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→Why is Silence Important?
For me, for what I am trying to do, action in silence is always much more important.... The force which is at work is not limited by words, and this gives it an infinitely greater strength, and it expresses itself in each consciousness in accordance with its own particular mode, which makes it infinitely more effective. A certain vibration is given out in silence, with a special purpose, to obtain a definite result, but according to the mental receptivity of each person it is expressed in each individual consciousness exactly in the form which can be the most effective, the most active, the most immediately useful for each individual; while if it is formulated in words, this formula has to be received by each person in its fixity—the fixity of the words given to it—and it loses much of its strength and fullness of action because, first, the words are not always understood as they are said and then they are not always adapted to the understanding of each one. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/09/5-june-1957#p11</ref>
As for calm and silence, there is no need of the supramental to get that. One can get it even on the level of Higher Mind which is the next above the human intelligence. I got these things in 1908, twenty-seven years ago and I can assure you they were solid enough and marvellous enough without any need of supramentality to make it more so! Again, a calm that "seems like motion" is a phenomenon of which I know nothing. A calm or silence which can support or produce action—that I know and that is what I have had—the proof is that out of an absolute silence of the mind I edited the Bande Mataram for four months and wrote 6½ volumes of the Arya, not to speak of all the letters and messages etc. etc. I have written since. If you say that writing is not an action or motion but only something that seems like it, a jugglery of the consciousness,—well, still out of that calm and silence I conducted a pretty strenuous political activity and have also taken my share in keeping up an Asram which has at least an appearance to the physical senses of being solid and material! <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/28/the-supermind-or-supramental#p45</ref>
== Silence for Receptivity ==
Supreme Lord, teach us to be silent so that in silence we may receive Thy force and understand Thy will. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/prayers#p105</ref>
Descents of peace are good, but an increasingly stable quietude and silence of the mind is something more valuable. When that is there then other things can come—usually one at a time, light or strength and force or knowledge or ananda. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/30/the-inward-movement#p75</ref>
Silence and a modest, humble, attentive receptivity; no concern for appearances or even any anxiety to be—one is quite modestly, quite humbly, quite simply the instrument which of itself is nothing and knows nothing, but is ready to receive everything and transmit everything. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/10/aphorism-4#p6 http://incarnateword.in/cwm/10/aphorism-4#p6</ref>
Every kind of realisation—infinite self, cosmic consciousness, the Mother's Presence, Light, Force, Ananda, Knowledge, Sachchidananda realisation, the different layers of consciousness up to the Supermind—all these can come in the silence which remains but ceases to be blank. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/30/emptiness-voidness-blankness-and-silence#p37</ref>
== Silence and Education ==