The Ab/Use Of Silence

There is a very old debate that goes down the centuries between two groups of people whom I shall here refer to as the Silence-Lovers (SL) and the Logic-Lovers (LL). Let me allow them to present their cases to each other.

SL to LL : 'You LL won't really ever be able to reach God. Why not? Because the only thing you do is simply to talk, talk, and talk. You split hairs an infinite number of times until there is no hair left; you fight and quarrel with one another like a bunch of street-mongrels; and you don't know the virtues of keeping your mouth shut and sitting down quietly in one place. Come to our meditation centres, and we shall teach you how to calm your mind, loosen your body, release your senses, and obliterate all traces of emotional disturbance'.

LL to SL : 'You mean we should stop talking, discussing, and writing, and run along and do whatever you ask us to do simply because you tell us to do so?'

SL to LL : 'Yes, my friend, the things that you talk about in your text-books of logic belong to the 'lower' level of truth. What we have attained through meditation, however, is the 'higher' level which cannot be attained through your childish exercises of dialectical argumentation. At this higher supra-rational and super-cognitive dimension, there is only absolute silence in which you shall intuitively become one with the highest Truth.'

LL to SL : 'So what is the difference between our position and yours?'

SL to LL : 'The difference is this. Those who do not know the Truth, they just talk and talk. But those who know, they do not talk.'

LL to SL : 'But you have contradicted yourself!'

SL to LL : 'How so?'

LL to SL : 'Just now you said that people like you who know do not talk. So why are you talking to us? Why don't you just shut up, go away to some remote cave in the Himalayas and never emerge from it?'

At this stage, I shall now leave the reader of this post to carry on the conversation inside his/her own mind, and see where it leads him/her to.