In silence, it's difficult to avoid our thoughts, feelings, and doubts. If they are not comfortable thoughts, if we'd rather not death with them, we can drown them out with noise. (Isn't much of the pain of insomnia the silence that makes it impossible for us to ignore the little slimy green things in our heads?) Noise can open us to people's ideas, or can be a take-off for our own ideas. The sound of silence can be the sound of a mind at work, or the sound of seperation, isolation, and/or death. It's deeply inhuman. It can be threatening, like in religions it can be punishment as in ex-communication. If we absoluty require noise, it may be because we need the comfort of our own kind. We need friendship, gossip, news. We need to bounce our minds off other people's ideas. The noise we aboslutly must have to survive, may be simple human conversation. As long as we've got this we're fine.


Silence is frightening because it strips us as nothing else does, throwing us upon the stark realities of our life. Noise is trying to fill in the infinite with the finite. We have an infinite void in our hearts that we attempt to fill with noise, people, busy-ness, possessions, and other infinite things. We are addicted to noise. We need noise. We've got to have noise! Silence is creepy, even frightening, silence steals away the distractions of life which anesthietize us from the feeling that our lives are still empty. Noise helps us live on the banks of denial. Noise keep us concentrated on something else, anything else.


Think about how much we hate to think. There is a t-shirt that reads, "When I work, I work hard. When I play, I play hard. When I think...I fall alseep." Contemplation is a four-letter word. Reflection is for mirrors and pools and highway signs. Why? It's because when we look at what our life really consist of, we are terrified by it's vast emptiness.


All our attempts to fill our infinite emptiness with finite things are simply a long string of distractions that occupy our mind until we slip into blessed unconsciouness. Think of all the things people do to "get their mind off 'it'"-whatver 'it' might be.


We are addicted to company. Notice also the many ways we work to fill the space around us. We fear being alone. We fear solitude. It is this fear that reveals a desperate insecurity within ourselves. However, our attempts to fill our lives with company will never satisfy the true hunger of the heart-community with God.


If you sum it all, it's the attempt to fulfill a feeling of isolation, to cover up the fact that your alone or feeling immense pain. Noise can affect your sleep and behavior, or can make an annoyance become an emotional response.

People use sound as a sense of security so they don't feel alone. Music is used for pyschological control. It's carefully times to human rythmns. The noise replaces the dead silence that makes us think we've been forgotten, diverts us prehaps, from noticing how long we've been alone. Music also turns off your thinking and turns on pure pyschological response. We can use it as a weapon to a way of asserting power, or claiming space. We can tune out everything around us and use it to focus on your own sounds.