Silence the Forgotten Human Skill
yeah i’m on a quest
i’m an anthropologist and i try to
understand how we can be human together
but people we love but also with the
ones we don’t like that much
so i travel the world to understand and
to find
ways and answers how we can shape the
world in a way
in a humana way in a humane way in a
peaceful way
and a constructive way and today i’d
like to talk
about the importance of the role of
silence in this
because i feel sometimes that we forgot
this human skill of silence and without
that
we cannot shape the world in a way that
everyone has its space
so i think that many times
sound rules over silence knowing rules
over not knowing
and talk rules over just
listening but if we leave silence out of
the mix of our behavior
the levels of trust and creativity just
go down
so we need silence just as much as we
need sound and it’s the combination
that makes the music it’s the
combination that makes us feel
alive so during my travels i learned a
lot about the different ways we can
treat silence
and today i will share some of the most
important lessons i learned
in india togo and the uk
but first of all let me tell you
about the start of my personal journey
to appreciate silence about
15 years ago i felt ill like seriously
ill my body wasn’t functioning i slowed
down my
thyroid wasn’t working so silence was
forced upon me and i hated it
i couldn’t process information i
couldn’t put words into one sentence i
couldn’t even drive my car because it
was just way too fast
and i was fighting the space and one day
i met one of my doctors and he said
why don’t you just surrender to the pace
of silence because he said
you’re at the place where your soul is
being built
now you just go build it you’re at the
place where your soul’s being built
that sentence that brought tears to my
eyes and it sometimes still does and i
must say that in the past weeks
of our corona lock down i
you know remembered this moment
and realized once again that it is in
the silence
that we can hear the voices of our souls
because silence is not the absence of
something
silence is the presence of everything
courage love trust wisdom
it all grows in the silence not
in the words and not in the talking
silence is actually the loudest form of
communication
and it has a locked language desperately
waiting to be heard i think that silence
makes us human
it’s where we develop our connections
it’s where creativity is hiding out
and i strongly believe that if we lose
the ability
to embrace silence we lose out on our
humanity
and those are big words and i do think
it’s important to find your voice
and to speak up you know in my life i
learned that it’s important to be bold
and brave
you know to to jump in a conversation to
be assertive
to speak up there’s so many problems we
have to tackle we got to speak up be
loud be fast do it now
because we have to fix it time is money
don’t waste time
but the thing is that somehow we created
this world
in which sounds rules over silence we
have so many screaming conversations
in which no one is actually listening to
what’s going on
the cleverest one-liner might go viral
politicians fire one-liners to each
other
and it drives us nuts at least it drives
me nuts
and i think that we live in a rhythm in
which everyone
is just talking and no one is listening
our office spaces are even too loud to
finish the thought process
and if we don’t stop ourselves the
loudness of our opinions
they block us from seeing the actual
world surrounding us
so when is the last time you’ve seen a
politician
sit together with other politicians and
be touched by the words
the other person is telling him or her
and the willingness to change their
minds
because they find new ideas in the
silence between the words
new ideas are born in the silence not in
the words
without silence we cannot build bridges
between our differences
we cannot find new ideas i think even
without silence we might lose our
democracies
so therefore it’s it’s of major
importance to master
the human skill of silence and during my
travels
i got some lessons on how to do that
so let’s first go to india i was there
last january
and i visited chathasgar and there lives
a community which called them helps the
ramnami
and they were seen as untouchable
in the time the caste system was still
alive
and untouchable means that people don’t
even want to be touched by your
shadow they were excluded from all parts
of social life
and they decided to come together not so
much to fight
their social position but to build on
their inner strength
and in doing so they created a community
and different
ways of living and one of his that they
couldn’t enter temples
so they decided to tattoo the name of
lord ram on their bodies
and therefore their full bodies became
the temples
they do a lot of chanting they come
together and
just to give you a feel of what that
feels and looks like
i’ll show you a short clip of the
documentary
patterns of life which will be
broadcasted later last year
in which i had the privilege to take a
part of
[Music]
[Music]
there’s two lessons i’d like to share
which i learned
from my experience with the ramnami
first of all is that
chanting and singing together
allowed me to feel the silence within
myself
and to feel the deeper connections with
the people around me and the world
around me
and to me i realized deeper that music
puts me in touch with the feelings the
emotions i cannot express otherwise and
i think it counts for more of us
music holds like the key to the unlocked
language
of silence so to experience deeper
connections together with others
we need to sink in our rhythms we need
to tune into each other and when we do
we feel that we build those connections
and i think that it’s part of the social
unrest today that we live in a world
where it’s not
really synced into each other we’re not
tuned into each other
and therefore we become disconnected if
we don’t take the time to do so
and the second lessons i learned lesson
i learned is that
it’s actually the silence that makes the
music
it’s like in every music piece that when
you hear a note
that after that you might start
wondering what the next
sound will be music
creates itself in between the notes
that’s where the actual creation process
happens
and i realize it’s the same in dialogues
and interactions
go chanting like for a long time
and during the chant they connect
and they listen and in the end they sit
down drink tea have a small bite
in silence and i realized being with
them that is in those silence you can
actually
shape new relationships together with
other people
and being interested in the rhythm
the rhythm of life the rhythm that
people shaped together to create this
world and to
live together i found myself at a voodoo
festival
because voodoo is a rhythmic religion
fudosi they believe that the world is
full of spirits and each spirit has its
own rhythm
and if you play that rhythm if you tune
into the rhythm if you dance the rhythm
you invite the energy of the spirit to
come in
now i was at this festival and i started
talking with my son and my son is a
buddha priest
and he told me about his religion and he
was just upset that people had
this image because most of you will by
the word
voodoo think about dolls and spells and
other black magic
but that’s not the voodoo i experienced
in togo
because my son said please come and i’ll
well teach you tell you ex you
experience
the voodoo of my people
and that’s what i did so i entered there
and in my anthropological research to
the essence of voodoo
i experienced a couple of ceremonies
and one of them took about 10 hours
just to give you a feeling
[Music]
that was intense and there is so much
i could share related to the experience
i had during the photo ceremonies but
for now i just like to
shed light on one of the lessons i took
and that is the role and the importance
of rituals
to allow yourself to enter a silent
space
because each time we went to a new stage
of the ceremony
there was this very small ritual with a
very clear sequence of actions
like offering or cowbells
or smalls chanting and it is those
rituals which
help us to move from the ordinary
into the extraordinary space and once
you’re
in that space your mind can go
anywhere you’re kind of invited to go
to an inner journey in silence
and and this is where you see me sitting
during the ceremony
where i was confronted with many
hard life questions and they were
prompted
by the offering that was about to happen
and it was not quiet i mean there was
tons of noise
but somehow the tapestry of the noise
the ritual surrounded me created the
space
in which i could let my mind go to
places
i’d never been before to find the voices
there
to listen to my soul because in
shamanism they say
that during life and the traumas you
have in life you lose bits and pieces of
your soul
and the healing is about retrieving
those bits and pieces and that’s
exactly what i experienced in togo
so the lesson learned is that we need
rituals
to allow ourselves to go into this
special place which is
out of the ordinary
and you know what i learned
is that i realized that i don’t often
create those spaces
question to you when is the last time
you sat in silence and you could hear
your heartbeat
or when is the last time you sat in
silence
with your loved ones and you could hear
their heartbeat or with your colleagues
your leadership team i mean these
moments are rare but we need them
because in the silence
we have the opportunity to hear the
things
we mostly ignore now to be in this
silence
is not like switching off and waited out
until it’s over
and that’s something which i learned
from the quakers
the quakers are experts in silent
meetings
they are originally a christian group
and their community started in the late
in the mid 17th century in england
so to understand their ways of living
together and the ways they have silent
meetings i traveled to the lake
districts in the uk
and the quakers have different types of
silent meetings and they’re very well
structured
you know they sit together in a circle
and it starts when someone starts the
meeting
and the idea is originated when the the
founder
the community started is that we don’t
need someone else to explain the word of
god to us
everyone is equal so we can all talk to
god and we can listen to that but we
need to listen
and they call it we need to listen to
the light
so their whole silent meetings are
structured to in a way
that we can listen to the light
well when you’re in the meeting you
don’t have to be silent you can talk
there’s no issue
but the only thing they say is only make
sound if it enriches the silence
so if you sit in the meeting and you
feel the urge to say something
just question yourself is it my ego
talking is it
something bigger than me which wants to
express itself
could it be mistaken by a political
statement or a personal lecture
and if the answer is that you feel it’s
something bigger than you
you say what you have to say
the result is is that in many quaker
meetings it’s pretty silent
and they call this process a discernment
process
and what they taught me and the lesson i
took
is that i more often ask myself
do i need to speak out now or not
is it my ego talking or not
because sometimes
our words can improve the silence
but many times they just
give words to something we don’t need
words for
some things should be left unsaid
because the words would kill the meaning
well if you are someone
who kind of forgot the human skill of
silence
then remember in essence it’s a very
easy thing to do and it has
something magical to sit in silence
with someone else to create the ritual
space
you need to let your minds wonder
together deepen the connections
build the trust between the words
so basically it’s just that i like to
urge you
to just have the courage once in a while
to just shut up
and be with what’s there
and to make only those sounds
that enrich our silence because remember
we can make sound but we cannot
make silence
silence is the given sound just
disrupts the silence and
our souls are being built
in the silence so i invite you
especially during those days
we live in now where the world is full
of loudness
let’s go sit down and build
our souls