Silence: In the Age of Noise

According to a philosopher, when we invented the ship, we also invented the moment of drowning; That is, the other side of every progress is darkness. There is no doubt that communication technologies have helped us a lot, facilitated things and brought us many achievements that we ourselves acknowledge, but we are talking about an age where something important, deep and precious called silence We lost it.

This era is hyperactive, hyperconnected, and hyperconnected. So much so that we are not alone with ourselves, our thoughts, imaginations and fears even for a few minutes. I want to say that we killed something important within ourselves and I want to speak in praise of silence in the time of noise.

Wounded human mind

Referring to Pascal's words , all human problems are caused by the fact that he cannot sit on a chair for minutes and do nothing. Researchers from two universities of Virginia and HarvardThey have done a shocking research in collaboration that has made them think for a long time. They put Pascal's words to the test and told some volunteers that they must sit in a room for 20 minutes, they have no right to sleep, they must not have a phone or any other means of communication with them, and they must not talk to anyone. There is also a button on the seat that gives them an electric shock if they push it themselves. They try this button beforehand and since the electric shock is painful, none of the volunteers like to use that button, but when they sit in the room and minutes pass, the silence bothers them in such a way that they begin to shock in a strange way. They do it themselves. 67% of men and 25% of women shocked themselves in this experiment. One of the volunteers (Mr.) shocked himself more than 190 times in 20 minutes; That is, every 6 seconds.

Therefore, we need an internal stimulus, and when it is not there, we provide it by giving a shock that is even very painful.

The human mind has the ability to spend long hours on a topic such as watching a movie, writing a text or reading it. So, how wounded and fragmented is our attention that we cannot sit still for 20 minutes! We are paradoxically poor in experience due to an abundance of stimulating experiences; That is, we understood so many consecutive exciting experiences with these mobile phones and our eyes that basically we no longer understand genuine experiences.

Just as we have a series of protected areas on planet Earth, which is being destroyed, we must create protected areas in our minds and psyches. Gilles DeleuzeThe great philosopher explains this very well. He says we should have the right not to say anything when we have nothing to say, so that when we do say something it is meaningful and profound. He talks about the "right to remain silent" and says that once upon a time, governments and authority structures would close their mouths so that people would not say anything, and this is how they exercised their authority. Currently, the form of exercising authority has paradoxically changed; They force people to say something and we lose depth. In our world, power is exercised with "must". Our world is an achievement world: you have to be successful, you have to be beautiful, you have to be seen, which is a form of dictatorship. These "shoulds" injure and scratch our psyche.

There are two things within the range of intellect: to speak at the time of silence and to speak at the time of silence

Fear of being left behind

Why are we so insistent on being connected to the world? In psychology, there is a phenomenon called FOMO , each of which is an abbreviation of a word: Fear of missing out. We must always be informed, and this issue has an evolutionary reason, because if we were not aware of the events of our tribe tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago, it was possible that we would be eliminated, killed, so we should be aware of what is going on in the society, who has the power. takes over, what happens in the tribe. Now, it's the same and it's like we're constantly afraid of missing something, while we can and should have general information about our surroundings, but we're too connected and the world is hyperactive.

Everything in the world is progressing so fast that the time will soon come when we will lose the last refuge of human creativity, the bathroom. The world has spread to the most private cells of our soul, it has taken away the permission of isolation from us. The world's pressure to achieve is like a prison with invisible but deeply real walls that limit us. We have forgotten everything, even when we forgot, we forgot. We do not remember that we lost the depth. We see without seeing, we hear without really hearing anything. We have a superficial touch of phenomena and events. We have experienced the death of depth in the modern world, and we want to talk about how we can create an isolation for ourselves to revive depth.

We quickly bridge any gap in everyday life. We have a fundamental fear of the same anxiety of living that is with us, and whenever there is free time when those existential attacks and fundamental questions come to the surface, we immediately pick up our phones and do everything without thinking; That is, the root of our desire to connect to the virtual world is existential fears, while silence is like a crack in the wall of the world that we can put our eyes on and see the other side of the wall for a while.

Silence and inaudible sounds

In 2010, Ms. Marina Abramovic performed a wonderful performance art called " The Artist is Present " in New York. He sat silently on the chair for 736 hours and 30 minutes. People came and saw him, but he stared at them in silence. The experience of Marina Abramovic is very audible. He explains that it was very much like a spiritual experience, the most important experience of his entire life, and how this silence helped him to hear sounds that we do not normally hear. First, he heard the noise in the museum, something we all get in a busy museum. Later, he slowly heard the sound of cars outside the museum and the sound of birds on the trees near the museum and experienced a depth that was unique.

The Japanese have a word in their language called " satori " which means understanding an enlightening vision, that is, a moment when you no longer experience time linearly, but streaks of inspiration occur to you in the world, and suddenly the truth becomes inescapable and self-evident. All people in the world have the experience of "Satori"; While praying, being in nature, while reading the text, in a romantic moment, etc., but I want to say that we have not experienced "satori" for a long time, that is, that discovery and intuition do not occur in us. To discover "satori", to understand this moment, we definitely need silence, we definitely need to slow down the rhythm of the world.

We should have a national day of silence, something that is established in Bali, an island in Indonesia. On this day, they stop all activities, close the international airport for 24 hours, cut off the internet and even electricity, people keep silent for a day and during this time they review the past year, review their sufferings, the meaning of their lives. They rethink and go through a great experience. It is as if they recreate the thoughtful life that Socrates talks about in that one day. In order for our fists to be filled with the joy of life and discovery and intuition, we must endure boredom because the reward for enduring boredom is the perception of depth. No man can understand depth unless he lives boredom, i.e. allows himself to be bored.

Low water, thirst-inducing atmosphere, to boil water from above and below

Do not drown in the world of the mind

To be in the world, but to have protected areas for our mind and experience, like a ship that is in water, but the water does not penetrate into it; It means to live and work in the flow of society, but be careful that this world does not subjugate our entire existence. In fact, the point we want to reach is that silence is often full of unspeakable things. Many things should not be said, it should be felt, experienced and finally just shown. At all, there are truths that destroy their telling. For example: a Portuguese word called " Sudad" ."which cannot be translated because there is a feeling of longing in it, sadness and relief in it. The meaning of "Soudad" if it can be described in one sentence, is a kind of mental state with sadness and ease of imagination. You lost something before and you searched for it, now you realize that you can't find it anymore. Think of a loved one whom you have longed for and missed, and suddenly you realize that you will no longer have him. It has taken thousands of years for people somewhere in the world to give a name to a spiritual phenomenon called "Sudad" and how many other spiritual and sensory phenomena exist that do not have a name and should only be felt in silence.

Just as speaking provides facilities for conveying a message, it takes facilities, that is, silence in speaking is also an important point. We need to be a little away from the world. A little isolation helps to keep us going. In praise of the usefulness of "barrenness", let me say this as if the world wants to consume us. There is nothing wrong with achieving, fighting, reaching our dreams and making the world a better place, but we can do these things better when we can leave a footprint in the sand of time and a mark in the world that we can keep a part of ourselves for ourselves. . Therefore, silence is very valuable. The important thing is to understand inner silence because our world is very busy, but the most important kind of silence is the silence that we feel inside.

Beethoven composed the third symphony while he was almost deaf. He made this symphony with the voices inside his head and that's why it's amazing. The canvas of music is silence. Notes are written in silence. In fact, we can look at music differently, as John Cage did. We can hear rhythmic silences. In fact, music is a collection of notes but there are silences between them which is an important part of music.

The author of the book Walking and Silence in the Noise has the experience of walking in the South Pole, in the North Pole and in the sewers of New York. In the middle of his trip to Antarctica, while walking on 30 million pieces of ice, he writes, "I've been lonelier at parties I've ever been to than here." Eskimos also have an interesting tradition in the North Pole that when someone is angry or sad, they leave the house and walk in a straight line. Whenever his anger, rage, sadness or anxiety decreases, he puts a stick into the snow and ice and measures that bad feeling. David Theron says:

We talked about the power of silence with various researches and people's lived experiences, but the solution that I suggest and has tried is that when we are in the protected area of ​​the mind, we remove all signs of distraction from ourselves. Because we are visually influenced by external stimuli. We have 11 million sensory receptors, 10 million of which belong to vision alone. So whenever we are doing something deep - like thinking about ourselves, reading or writing something - remove all the signs of distraction as much as possible and don't see at all.

Let your heart be happy alone, that one who avoids bodies will see the happiness of those who avoid bodies