"Who knows, does not say." Tao te Ching
"Nothing in creation is so like God as silence." Meister Eckhardt
"So it's not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don't stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves; What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying. What we're plagued by these days isn't any blocking of communication, but pointless statements. "
(Gilles Deleuze's Negotiations, 1972-1990)
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(Gilles Deleuze's Negotiations, 1972-1990)
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The most profound conversations are carried out in silence. Language, since it is a form, eventually comes to a dead end. "Language cannot contain reality...we know more than words can tell" says Ali Lakhani. While we must speak and converse, a form, in the final analysis, cannot do justice to the deepest, the highest essences, as sages of both East and West have reminded us. It can't do justice especially because languages in our modern world have lost their symbolic quality, something we see nowadays around us. When thought patterns and worldviews become depleted of their symbolic, mythical and metaphysical contents, then languages also get affected; with the loss of the sacred and the science of metaphysics through which we have access to the sacred---the loss of verticality---languages also begin to lose their symbolic and anagogical richness and end up expressing the flat, one dimensional inner cosmos of the speakers or users of those languages. So much is said these days, but all so weightless, so lacking in profundity, so utterly superficial and meaningless. The continuous, colorless, vapid chatter and especially the speed with which it is carried out by many people, the young in particular, is outright ugly, lacking all the old charm and beauty.
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