According to Osho, yes—silence is the beginning, the middle, and the end; it is the very soul of existence. Words and sounds depend on a hearer, but silence precedes, pervades, and consummates all. He uses laughter, gibberish, and meditation to clear the mind so you can taste this eternal, deathless stillness and let it flow as an undercurrent through every action.
Silence is the quiet behind everything—before, during, and after—and you can feel it inside when you stop and listen.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
She has asked: I have understood you to say that in the beginning was not the word, but silence. Is not silence the beginning, the end, and the continuum between beginning and end?
Yes, a thousand times yes. I have been speaking about the Bible, which says, "In the beginning, there was the word." Now that is sheer nonsense. How can the word be of itself? Somebody has to utter it. And what is a word if there is nobody to understand it? It becomes just a sound. But what is a sound if there is nobody to hear it? Certainly the Bible is wrong. In the beginning was silence, in the middle it is silence, in the end it is silence. Silence is the very soul of existence. Before we enter the silence, because it is an arduous journey to be in your very innermost core -- arduous and unknown and forgotten -- a few laughs will prepare you. I am using laughter to create a preparation for you to dive deep into silence. After laughter, it is simpler. Ace psychiatrist, Dr.…
Slowly slowly, first for a few seconds, then for a few minutes, then for half an hour, then for an hour, then for a day, then for two days, then for a week... slowly slowly the person who is getting ready to go into space prepares himself. A musician went to visit this absolutely sound-proof room. When he entered it he could not believe what was happening. They had told him it was absolutely silent, but he heard two sounds very clearly, absolutely clearly, and they were not whisperlike -- they were so much that he enquired of the director of the lab 'What is the matter? From where are these two sounds coming?' And the director laughed; he said 'They are not coming from anywhere. One is your heart beating, the other is the sound of your blood circulating.
Beloved Osho, a while ago you said something about silence which startled me. In my sleepiness, I'd simply thought of it as just an absence -- an absence of noises. But you were saying it had positive qualities, a positive sound. And in my meditations, I've noticed the distinction between a silence in my body and a silence in my mind. I can have the first, without the second. Beloved master, please talk to me about silence.
Anand Somen, silence usually is understood to be something negative, something empty, an absence of sound, of noises. This misunderstanding is prevalent because very few people have ever experienced silence. All that they have experienced in the name of silence is noiselessness. But silence is a totally different phenomenon. It is utterly positive. It is existential, it is not empty. It is overflowing with a music that you have never heard before, with a fragrance that is unfamiliar to you, with a light that can only be seen by the inner eyes. It is not something fictitious; it is a reality, and a reality which is already present in everyone -- just we never look in. All our senses are extrovert. Our eyes open outside, our ears open outside, our hands move outside, our legs... all our senses are meant to explore the outside world. But there is a sixth…
Question: OSHO, CAN SILENCE BE HEARD AND UNDERSTOOD? My own feeling is Socrates knows perfectly well that he's not going to die. It is impossible that he should not have known -- such a tremendous intelligence, such an individuality, such purity, such penetrating insight -- it is not possible that he would not have known the non-temporal, the timeless. The moment you understand that you are eternal, all fear disappears. And the society exists through exploiting your fear; hence, it teaches you from the school to the university, it devotes almost one-third of your life in learning words, language, logic. It is not concerned at all that you should understand, Pradeep, silence. That's the function of a Master: to undo all that the society has done to you, to help you to go beyond words. And you can experience it happening here -- you can hear the silence.
Beloved master, I am always intrigued by eastern scriptures that begin with om, shantih shantih shantih and end with om, shantih shantih shantih. Would you please talk about this?
Maneesha, the East has approached reality in an almost diametrically opposite way to the West. First, the simple meaning of the word should be understood, and then all the implications. All Eastern scriptures begin with OM, Shantih shantih shantih and they also end with the same. OM is the symbol of the universal heartbeat; it is not a word. And as you come closer and closer to the universal heartbeat, the by-product is a deepening silence. Shantih means silence and it is always repeated three times because by the time you reach to the fourth, you are no more -- just the silence has remained. You have disappeared as an entity separate from the universe. The West has not been able to begin even a single scripture with this intention. It is understandable. They never went into the deeper communion between your heart and the bigger heart of the universe.…