Silent Knowledge is Steiner's occult practice of holding back the force of speech before it reaches Broca's organ, so it becomes an inner organ of spiritual hearing.
Silent Knowledge in Anthroposophy is the occult practice, also called golden silence, of arresting the soul force of speech before it enters Broca's organ in the third cerebral convolution and the larynx, so that the power which would otherwise become the spoken word is held back and made inwardly active. Through the freed Word, Steiner taught, the meditant unites with the Mystery of Golgotha. Rudolf Steiner described the practice in a lecture given in Stockholm on 10 June 1913, published in The World of the Spirit and Its Impact on Physical Existence (GA 150). In German he calls it schweigende Erkenntnis, silent cognition. The meditant places himself in the forces of the soul that would normally flow into speech, yet remains mute; the liberated speech force then becomes the organ of Inspiration, of spiritual hearing, and of what Steiner names the soundless sounding. Practitioners of Anthroposophical meditation still train this arrest of the word as a doorway to Inspiration.
Silent Knowledge names the moment a meditant deliberately withholds the word. Ordinary speech spends a soul force through the brain and the larynx; Steiner's exercise catches that force before it touches the body and turns it inward. What was about to be said becomes a faculty of listening. The mute meditant begins to hear the spiritual world speak, which is why Steiner treats this golden silence as the gateway to Inspiration.
In Steiner's Own Words
When we speak, spiritual-soul forces intervene in the so-called Broca's organ, which is located in the third cerebral convolution, and then in the larynx. If we withdraw this power, which acts on the Broca's organ, from speaking, as it were, if we become aware of it without using it to speak, then we have grasped it in its spiritual-soul aspect. Let us suppose, for example, that you meditate in such a way that you place yourself in the forces of your soul, which would otherwise be expressed in speech, without speaking, you remain silent. When one thus arrests the soul-life in its inner being, before it intervenes in the bodily, one has grasped a power in oneself that leads to so-called inspiration, to spiritual hearing. The occult saying about so-called “silent knowledge” is based on this.
What it Means Today
In March 2004, NASA's Ames Research Center in California announced that a team led by Chuck Jorgensen had achieved what it called subvocal speech recognition. Button-sized electromyographic sensors placed under the chin and beside the Adam's apple picked up the faint nerve signals the brain sends toward the larynx and tongue when a person reads silently or talks to himself, and pattern-matching software translated those signals into words. No sound was produced; the impulse to speak was already measurable at the throat. The experiment confirmed, with electrodes, the physiological picture Steiner sketched in Stockholm ninety years earlier: inner speech is not an abstraction but a real force already flowing toward Broca's organ and the larynx before a syllable is voiced.
The two approaches use that stream in opposite directions. The NASA team harvested the outbound signal and turned it into text. Steiner's exercise of Silent Knowledge notices the same stream, declines to let it discharge into the body, and holds the gathered force within the soul, where it becomes an organ of listening rather than an instrument of saying. Thalira synthesis: the electrodes read the word on its way out of the body; golden silence reads it on the way back in, and what returns, in Steiner's account, is not one's own voice but the speech of spiritual beings, heard as the soundless sounding. A practitioner can test the gesture in miniature: form a sentence completely, feel the throat prepare it, then withhold it and attend to what the withheld force does within.
Where to Read More