Thanks to Sage for posting "Into the Great Silence" In the same vein is a article by a Monk on silence.  Which I could not get to post on her original blog.  So I offer it here.  Enjoy:)

Monk Cyril

Internal and External Silence

        & nbsp;   Yes, I enjoy talking.  That’s no secret.  It’s one of the things I have to address in the monastic life, because we try to keep idle talk to a minimum.  We do not follow a rule of strict silence at my monastery, but we do try to avoid unnecessary conversation.  Even guests to the monastery are asked to “help us to maintain a quiet atmosphere conducive to prayer.  Idle talking should be avoided and conversations in general should be kept sober and short.  Inappropriate subjects include politics, ecclesiastical gossip, and controversy.”  These guidelines are not tyrannical or oppressive.  Their purpose is simply to remind us where we are and what our common purpose is.

        & nbsp;   Another challenge is the kind of internal chatter that occurs in my mind, even when I am not saying anything to anyone else.  The two matters are related.  I am beginning to acquire the tools to confront the external and internal talk, however, with a set of books my abbot has asked me to read and the lessons he has given after meals during those periods of time he has been with us.  We have also been reading some of the writings of the fourth century monk and author John Cassian at meals—that is, one person reads aloud while everyone else eats—and our abbot has explained Cassian’s teachings.  Cassian refers to three basic renunciations as being essential to the monastic life: first, we renounce our former way of life; second, we renounce mindless thoughts in order to clear the heart and mind for the inner work of asceticism; and third, we renounce our own images of God so that we can enter into the contemplation of God as He is.

        & nbsp;   The first of the three types of renunciation is fairly obvious, and the third will probably represent no obstacle for me, because I have long been deeply committed to negative theology as a corrective to the over-reliance on purely intellectual system-building in theology.  The disciplining of the mind to achieve the renunciation of thoughts—something which Eastern Christian monasticism shares with Western Christian monasticism and with monasticism as practiced in other faith traditions—is much more difficult and will take years of unremitting effort to put into effect.  All the same, it is at the core of Eastern Orthodox Christian monastic spirituality, and it is one of the reasons I am here.  I never actually noticed how bad intrusive thoughts were, and the emotions that came along with them, until I began to pay attention to them and started trying to achieve an interior calm.

        & nbsp;   Internal calm starts, of course, with the exterior calm that comes from eliminating unnecessary conversation, which is hard enough for me anyway.  I’m making progress on that.  I have made a beginning by trying to limit my conversation to what is really necessary.  The rule we have been given is we should not speak without asking ourselves whether what we are about to say will contribute to our salvation or that of the person to whom we are speaking or whether it will help to accomplish a task we have been given to do.  If I follow that rule—and I fall short all the time—it eliminates the vast majority of remarks I am tempted to make.  When I look at the things I would like to say, I see that most of the time they are intended to impress others, to criticize someone, or to justify myself.  When I am able to reflect on what I am about to say instead of just blurting it out, however, I have won half the battle, because I have kept the thought in my mind where I can wage war against it.  Once I understood how much of my interaction with other people was really unnecessary and driven by my passions, I could make sense of the saying attributed to Abba Moses, “Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.”  Solitude helps us to refrain from idle chatter—the easiest way to eliminate unecessary conversation is by eliminating contact that would lead to it.

        & nbsp;   The teachings of the monastic and ascetic fathers run contrary to what I was taught as a literature student in university.  According to the conventional wisdom—that is, the secular view that prevailed in the twentieth century—the flow of thoughts and feelings in the mind reveals who we really are.  In authors such as Marcel Proust, who focused on memory in his huge multi-volume novel Remembrance of Things Past, and in writers such as James Joyce and Virginia Wolf, who placed their attention on the stream of consciousness, the passage of thoughts and their attendant feelings was taken to reveal the very essence of human existence.  The surrealists took a different approach and looked at the random thoughts that passed through the mind as revealing the unconscious motives—as understood in Freudian terms—which constitute our nature.  The monastic and ascetic fathers, on the contrary, see random and intrusive thoughts as evidence of our fallenness, and say that our real nature—the way in which we are created in the image and likeness of God—lies in the silence of the heart.

        & nbsp;   As I have become aware of intrusive thoughts, I notice them all the time when I am praying—or rather, trying to pray—reading scripture or anything else, or participating in services.  As our abbot puts it, we might be in church trying to pay attention to the service, but in our minds we find ourselves watching a movie, and then at the supermarket shopping for groceries, and then wondering what’s for lunch, and finally reminiscing about how we spent our summer vacation when we were ten years old.  And here I thought I was the only one who had the problem of my mind wandering.  We are fortunate, though, in having two thousand years of guidance on how to guard the heart against all this chatter, some of it in the Bible, but mostly coming in a more organized form from the writings of the desert monks who dealt with the matter most intensely in their solitary life.

        & nbsp;   The task, then, is to silence the mind so that the heart can speak and listen in silence to God and to others.  Writers on the ascetic life tell me—and I have to take what they say on faith at this point—that the external and internal silence will allow me to be fully present to others.  At first I wondered how I could be present to others when they are not present to me—that is, if I do manage to achieve external and internal silence, what good does it do when I am with others who are chattering away with their own preoccupations and driven by their own passions?  Then it occurred to me that this is the way that God is present to us—whether we are aware of Him or not, and whether we obstruct the awareness of Him or not.  Part of the task of growing into His likeness consists of being present to my brother and neighbor without waiting for my brother and neighbor to take the first step.  I can take the first steps along this path by continuing to work toward internal and external silence.

Monk Cyril was born at the mid-point of the twentieth century, in 1950.  He was raised Methodist and was the son of a minister.  Soon after entering college he drifted away from Christianity, seduced by the allurements of secularism and decadence, and spent many years in the spiritual far country of depravity, degeneracy, defiance, and bad attitudinality.  He entered the Greek Orthodox Church in 1996 the old-fashioned way as a repentant sinner.  Anything that might be construed as a journey to Orthodoxy was confided to his spiritual father in life confession and sealed with the prayers for absolution.  He is a tonsured reader / chanter.  In 1997 he joined the translation team to complete the Orthodox Study Bible by producing a version of the Old Testament with commentary which conformed to the Septuagint Greek text and was made chairman of the translation committee.  His work on that project continued until 2004, when he joined the brotherhood of the Monastery of St. John.  He is now a rasophor monk.  His obediences and other activities at the monastery include copy editing, proofreading, translating, and some writing for Divine Ascent Press, hauling trash to the dump, dipping and chopping candles, and making coffee.