Our personal lives are spent largely in making a living and amassing resources, as if we will have a receding life. 'Silence' is one of his many marvels in the area of mindfulness and well-being authored by Thich Nhat Hanh a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, who practices Buddhism in France. Silence is one of the most powerful yet difficult state of mind for humans to achieve. He very succinctly and in simple language explains the secret of achieving well-being through meditation.
One would wonder of the insatiable desire of preserving resources! In quest of making this living, we have lost the purpose of life itself. It's an unending spiral, and, it is important to understand, what lies beneath this quest? It is, in fact, our experiences of past, that make us worry of future. Life has become more of chaos than stillness with this constant thinking.
This crowd and rush of thinking is what is referred as Radio: Non-stop thinking. This just doesn't let us live in peace with ourselves. There are umpteen books and discourses on showing what the world around us is, but little, to draw our attention to our own inner world, our own inner self. We have become enslaved to our own non-stop thoughts. We are either overly conscious of our past or are overly worried of the future.
With the practice of meditation, one can attain the silence and thus attain mindfulness and live in present. The book is a brilliant guide and helps as guide in attaining that state, step by step. There are four kinds of experiences we have. First, the sense driven of edible sources, the second by other sensory carriers such as hearing, watching and touch, the third is volition, which is our own experiences of our past and fourth is our conscious, our beliefs. All these four senses feed, in what we become.
Silence itself may mean depressing for some if it is enforced or is attained out of oppression. Silence is not closing oneself from the world, but is a state of being one with self. It can be attained by the mindful exercise of breathing to start with. The meditation can not only be attained by sitting in a particular pose, but in other acts such as walking. The core of Silence, is in listening, not just to the surrounding but to oneself. This art of listening is the key to attaining mindfulness. Listening intently, has the power to heal the world. Think of an incidence, where you would have listened carefully, given your thoughts to what you listen and then respond!
In our society stillness or inaction is a display of being useless. But, being still has its own power. It is one of the most difficult things to attain in an environment of such a context. We have so much fear of not being in communication. We simply just can't remain disconnected from our devices and applications on our mobile. While, we are getting more and more connected with technology, we are losi3ng the connect with our own selves and quality of our relationships is consistently deteriorating.
We require an art of attention in cultivating connection with our own selves and with the nature. Only then, we can attain a position to help ourselves and the world around us in doing our bit to reduce the pain and agony that the world around us is facing. Before helping the others, we need to find our own true self by practicing mindfulness. This book reveals the secret of action and not theories in essence.