Have you ever been "stricken with silence"? If so, you have tasted the ineffable; you have had a mystical experience. Silence is too often defined as "the absence of something" when it is much more than that. Silence is also a search for something, a search for the depths, for the source. Many of the mystical awakenings experienced by astronauts and cosmonauts in space have been triggered by the cosmic silence they have encountered there. Similar things happen to persons swimming in the depths of the sea or spelunking in the caves of Mother Earth. Silence moves people. That is why it is so essential to meditation practices, including the art of listening to our images. Being, one might say, is silent. We must embrace silence in order to experience being. Then -- and only then -- does it speak deep truths to us. As Rilke says: "Being-silent. Who keeps innerly silent, touches the roots of speech."
Without faith that it is possible to render reality understandable by means of our theoretical constructs, without faith in an inner harmony of the world, there could be no science. This faith is and always will be the basic motivation behind every creative scientific idea. All our endeavors, all the dramatic conflicts between old and new ideas are supported by the eternal desire for knowledge, the unshakeable faith in cosmic harmony which becomes stronger the more difficulties loom before us.