Buddhism and the Power of Silence
Words once spoken cannot be taken back. Actions once committed cannot be retracted. Silence is better than violence. This is one of the hidden little gems of Buddhism, the value of silence. And other than the emphasis on meditation, it’s something that doesn’t often get mentioned—until now. Because here and now, in the modern age and the Western world, the noise is almost deafening, and the calls to engage are never-ending, no matter that much of that engagement is cruel and disheartening.
As a ‘digital creator’ on Facebook, I get it all the time, as if non-engagement were synonymous to incompetence. But nothing could be further from the truth. Silence is not violence, and BLM (Black Lives Matter) should know this. MLK (Martin Luther King) certainly knew it well, as did Mohandas K. (Mahatrma) Gandhi. Silence is one of the most powerful weapons in the world, in fact, but it is also much more than that. As the operating method of meditation, it can save souls (people) and so, it can also save nations.
If silence is the zero point for meditation, then meditation is the zero point for life. In this analogy, silence is like the zero (shunya) for which emptiness (shunyata) is named and can be thought of like the mathematical zero as the point between positive and negative (existence or non-existence?) numbers or the absolute zero temperature beneath which there is no lower, or even the zero-point energy of quantum physics as that point closest to absolute stillness. That’s the goal of meditation, insight optional, and that’s the goal of life, if only for a moment, now and again, always and forever.
streaming consciousness... 
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