"Be still, and know that I am God."

[ArmsMerchant]

Civilization is becoming (okay, has been, ever since the Industrial Revolution) very noisy. This is inimical to spiritual development. Even more so is all the talk, talk, talk. As Aldous Huxley pointed out in The Perennial Philosophy,"Unrestrained and indiscriminate talk is morally evil and spirtually dangerous." The Bible puts it even more strongly--"But I say unto you, That every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgement." (NOte:a ll following unattributed quotes are from the PP.)

Yet what do we do? Most of the words we utter, aloud or on-line, tend to be either 1) inspired by mean-spiritedness or outright malice (i.e., flames); words inspired by ego manifested as greed or self-love; and 3) words inspired by pure bone-headedness, mere sound and fury signifying nothing but a desire to distract and be distracted.

They greatly outnumber those words which come from a place of love, or dictated by reason or necessity. And if we include the endless internal monologues, the constant monkey-babbling of our tiny minds. . . . .

So, what is the problem? The problem is that because for many of us--and for our predecessors, the exponents of the Perennial Philosophy, the sages and Sufis and saints and shamans and weird holy dudes who down through the years have insisted that there is only one true end and purpose to life--attaining a unitive knowledge of the divine ground of being. Or in other words, becoming enlightened, attaining satori, or going to heaven (except that for some of us, this is a solely posthumous possibility).

All those idle words are vanities--"the silly no less that the self-regarding and the uncharitable" get in the way of this. They are "a dance of dust and flies obscuring the inward and outward Light."

I would suggest that we need to pay attention, to be vigilant in our language, and compassionate in our mode of expression. I think it behooves us to be mindful of the fact that we pay a high price for the dubious pleasures of contentious and sarcastic discourse.

Chuang Tau observed that, just as a dog is not considered a good dog because he is a good barker, so is a man not considered a man because he is a good talker.

Only in silence and stillness can we connect with the worlds within.