up driving and almost found it personally offensive that he chose to walk everywhere instead. Because he was getting fed up of arguing with his neighbours he just decided to keep quiet for a single day, to see what effect that had, whether it would keep the peace and let the community heal.

John was right, that did happen, but what he hadn’t expected was that physical silence opened a new world of awareness for him. He found that he was suddenly listening in a way that he hadn’t before. In a conversation his mind was racing ahead to what he was going to say next, but he wasn’t really listening. At the end of the day, he hadn’t finished listening, so instead of just having his one day experiment, he spent the next seventeen years in voluntary silence, walking the planet. During this time, he completed three degrees and his PhD. He is now an environmental conservationist and fellow of National Geographic.

Watch John’s 2008 TED Talk – John Francis: Walk the earth … my 17-year vow of silence

Tim Parks, the famous British author, documents his experiences with silent retreats in his book, ‘Teach Us To Sit Still’. After coming to terms with the imposed silence at the meditation retreats he went to, he comes to the revelation that he has lost the ability to experience because he is always putting the situation into words, describing it to himself, thinking how he’d describe it to others.

‘Such pertinent reflections were stealing away the experience that I had come for, the experience of wordlessness. Reflection comes at the expense of being.’ In his Vipassana meditation class, the retreat’s first rule is silence, the Noble Silence.’

At a silent retreat, he stands in a garden, next to a woman who’s gone outside to smoke. He recalls standing next to her in a comfortable silence, both knowing that they don’t need to strike up a conversation they can just be in someone else’s company without needing to engage them. It wasn’t as awkward as he would have thought, in fact it was peaceful and comfortable.

So can just coexisting with other people in silence, foster a greater sense of community? Prof. Diarmaid MacCulloch has written a book  about the history of silent religious orders in the west, and he traces them back to the eastern mysticism in India, which Tim Parkes’s retreat emulates.

Monks and nuns in silent orders use sign language to communicate, and from this grew a sort of newspeak, where they only had words for things they needed to communicate in a practical sense within their community. It’s a language of cooking, libraries and worship. They don’t have words for things they don’t do so there is no word for meat, for example – because they didn’t eat it. So their sign newspeak is a shared language that reflects the values of the community by what it can’t say, as mush as what it can say. I’m guessing they were missing the ability to swear creatively, which, if I took a vow of silence would be the first thing I’d learn. But then, a lot of conflict must be avoided by such a utilitarian method for communication that doesn’t have room for insults, scheming or gossip.

Silence in western religion doesn’t go back as far as we might think. There are no mentions of monasticism in the bible – in fact, silence was a negative quality early on. The ancient Israelites thought that the noisier the Gods were, the more active they were. That a dumb, silent God was no good at all. The first instance of silence in Christianity was in second century Syria. Syrian traders travelled to India and saw Buddhist and Hindu monks and brought back the link between silence and religious meditation. Religious icons are pictures which can be meditated on without words. In the orthodox, eastern Christian tradition, visual contemplation is more democratic and everyone is just as able to wordlessly contemplate an icon than to participate in a Latin mass.

So, it’s possible, as John Francis and Tim Parks found out, that silence is not necessarily anti-social, that it can be the opposite as long as both parties accept the silence. John Francis finds that verbal chatter stops him from listening, and Tim Parks learns that switching off the verbal chatter is just the first, and easiest step to turning off the mental chatter that is pretty much omnipresent from the time we learn to talk.

Matt Killingsworth presents a study of mind-wandering in his talk: Want to be happier? Stay in the moment (TEDx Cambridge 2012). He shows that the more our minds wander, the less happy we are. Even if we’re doing a boring task, having our minds wander while we’re doing it, makes us less happy than if we just focussed on the task. So this constant verbal and mental chatter is just making it harder for us to focus on what we’re actually experiencing, and that lack of focus and physicality is making us less happy.

As Tim Parks’ meditation teacher says, much to his irritation, as he tries to fathom what on earth the guy means,” These are not your thoughts.” After much meditation practice, Tim realises that “we’re trained rigorously, unrelentingly to think – to read, write, analyse, criticise, talk, debate and verbalise – but when are we required not to do any of these things routinely?”

So what’s the solution? Even identifying a problem is a step in the right direction. John Francis talks about how a small intention can effect a huge change, so try Andy Puddicombe’s 10 mindful minutes today, doing whatever it is you’d be doing anyway, but pay attention to it, whether it’s walking or washing up … or watching a TED Talk. Just don’t multitask, don’t chat through it, just focus on it silently and enjoy it. Good luck. And shhh.