What is needed above all is that we should treat our social and cosmic environment AS AN ACTUAL LIVING BEING, with which we are in the most intimate reciprocal action, though without becoming merged into uniformity with it.
Sometimes there would be a rush of noisy visitors and the Silence of the monastery would be shattered. This would upset the monks; not the master, however, who seemed just as content with the noise as with the Silence. To those protesting he said one day:
"Silence is not the absence of sound,
but the absence of self."