Tuesday 2 June 2020

Noise and Silence

Now that the lockdown in England is ending the world is getting noisy again. One of the many pleasant side-effects of the enforced restrictions of the past 10 weeks (cleaner air being another) has been the relative peace and quiet. The racket of the modern world has been subdued and it has made me realise how I am constantly having to mentally defend myself from noise and this can be a very exhausting process. Anyone of any sensitivity has to do this. Practically all the time we are assaulted (there is no other word for it) by noise.

It is a commonplace now to say that the world gets noisier and noisier. The means of creating sound and making it louder become ever more sophisticated and available to everyone. The roar of traffic, the unholy din of pop music, planes overhead and so on. There are so many contributory factors. Even people are louder now than they used to be. All this simply drowns out the human ability to respond in any way to the spiritual world for this can only be truly detected in an atmosphere of quiet.

That doesn't mean complete silence. The sounds of nature do not generally interfere with spiritual response. But mechanical sounds, artificially created sounds and human sounds originating from the level of ego consciousness generally do. It is these that have become so ubiquitous and so loud for it is a twofold problem of volume and constancy.

Could one of the reasons for the dramatic decline in spiritual belief be because of the dramatic rise of noise? The latter will certainly feed the former because of the distraction it creates, distraction from deeper sensibility, together with the fact that it fixes a person subjected to it firmly in the material world. Not just the physical world but the artificial environment created by modern humanity that separates us not only from spirit but from nature too. Modern noise is produced by this world and it intensifies the quality of this world in our mind. It literally imprisons us in this world.

I see little prospect of human beings escaping the dominance of materialism if noise is not controlled. But firstly we must want to control it and too many people not only do not want this but actually seem to enjoy noise. And even many who do not enjoy it do not seem to mind it. Of course, our dislike of noise increases as we get older but could this sometimes be because we are, on a certain level, trying to prepare for entry into the spiritual world and noise is the number one obstacle to that?

Silence is a blessed gift from God and is the state in which we are best able to find God. When the outer world is shut down to an extent then we can enter the inner world. The prevalence of noise in modern times must certainly be one of the tools employed by the anti-spiritual powers to separate us from our true and deeper selves and keep us locked in a world without God.


5 comments:

Sean G. said...

Great post! As my connection with the Holy Spirit increases, my desire for distracting noises decreases. Cause and effect are reversible here, as they often are (Happiness makes you smile—smiling makes you happier.)

Let's pray drones and flying cars don't fill the sky or there will be no more peace on earth!

Bruce Charlton said...

@William - I certainly have appreciated the quiet, in a spiritual sense - and it has been very noticeable since I live only a mile from the centre of the Big City. My impression is tha tnoise makes it difficult to concentrate and to contemplate. It is certainly a part of the demonic strategy. On the other hand, it is not the central part - since modern rustics are just as Godless as the urbans.

William Wildblood said...

True about the rustics, Bruce (sounds like something out of A Midsummer Night's Dream!) but I suppose they will be affected by the general noise culture as much as the urbans.

Adil said...

I agree with Bruce Charlton's idea that communication in heaven is non verbal. It is amazing how much our civilization talks, yet how little is said. As a kid I always enjoyed the company of animals. They seemed more honest and didn't speak or smile, but you could see in their eyes that there was a presence there communicating from within. If it weren't for all the noise perhaps people would notice that even trees can speak.

S.K. Orr said...

Eric write, "If it weren't for all the noise perhaps people would notice that even trees can speak."

This is profound and simple and so, so true.