Silence

What it is

The deliberate withdrawal from speech, and often from other stimulation, as a contemplative practice.

It appears in several forms:

• Monastic silence — the Cistercian and Trappist observance, and the "Great Silence" kept in many communities from evening prayer until morning
• Noble silence — on Buddhist retreat, extending beyond speech to eye contact, reading, writing and gesture
• Quaker meeting — communal silence, broken only when a participant feels moved to speak
• Khalwa — Sufi retreat in seclusion, traditionally forty days
• Dark retreat — the Tibetan practice of extended periods in complete darkness
• Eremitic and anchoritic life — the hermit, and the anchorite enclosed in a cell attached to a church

One correction worth making, because it is repeated constantly: Trappists do not take a vow of silence. There is no such vow. What the Rule prescribes is restraint in speech — talking when necessary, not talking idly — and the popular image of monks forbidden to speak at all is a misunderstanding that has survived a century of monks patiently correcting it.

Where it came from

The desert ascetics of fourth-century Egypt made silence and solitude foundational, and the tradition ran from them into Western monasticism through Benedict's Rule, which devotes a chapter to restraint of speech.

Comparable practices developed independently: Buddhist forest monasticism, Hindu mauna (deliberate silence as an ascetic vow), Sufi khalwa, and Jewish traditions of contemplative withdrawal.

How it is done

By suspending speech, generally with community support and for a defined period. On retreat it is usually combined with a structure — fixed sitting times, prescribed meals, no reading, restricted movement — which does most of the work that the silence gets credited with.

What we can and cannot say

We can say chosen silence is well supported. Research on floatation-REST — restricted environmental stimulation in a lightless, soundless flotation tank at skin temperature — has found substantial reductions in anxiety, including in clinical populations with anxiety and stress-related disorders, with effects appearing after a single session. Work by Justin Feinstein and colleagues is the main line here. The mechanism is plausibly the removal of exteroceptive load, allowing interoceptive and self-referential processing to settle.

We can say prolonged silence and low stimulation reliably produce perceptual disturbance, and that this is expected rather than a sign of anything. The mechanisms are those described under scrying — Troxler fading, ganzfeld effects, the visual system generating content when starved of input. People in dark retreat, extended solitary practice or sensory restriction commonly report imagery, voices and presences. Traditions that use this deliberately know it happens.

And we can say that the same conditions, imposed rather than chosen, constitute one of the better documented forms of psychological harm.

The research on solitary confinement is unambiguous. Prolonged isolation produces anxiety, depression, cognitive impairment, hallucinations, paranoia, self-harm and markedly elevated suicide risk. Craig Haney's work and a substantial clinical literature have established this well enough that the UN's Mandela Rules, adopted in 2015, define solitary confinement beyond fifteen consecutive days as prohibited — as amounting to torture or cruel treatment.

The contrast is the most instructive thing on this page. The physical conditions overlap substantially. The outcomes are opposite. What differs is not the quiet but three things: agency — chosen and revocable at will; duration and structure — bounded, with a schedule and a purpose; and support — a teacher, a community, a framework for interpreting what arises.

That has a practical implication for contemplative practice. A retreat that removes a participant's ability to leave, or that leaves them without support when the silence becomes difficult, has moved some distance toward the harmful arrangement — and the adverse-effects research discussed under medical harm documents exactly that happening.

We cannot say how much of a retreat's benefit is the silence and how much is the removal of obligations, decisions, screens and other people. Nobody has separated them, and it would be interesting if anyone did.

Further reading

• Feinstein et al. on floatation-REST for anxiety (2018 onward).
• Craig Haney's research on solitary confinement, and the UN Mandela Rules (2015).
• Sara Maitland, A Book of Silence (2008) — a first-person account of pursuing it deliberately, including what went wrong.