From this clouded perspective silence is nothing, not even context. In a life of noise silence is just a lack of noise. In a life in which noise, no matter how loud or painful or disjointed, is what life IS, silence is NOT life or even death, a dearth of anything at all.
Perceive silence this way, as an alternative: You live within a space limited by walls and filled with things, lots of things, so many things that the space is hard to navigate, the things difficult to adjust or even use. Because this space is the limit of your experience and thus your perceivable reality, there is nothing outside of it that you can perceive. There is a window in one of the walls, perhaps large, perhaps small, but from the angle you can approach this window, given your cluttered surroundings, you can see nothing but emptiness, and this seems to confirm your isolation to within the walls. But from a different angle that you could reach if the clutter was not so tightly packed you could see that there is a vast and dimensionally different space outside the window, a mystery that lives outside your closed and cramped space. That mystery is separated from your experience by only the structural integrity of the window's glass, the thinnest edge of your walls, of what you consider to be the end of reality. You can see through it and see something else--something that at a very minimum proves your reality is artificially limited--if you can approach it from a useful angle (give yourself the space), but to actually get to it you have to open the window, an act that violates the integrity of the known.
And there you have both the perceptual doorway (or window, in this case) and the nature of the problem, which includes the nature of the resistance once the problem has shrunk to perceivable size. To move past the space that limits reality requires an acceptance of its artificiality, which implies a part of you has to die (ala Wayne Dyer and a whole bunch of other folks), possibly a hard nut to swallow. Once you have realized the limits of your self-imposed reality are actually not real you have a new problem before you can fully free yourself--exactly what is and isn't real?
And that's why this statement by Maharshi is phrased so simply (it is, of course, stripped of any original context, but it is presented that way for a reason). Because the point is that to attempt to define reality through building walls around representations of components of reality (things) is a trap. But likewise, to attempt to remove yourself from that trap by just doing the same thing on a larger scale is to just create a larger version of the same trap. In other words, the act or process of replacing awareness with conceptualizations is the real problem. But from within that problem the perception is that awareness itself is nothing without the conceptualizations we place into it that then ground it into a confined space rather than an unlimited space. And you can feel that encapsulating tension even while looking out the window into a larger space.
The answer, as I see it, is to frame the problem, not the larger space. This is because once an attempt is made to frame the larger space (i.e. define a larger reality) it becomes contained and limited. But once the problem is framed and thus confined, and provided the space outside it remains undefined, awareness is now free to expand into it and experience it, perhaps infinitely. Why infinitely? Not necessarily because reality is infinite (though it may be), but because to define its edge recreates the entire problem. Besides, if you make it to an edge you won't be concerned with what I've written here anymore...