A wonderful post, I appreciate how you state that you "don't have to create or do anything" to be in silence because it is always there. In my beginning days of meditation I found myself trying to "do" or "create" silence, which just played into my thought patterns even more. It was within recognizing my thoughts, and not fighting them but rather like you said, allowing them to pass like clouds in the sky, simply observing the clouds and not grasping onto them, that I found silence.

I also benefited a lot from reading Ram Dass's book "Be Here Now", here are a few pages that I think relate to this post :-)