What is silence?
Is it the absence of sound?
We can sit beside a rushing river, surrounded by birdsong and wind, and experience profound stillness.
Or we can sit in a soundproof room and find ourselves surrounded by the noise of our own thoughts.
Perhaps quiet is a condition of the environment, while silence is a condition of awareness.
But even that leaves a question.
If sound continues around us, and thoughts continue within us, what is it that becomes still?
We spend much of our lives searching for peace by trying to quiet what disturbs us.
The noise of the world.
The echoes of our past.
The questions we cannot answer.
We imagine that somewhere beneath it all, silence is waiting.
And perhaps it is.
But what if silence is not the absence of sound, but the absence of separation?
A moment when we stop standing apart from life, judging what should or should not be, and simply allow ourselves to belong to it.
The river continues flowing.
The birds continue singing.
Our thoughts come and go.
Nothing has disappeared.
Yet something has changed.
We have stopped struggling against the moment.
And perhaps this is connected to something even deeper.
So much of our spiritual journey is described as remembering who we are. Removing the layers of fear, expectation, and identity until we recognize what has always been within us.
But how do we remember something we cannot describe?
How do we recognize a silence we may never have heard?
Perhaps remembrance is not the recovery of something forgotten.
Perhaps it is the recognition of something that never left.
And perhaps the mystery is not asking us to solve it.
Only enter it.
What if remembering who we are isn’t about finding an answer, but becoming comfortable enough with the mystery that we no longer need one?
Maybe silence has never been empty.
Maybe we have simply been too busy filling it to notice.
— a Torchbearer Wisdom by Corvalya