by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, April 2026
Auf Deutsch: Stille
When I was nineteen, I met a white-haired Russian lady who had just returned from India where she had been trained by a Sufi master. He belonged to the Naqshbandi order, known as the silent Sufis because they do all their practices in silence, unlike other orders which practice a vocal dhikr and may use music or dance. As he explained to her, “We go to the Absolute Truth in Silence, for it can be found only in silence and it is Silence.” Sitting in her small North London room beside the train tracks I was able to rest in this silence and sense a love I had never known existed.
For the past fifty years silence has been my companion. In these, my later years, I have retired from life’s outer activities, drawn deeper and deeper into seclusion. Watching the tides rise and fall in the wetlands outside my window, taking my early morning walk in the lagoon where I meet a Great Blue Heron, its long, curved neck searching for fish, I am present in a world where the sounds are of egrets squawking, coyotes calling to each other, or geese passing overhead. And beneath this is a landscape of silence.
I have learned how this silence is singing with love. There is love that exists in forms, sounds, and activities—we feel its presence in beauty, are touched by its joy. But there is also love present in emptiness, in silence, in space—a love that does not require recognition, that just is. The mystic is absorbed by this love that at once takes her into the infinite and grounds her in the web of life, for silence is an open passageway between the worlds. Through spiritual practices like meditation or watching the breath, we become familiar with this silence. It happens quite naturally that we dwell in silence, for silence pervades the depths into which the mystic dives again and again. This silence is undefined and speaks to us of the undefined vistas of our own being, and the greater mystery that pervades everything.
For the mystic silence is not the opposite of sound, but an inner state of being that takes one far beyond the mind and its endless chatter, into the deeper dimensions of being that are found within the heart and soul. Through our practice we move from the world of outer activity and the distractions of the “ten thousand things,” into an inner dimension radically different. At the beginning it can be helpful to meditate in a place of outer silence, where the noise of the world does not disturb our practice; but then we are drawn deeper, into an inner silence and emptiness.
This inner space of quiet allows us to listen with our inner perception, with a heart attuned to love, or for the Buddhist with a consciousness empty of form. Listening is born of silence, and for the Sufi, for the lover of God, this listening of the heart allows us to hear life’s inner story—not the ego’s desires or attachments, its demands of success or failure, but the love story that runs through creation, the unfolding mystery within and around us. Rumi describes this receptive awareness:
Make everything in you an ear, each atom of your being, and you will hear at every moment what the Source is whispering to you, just to you and for you, without any need for my words or anyone else’s. You are—we all are—the beloved of the Beloved, and in every moment, in every event of your life, the Beloved is whispering to you exactly what you need to hear and know. Who can ever explain this miracle? It simply is. Listen and you will discover it every passing moment. Listen, and your whole life will become a conversation in thought and act between you and Him, directly, wordlessly, now and always.
Without a quality of inner quiet we would be unable to hear this continual unfolding of life’s deeper truth, this self-revelation of God. This can also be understood as listening to the still, small voice of God, a voice that resonates at a higher frequency than the mind, that belongs to the dimension of the Self rather than the senses and the ego. If we are to live a guided life, this is the voice that guides; and the clearer our mind, the deeper the silence, the more we are able to be guided from within.
My first practice, before I met my Sufi teacher, was the empty mind meditation of the Zen monk, and this thread has also been present over the years, weaving its texture into my inner and outer life. For the Zen monk inner silence does not turn him away from the outer world, but allows him to experience it more clearly, leading to the experience of satori, in which one can experience one’s own true nature and the true nature of the world around. It is a moment-by-moment revelation in which everything is seen with the immediacy of the first time: the strawberry tasted in its sweetness without comparison, the spider’s web glimpsed in its beautiful fragility. In this state everything is complete in itself, is the dharma completely alive. This is poignantly expressed in the Zen poem:
A monk asked the Zen master Fuketsu: “Without speaking, without silence, how can you express the truth?”
Fuketsu observed: “I always remember spring in southern China. The birds sing among innumerable kinds of fragrant flowers.”
Whether listening to the inner voice of our Beloved, or seeing the Buddha nature of a leaf swirling in the wind, we have moved into a quality of life that is mostly hidden amidst the noise and clamor of today’s world. But it is always present, existing outside of time, the secret garden of the soul—of what is innermost in our own heart and awakened consciousness, and fully present in the world around if we are able to see, to listen.
In recent years I have spent many hours alone in nature, especially in the early morning when silence can be almost tangible. And listening carefully I have come to hear life’s deeper rhythm, what I have called “the song of the heart of the world.” This world is not as we think; it is made from a substance that is not of atoms or particles, and in its depths there is a hidden song. At some moments in my life I have touched this substance, caught a line of this song. It reminds me of the first day, when the beauty and wonder of creation are being born.
But the mystic is drawn even deeper, into a silence and emptiness that is before and after creation. In Ch’an Buddhism, empty mind is Absence itself, that is the consciousness which is the generative tissue of the Cosmos or the Tao. From this primal silence and emptiness all of life arises and returns, even as it remains clear and empty.
For the Sufi mystic this is when the “journey to God” becomes the “journey in God,” in which we are drawn deeper and deeper into the love and emptiness that is the true home of the mystic; we are melted, merged into this “like sugar in water.” It is also described in Christian mysticism as “the dark silence in which all lovers lose themselves.”
This silence is deeper than any sound, and it is only understood as silence because it cannot be heard by the senses or even the inner ear. It is unborn and undying, the texture behind and within creation, which the Sufis call the Beloved. It is the undifferentiated Essence, and yet its light and love are within every cell of creation and found directly within the heart. It is at the root of all mystical experience, as expressed many centuries ago in the Upanishads:
There is something beyond our mind,
which abides in silence within our mind.
It is the supreme mystery beyond thought.
Let one’s mind and subtle spirit rest upon that
and nothing else.
…. When the mind is silent,
beyond distraction,
then it can enter into a world
which is far beyond the mind.
Maitreya Upanishad
For the mystic deepening states of meditation are an absorption into this mystery, this placeless place, this stateless state. There are no words to describe it except there comes a knowing that one has been taken far beyond oneself, beyond the fragile ego, into limitless dimensions of love and light, where the mind cannot reach, but a thread is left in one’s consciousness. This thread remains as a connection to this enduring and life-sustaining emptiness, and from it arises a way to live that is both simple and profound. I have found it as a way of being that allows life to unfold around me, in which I am both present and absent, similar to the Taoist practice of wu-wei, actionless action. It is best expressed in the poem by Basho:
Sitting silently
doing nothing
Spring comes
and the grass grows, by itself.