“To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it’s because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that’s where phrases like ‘deadly dull’ or ‘excruciatingly dull’ come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient, low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing’s pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly…but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places any more but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets’ checkouts, airport gates, SUVs’ backseats. Walkman, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everyone knows it’s about something else, way down.”
David Foster Wallace
“Within each of our forms lies the existential mystery of being. Apart from one’s physical appearance, personality, gender, his- tory, occupation, hopes and dreams, comings and goings, there lies an eerie silence, an abyss of stillness charged with an etheric presence. For all of our anxious business and obsession with triviality, we cannot completely deny this phantasmal essence at our core. And yet we do everything we can to avoid its stillness, its silence, its utter emptiness and radiant intimacy.”
Adyashanti (via moreofamore)
(Source: ashramof1)
“The futility of everything that comes to us from the media is the inescapable consequence of the absolute inability of that particular stage to remain silent. Music, commercial breaks, news flashes, adverts, news broadcasts, movies, presenters—there is no alternative but to fill the screen; otherwise there would be an irremediable void…. That’s why the slightest technical hitch, the slightest slip on the part of the presenter becomes so exciting, for it reveals the depth of the emptiness squinting out at us through this little window.”
Jean Baudrillard (via mindfullyobscure)
“People often ask me questions that I cannot very well answer in words, and it makes me sad to think they are unable to hear the voice of my silence.”
Hazrat Inayat Khan (via fluxofpinkindians)
(Source: smirkingbuddha)
“Real surrender is when the mind becomes quiet.”
Sri ShivaRudraBalayogi (via moreofamore)
(Source: lazyyogi)
“You are most powerful when you are most silent. People never expect silence. They expect words, motion, defense, offense, back and forth. They expect to leap into the fray. They are ready, fists up, words hanging leaping from their mouths. Silence? No.”
Alison McGhee, All Rivers Flow To The Sea (via cvnp)
(Source: hermicent)
How noise pollution increases your heart attack risk
Every 10 decibels of roadway traffic noise increases the risk of heart attack by 12 percent, according to a new study.
“I would say the cultivation of silence is indispensable to being human. People sometimes talk as if they were ‘looking for silence,’ as if silence had gone away or they had misplaced it somewhere. But it is hardly something they could have misplaced. Silence is the infinite horizon against which is set every word they have ever spoken, and they can’t find it? Not to worry—it will find them.”
How Silence Works: Emailed Conversations With Four Trappist Monks | The Awl (via moreofamore)
“We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature - trees, flowers, grass- grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence… We need silence to be able to touch souls.”
Mother Teresa (via lucifelle)
That’s when you know you’ve found somebody really special. When you can just shut the fuck up for a minute and comfortably share silence.
(Source: dirtylies-myregards)
