SPIRITUAL - Xtreme Music

JoSeph diSpenZa
author of
on Silence: 30 days To a powerful
Spiritual practice
when I tell people that I spent an entire year in silence, their
expressions usually stop cold, waiting for their minds to catch up
with the novel information. How can anyone live in silence for a
year? Their eyes seem to ask—even if it were possible to live in
silence, why would anyone want to?
Being silent was not difficult for me. Perhaps my biggest
surprise was that once I went into the silence, I was not interested,
most of the time, in speaking. Also, when no one is speaking, it
is much easier to be quiet than if some people are speaking and
others are not. In the monastery, sixty of us monks lived under the
rule of silence.
As for why we wanted to be silent, that relates to the nature
of monastic life itself, which is to be apart from the world and to
have the opportunity for reflection and meditation, activities that
are “inner” and require quiet. It would be absurd to try to follow
a contemplative path and also to allow noise into one’s realm. The
two do not go together.
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