The silence that knows it is

AI-assisted translation from the Greek. Greek original

There is a silence that is neither a lack of sound nor an absence of speech, and perhaps, if you pay attention to it for a moment, you will see that it is neither something that appears when the noise around you stops nor the result of a stillness you have managed to attain through effort, but something that exists independently of what moves within and around you, like a foundation that no one laid and that nevertheless stands.

When you encounter it, if you encounter it, you notice something strange, something hard to put into words because words want to make it an object, and it is not an object but a presence that expects nothing of you, does not ask you to address it, promises no answers, does not offer itself as a place where you will hear a voice or receive a revelation, and yet it is there, steady in a way that moving things are not, quiet without seeking its quietness, deep without needing to display its depth.

Our relationship with it is usually awkward, and perhaps this says something important about the way we have learned to live, because we pass it by without noticing when it appears fleetingly between two thoughts, we rush to fill the emptiness we imagine it to be, we equate it with loneliness because we know no other way of being present without speaking or listening, and so, when it appears within us, we immediately look for something to think or something to say so that the awkwardness will go away, as though we were afraid of what would be revealed if we let it stay.

But this silence, if you allow yourself to remain with it for a while without imposing a shape on it or asking it to give you something, begins to reveal a quality that does not fit familiar categories, because it is not pleasant in the way that entertainment or satisfaction is pleasant, nor unpleasant in the way that deprivation or grief is unpleasant, but stands somewhere beyond these distinctions, with a kind of seriousness that is not heavy and a kind of lightness that is not frivolity.

When you begin to recognize its presence, you may notice something even subtler: your whole life is constantly moving, thoughts come and go, emotions flare up and subside, desires kindle and die out, plans take shape and fall apart, and amid all this movement the silence does not move, does not come and go, does not depend on what happens on the surface, but is present as the very condition in which everything that moves can appear.

It is not divine in the sense that religion would have you see it, it is not mystical in the sense that traditions of spiritual seeking would describe it, it is not a higher state available only to a few, but the simplest of all the things you can encounter, and perhaps that is also why it is the hardest to recognize, because we are always looking for something important, something great, something that vindicates the search, and silence has none of these things to offer you.

When you stop insisting on something, it appears of its own accord, and this is perhaps its strangest feature: it cannot be attained through effort; on the contrary, effort drives it away, and it does not appear to those who seek it intensely but to those who have stopped seeking it, as though it were sensitive to the weight of our desire and withdrew when we asked for it, returning when the search ceased, not out of some stubbornness of its own, but because perhaps the search itself was what concealed its presence.

This does not mean that you should stop searching, nor that the search was a mistake, but perhaps at some point, in the midst of searching, if it happens, you recognize that what you are looking for was there from the beginning, that you needed to do nothing for it to appear, that all the work of searching was perhaps what prevented the encounter, and when the obstacle ceases, not because you force it to cease but because it has exhausted itself, the silence that was always there becomes apparent as though for the first time.

You do not need to learn anything, you do not need to follow anyone, you do not need to practise techniques, and this is perhaps the greatest relief this silence can offer you: it demands nothing of you, sets no conditions, expects no achievements, and the only encounter that can happen with it is when, at some moment, without knowing why or how, you find yourself standing without insisting on anything, and it is there, as it has always been.