In this country, intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face. . . Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and incovenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. . . At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of iedas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question.
Elizabeth Gilbert
The Yogic sages say that all the pain of a human life is caused by words, as is all the joy. We create words to define our experience and those words bring attendant emotions that jerk us around like dogs on a leash. We get seduced by our own mantras (I'm a failure I'm lonely I'm a failure I'm lonely) and we become monuments to them. To stop talking for a while, then, is to attempt to strip away the power of words, to stop choking ourselves with words, to liberate ourselves from our suffocating mantras.
