The pursuit of silence

I'm listening to some music right now. Far too loud - even my daughter complained! It's stuff I used to listen to 30 years ago. And by dragging me back 30 years to when life was simpler, well, mine was anyway, it's made me realise something I never understood before. Silence isn't really about sound. Listening to Horlsips blasting out The Man Who Built America at 95dB, my mind is quieter than it has been for a long time. And this kind of silence is wonderful. Maybe this is what all those millions of people who meditate are after. Silence is golden. Hardly news to the world as a whole, but it is to me on a personal experiential level. I always thought it meant absence of sound, but it doesn't, it's about mental silence, inner peace, something I'm not used to. And I like it.

So now I want a new piece of technology that I never thought I'd ever want. I want to be able to switch off part of my mind sometimes. I still want to be able to increase my mental stimulation level on call just as I've always sought to do, using music, games, documentaries or whatever - I'm sure that will always be the way I am, terrified of being bored. But sometimes I want to be able to hide in an inner cave and pull down some internal mental shutters. I don't need to switch off the externals, they aren't the problem, just the endless internal thought traffic. To switch off the monitor circuits, the inner shells of consciousness.

Technology should be able to deliver on this one in due course. Transcranial magnetic stimulation can already deactivate parts of the brain temporarily. What is needed is a little more focus and a little more understanding of the brain so that we can determine exactly what to deactivate, what fields are needed to do so safely to the right level, and the means to deliver the required fields. I guess this will mean electronic drugs in effect, doing in electronics what drugs do chemically. But I don't take drugs, never have (except alcohol), and don't want to start. And I do wnat to achieve mental silence. I want to switch off my monitor circuits and concentrate on pure thoughts, or on enjoying stimulation such as music, without the additional internal noise of all the other mental activities going on that corrupt he enjoyment of experience now.

I guess lots of people reading this will wonder what the hell the problem is, since maybe they do it all the time. But I can't. And I don't want to spend 50 years learning how to do meditation either.  But silence is golden, and I want to experience it again.