Silence is always speaking; It is the perennial flow of language. It interrupts itself by talking because words obstruct its silent voice. Lectures can entertain people for hours without improving them. Silence, on the other hand, remains and benefits everyone. Silence is eloquence.

(Ramana Maharshi)

Much silence, makes a lot of noise.

(African proverb)

I remember that particular morning. December 1974, almost 50 years ago, walking with my friend Norberto, who had visited these places once before. It was about five in the morning; we started our walk from the hotel that we were staying at, on the outskirts of town. We were in Ahmednagar, a relatively small city, in the state of Maharashtra, India, about 300 kilometers east of Mumbai, on the Deccan Plateau.

The sun was not yet rising, so we walked along the middle of a deserted narrow paved road, where sometimes we had to step aside to make way for oxcarts, horse carriages, or those trucks, so peculiar to India, with yellow and red symbols and colors, which traveled at full speed sounding their horns continuously, to scare animals and passers-by, and that on the back they portrayed painted symbols in Hindi and the English line: horn please.

A majestic full moon shone on the horizon of that endless plain. After a while, the sun began to rise and, for perhaps 10 or 15 minutes, my friend and I enjoyed a mystical vision: the sun and the moon, diametrically opposed on the horizon. Shining giant spheres, a full moon in the west and a rising sun in the East. I had never seen anything like it. The ancient landscapes of the region, the gentle hills and the wide fields were eerily illuminated with the contrasting dances of sunlight and its lunar mirror. Life was undoubtedly magical.

After a while, my friend realized that we were not going to arrive on time at our destination. We were walking to the tomb of Meher Baba, in a place called Meherabad, that was maybe about 15 kilometers ahead, and we wanted to get there before the day began. Then my friend decided to ask for a ride. And well, only these crazy fast-paced, folkloric trucks were passing by, but he insisted and prevailed, one of them stopped. In the truck cabin there were at least eight men including the driver. All dressed in white and intensely used clothes, and talking at the same time, in Marathi maybe.

My friend said "Meherabad". They kind of understood and beckoned us inside the cabin, and now we were 10, like sardines in that little cabin, sitting on top of each other. It was a comedy situation. We went from a mystical dawn to an old comic silent movie, like those of Laurel and Hardy or Charlie Chaplin.

Fifteen minutes later, they stopped at a desolate place where there was a narrow path road that climbed a hill. "Meherabad" they all said in unison. We stepped down, thanked them in Spanish and English, and they answered in a chorus of incomprehensible language and laughter.

We went up the hill. At its top there was a small tomb-mausoleum the size of a small room, a square room with a dome. Above the dome were the symbols of Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Islam, and Hinduism. Inside, murals depicting the crowd of humanity, women, men, and children painted on the walls, surrounding a marble tombstone, with an inscription in golden letters that partly read (in English) "I have not come to teach but to awaken", Avatar Meher Baba.

Outside, dawn still surrounded us. I perceived an atmosphere of enormous tranquility and familiarity, a sepulchral silence, but without the sepulchral connotation, it was rather like the silent love one feels, when one embraces someone out of the depths of the soul, after not seeing them in a long time.
Leaving the interior of the small tomb, on the wall of the small wooden shed built at the entrance for people to shelter from the weather and sit down, hung a small sign in a homemade frame. It contained a phrase in English, "Things that are real are always given and received in silence", Meher Baba. I felt it in my heart.

An old and very petite lady, who was the caretaker of the place, had gone to fetch something from nearby and had asked us to wait for her. At that moment we were alone, my friend and I, in that lost place, surrounded by the morning sounds of unfamiliar countryside. We were outside a room like no other I had ever visited. It was as if that moon-sun dance, that we had witnessed before, was frame and prelude, to the simplicity of space, the oceanic silence of love, brought by that chamber, which more than a tomb seemed like a manger. And that day my life took a turn that I will never forget.

Things that are real are always given and received in silence. The message was indelibly etched within me.

Words pull thoughts out of the mind with a kind of gravitational force. I've noticed that if you keep your mouth shut your thoughts tend to relax a bit. I wonder why. Talking is like scratching, the more you scratch, the more your mind itches. And one talks, about anything, like a parrot. Pouring out chains of words, charged with emotion, that serve to empty the tension accumulated in the mind, as when one taps with rhythm on a table nervously, to release energy, loneliness perhaps.

Life is a constant soliloquy within each of us. Thoughts, like birds, fly from somewhere unknown, driven by external stimuli or internal memories. And they congregate in conversations, pronouncements, beliefs, ideologies, opinions. And spread through language. Sound waves, vibrating columns of air in the pharynx, try to reach the eardrums of others and also your own.

Stacked with our respective histories, perceptions, cultures, trajectories, personalities, intentions, words pour like rain, through that little hole in our faces. Speeches, quotable words, banalities, prejudices. Sounds.

Some create pain, others can help. Some can confuse, others inspire. These sound waves packaged in different tones and symbols, codify resonant currents of thought that come from an unconscious darkness or surrounding stimuli, and make us sing in throat sounds, to say inane things or, rarely, to try to reproduce the song of an inner silence that sometimes is also heard.

When they are inspired by that inner perception of silence, they lead one to embrace the other, rather than to being afraid. Words take on a real meaning when they align with that silence. Otherwise, whether noble or infamous, they are just noises we make to declare our presence, to draw attention to that loneliness of being that we feel in us, that we cannot understand with thoughts. We have the imperative to communicate, to congregate with that other who is apparently outside, to calm the contradictory thoughts that are born within us or share the awe. The most sublime moments of life are always silent, in that solemnity of amazement, when one realizes the wonders that surround us. Or when we feel that deep love that fills us inwardly. That is, when we understand, in flashes of consciousness, the unitary nature of being, like when we become confused in a deep embrace with the other and become one with him.

Words constantly fall from the sky of mind. Like summer rain they cool the soil. They form aerial passing clouds, structuring sentences, songs, and poems. They merge in the whirlwinds of stories, accumulate in corners, and sometimes manifest in storms. On occasion they curl up in lies and slander and become swords that hurt and kill. Sometimes they are imperceptible, sometimes scandalous, other times they are drums of violence.

They whisper in secret mysteries, conspire in hypocrisies, or cheer up those bearing stern and serious faces, with smiles of a new day. In winter they curl up like snakes, and in spring they sing with flowers to emerging loves, and wild desires.

They peek out onto balconies of lips and fingertips, tired and discouraged, looking for themselves in eternal dictionaries. Lengthening in verbs, multiplying in synonyms. They flood everything always, like water poured from clouds in the sky of mind, they thunder in nothingness and then fall, raining, singing, accusing, cursing, and blessing.

But, facing Silence, they make quiet; In the face of moments of astonishment, they are speechless. Then they dissolve like fog, facing the intense sunlight, and everything rests in quietude.

That is why we have to walk without making much silence, because we can wake up the little boy or girl that we all carry inside, the one who lives in the ancient cradle of the heart. Yes, who lives beyond mind, and beyond the comments, and news of passers-by. Beyond thoughts of flesh and blood, pages of sacred and profane books, and fairy tales, there is a place, where rivers and dreams are born, along with colors and angst, and the hands of serene and stoic mothers who love, and only love.

How much awakening awaits these eyes of ours filled with daydream and purpose!

Let us rest our words as footprints in the sand, and be girls and boys, again, or whatever, but let's go back, to wonderment without noise. For therein sleeps, in the intimacy of ourselves, the reason for all that is, has been and will be. The inconceivable, which immaculately conceives the conceived.

Once a year, in memory of that silence, I observe a day of silence. And I realize how much noise one carries inside, how much energy is wasted on words, usually talking about others, or expressing opinions, as if they were doctrines or truths.

Most of the words spoken, whether intellectual or trivial, don't really get us anywhere. Meher Baba who was silent for 44 years, maintained an active life of travel, spiritual teaching, social action, meetings of large groups, where he offered messages of encouragement and wisdom, through gestures or using an alphabet tablet that someone would interpret. The atmosphere of those multiple encounters, the accounts of the people who knew him, the fragrance that remains in the places where he lived, or in the tomb where his body rests, keeps, in some unknown way, the fragrance of his silence.

In silence I tell you love is silent.

(Meher Baba)