We are addicted to words, sounds with meaning. We fill our world with a ceaseless babbling of words, surround ourselves with thick quilts of words, all for the sake of avoiding silence. Rid your mind of words, the need to make words. Silence the voice in your head, the one that keeps speaking, speaking. Silence starts from within.
It is not hard to keep the mind from making words - we all have experience with wordless being. The part of our mind that makes words is very highly developed, very active - it is when that part of the mind is drowsy that we experience wordlessness. This wordlessness comes without effort. It is not by trying to force our minds to shut off that we experience wordlessness, but by simply letting the words go. When we have eaten our fill, when we are drowsy at the end of a long day, This is when the word activity of our minds shuts down, and we simply see without thinking of the names of what we see - much as babies see the world.
We don't normally associate this form of awareness with our more active states, which is why we find it so hard to stop thinking in words when we are wide awake. This also makes many people believe that it is impossible to think without words - these people are very seriously addicted. Like a junkie who centers his entire life experience around heroin and who cannot remember any other way of life, these word junkies are blind to non-verbal knowledge.
Which is too bad for them. We can practice this wordlessness every day. Start out by letting all words escape your mind just for a second or two. If you are badly addicted to words, they will be hounding the fringes of your awareness, demanding to be let back in. And you will probably form the resolution in your mind, "I am not going to think in words," destroying all at once your good intent.
Let it go. And let the words go as well. Allow the observing ego (that part of you that observes yourself) to recall the experience of wordlessness from the days of babyhood, or those late night adventures with insomnia. With practice, it becomes quite easy to allow the mind wordless freedom for many seconds at a time.
Think of the things you enjoy without the attending words. Our vocabulary is limited in adjectives describing taste and odor sensations. When we smell or taste a thing. we do it on a more primitive level, without necessarily formulating words as we do it. These sensations have not been so narrowly pinned down with words as have our sensations of sight and hearing. We can taste something sweet without thinking the word `sweet', but we find it difficult to hear a bird calling without thinking the word `bird'.
Listen to the bird call without thinking of its source, its cause, or how it came to be. Simply hear it as one sound in an entire environment of sounds. The effect is one of lightness of being, a sense of timelessness, and a curious deepening of understanding. When we know the name of a thing, we know what we call it, but that name itself inhibits our observations of the thing. It is by simply looking or hearing, that we understand it in a more intuitive, more intimate level.
Silence is an important mental habit, a neglected habit, but one which is crucial to good mental hygiene. It is especially important for those most susceptible to addiction to words - those who read and those who write.