Silence is where we learn to listen, where we learn to see. Holding silence, being held by stillness, people go alone to the wilderness "to stop and see", to renew their vision, to enter the mind ground, to hear the truth, to return to the knowledge of the extensiveness of self and the truth of no self. One seeks solitude to know relatedness. There the unknown, the unarticulated, the unpredictable, the uncontrollable appear as protectors of the present.
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."