Come to think of it, everything in our high-tech world has acquired voices. Elevators, cars, buses, doors, wristwatches, and clocks speak. Answering machines talk to us on behalf of persons who will not talk to us. Wherever we go, the radio, TV, the Walkman and now, the iPod, bombard our eardrums with non-stop blasts of sound bytes masquerading as music.

There was a time when it was easy to escape the noise by going to a far-away, private place. Not anymore. When the cell phone rings, the whole world knows where we are, and putting it off creates anxious chatter within us: "The call might be urgent, or there might be an emergency situation." We feel that choosing silence over communication may be risky. It may entail a loss of connection. So, even when we are in an ideal quiet place, the cell phone provokes so much internal noise that it is impossible to experience silence.

In our world of machines, silence has acquired another meaning. When the whirring or droning of our appliances stops, immediately panic sets in. "Is there a brown-out?" The silence of machines signals a malfunction. Since living with machines make us think and act like machines, when people are silent, we conclude that there must be something wrong with them. When a wife gives the husband the silent treatment, we think that their marriage is off course.

One reason why people do not appreciate, or are even threatened, by silence is due to a misunderstanding. We often think of silence as an absence. We equate it with emptiness. For silence to exist, there must be the absence of words and noises. In truth, silence is not absence, but PRESENCE, not emptiness but fullness. Strangers babble and chatter because they are seldom present to each other. It is ironic that despite the Web and other means of communication, we find it more difficult today to create real conversation. We make contacts without any real engagements. Webcams and videophones make us visible to people everywhere, but our visibility does not translate to real presence.

Television has brainwashed us into thinking that words are more powerful that silence. Noise is the signature tune of modernity. Words are often bearers of lies, false promises and gossip. We are gradually forgetting the harmony created by the silence of the universe (UNI-VERSE), the poetic homage to a Creator that we can hear only when we allow noise to cease and silence to take over.

Socrates wrote that Hermes, the messenger of the gods, is both a harbinger of truth and the father of lies, an apt description for the inventor of words. For, words can reveal and conceal, say and unsay, express and withhold meaning. It is only when we are accustomed to silence that our words become transparent.