This quiet thing is hard....folk keep asking questions and I do not always have my pad and pen at hand....they ask again when I don’t speak ...they sound like they need me to answer...folk call me from a distance and I end up having to walk to them, doesn’t matter what I am in the middle of...they forget I can’t yell back, they don’t come to me (symbolic??) The phone keeps ringing....I want to answer.......some of those that ring know I cannot talk, they say ‘don’t talk’ when I answer the phone in desperation, and I just sit and listen while I am talked at....it feels weird, I feel impotent.
My normal reactions are difficult to curtail...getting others on board to be sensitive to this seems nigh on impossible.....My husband left for work a little irritated at me because I couldn’t answer a question straight away ‘cause I had no paper and pen handy. I wanted to hug him to say I love him, but he’d headed down the stairs already and I could not call out, instead I banged on the wall, but to no effect....
Everything feels so disjointed without the spoken word....
My patience levels are a little unsteady too....I am writing as fast as I can go but cannot keep up with the speedy brain, so I shorthand, text style, and lots of misunderstandings ensue, and then more explanatory writing and the catch 22 begins its endless circling!!
I am trying to see the funny side, to affect a serene calmness. This is not so easy, the solitude of silence is fine in a silent world, but my world is full of demands and noise. I generally enjoy it that way! Now, I struggle to maintain a silent retreat whilst not retreating!
I remind myself of a story about the gentle art of meditation.....
‘There was a young aspirant who wished to learn the meaning of life so he travelled to meet the most famous philosophers of his age. The first philosopher gave a very great and lengthy explanation on the meaning of life. The aspirant was suitably impressed and awed by the magnificence of his deliberations. However, straight away this theory was criticized by another philosopher. He cogently pointed out many deficiencies in his system; instead he pointed out another philosophy, which he argued was far superior. Like this several philosophers came to argue their case for having the best philosophy. Some said truth could not be discovered in this life, others said that truth was in a particular book. However, with so many conflicting philosophies the aspirant just became confused.
The aspirant decided to travel deep into the forest where he came across a yogi deep in meditation. His face expressed a countenance of deep equanimity, peace and, contemplation. Eagerly the aspirant asked the yogi what was the meaning of life. To this question, the yogi did not flicker even an eyelid, but continued in his deep meditation. The aspirant was disappointed, but remained inspired by the consciousness of the yogi. The next day he came back and his repeated question, the yogi maintained his silence. It was then that the aspirant realized the meaning of life could never be explained in words. At this point he began to learn meditation himself.’
I like this story; it makes the wonderful sense of wordlessness. True, too many words confuse and create their own kind of chaos; meditation brings a calmness that signals out a truth in the chaos. But we live in a word-driven world and even in this story the yogi, who understands the meaning of life, sits alone, in the quiet. His responsibility is with himself and the quiet……I am sure this is true for all of us, we are responsible in the final telling only for ourselves and our own quiet, but how much harder to live this truth in a peopled world. Of course, if we can manage to do so, then our peopled world becomes a serene valley, we become an icon of calm, those we share with become touched by the calm and a new circle of events begins to flow…..
At this point I am feeling a bit of a silence failure….and to think I teach meditation….I guess I know the ‘words’ the ideas and the intent of meditation better than some, but I do not always live the truths I understand in words….is this silent opportunity a chance to find an inner silence I have not yet delved deep enough to unearth?
Let this distinction be made, I am not necessarily silent, I am being silent by avoiding speech….this does not automatically instill a sense of inner quiet. It certainly does entail an embodiment of silence…at present all it is, is ‘being’ silent. I have a way to go to encompass silence, but first I will find my peace with being silent…kind of like being on the path to enlightenment, it does not automatically assume enlightenment itself!!!
And of course one has to bear a thought for the complex nature of silence and the complex nature of being silent…..
The complexity of silence is best examined I believe in a reflection upon a score of music written in 1952. The first recital of John Cage's 4'33" created a scandal. It is Cage's most infamous composition, his so-called "silent piece". The piece consists of four minutes and thirty-three seconds in which the performer plays nothing. At the premiere some listeners were unaware that they had heard anything at all. Tudor (who first performed this piece) placed the hand-written score, which was in conventional notation with blank measures, on the piano and sat motionless as he used a stopwatch to measure the time of each movement. The score indicated three silent movements, each of a different length, but when added together totaled four minutes and thirty-three seconds. Tudor signaled its start by lowering the keyboard lid of the piano. The sound of the wind in the trees entered the first movement. After thirty seconds of no action, he raised the lid to signal the end of the first movement. It was then lowered for the second movement, during which raindrops pattered on the roof. The score was in quite a few pages, so he turned the pages as time passed, yet playing nothing at all. 4'33” is often incorrectly referred to as Cage's "silent piece". He made it clear that he believed there is no such thing as silence, defined as a total absence of sound. In 1951, he visited an anechoic chamber at Harvard University in order to hear silence. "I literally expected to hear nothing," he said. Instead, he heard two sounds, one high and one low. He was told that the first was his nervous system and the other his blood circulating. This was a major revelation that was to affect his compositional philosophy from that time on. It was from this experience that he decided that silence defined as a total absence of sound did not exist. "Try as we may to make a silence, we cannot," he wrote.
The essential meaning of silence is the giving up of intention," he said. He redefined silence as simply the absence of intended sounds, or the turning off of our awareness. "Silence is not acoustic," he said, "It is a change of mind. A turning around."
And so we come to Zen. According to legend, when Buddha was growing old he convened his disciples for an imperative discourse. And when they gathered and sat down silently, reverently waiting to hear their aging Master speak, the Buddha arose, came forward on the flower-decked platform, looked over his audience of disciples and monks, then bent down and picked up a flower which he raised to the level of his eyes. Then, without uttering a word, he returned to his seat. His followers looked at each other in bafflement, not understanding the meaning of his silence. Only the venerable Mahakasyapa serenely smiled at the Master. And the Master smiled back at him and wordlessly bequeathed to him the spiritual meaning of his wordless homily.
And that, according to legend, was the moment Zen was born.
According to Zen, existence is found in the silence of the mind (no-mind), beyond the chatter of our internal dialog. Existence, from the Zen perspective is something that is only happening spontaneously, and it is not just our thoughts.
So yes I am ‘being silent’ but have yet to embrace day to day, moment by moment silence…. (it is true there are the odd instants in my day when I return to the breath and then pause between breaths for a brief exposure to silence…and there are moments in meditation when silence is achieved if we are to define it as absence of thought not sound…I can still hear my breath only I do not connect to this) but yes it is true too that I still define my existence by my thoughts….
So now back to those complexities, we have still to look at the complex nature of ‘being silent’.
Perhaps the following quotes will instill this information well…
To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.
~ Abraham Lincoln (1809 - 1865)
History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.
~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
Oppression can only survive through silence.
~ Carmen de Monteflores
I have always thought it would be a blessing if each person could be blind and deaf for a few days during his early adult life. Darkness would make him appreciate sight; silence would teach him the joys of sound.
~ Helen Adams Keller
Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time.
~ Thomas Carlyle (1795 - 1881)
Nothing is so good for an ignorant man as silence; and if he was sensible of this he would not be ignorant.
~ Saadi (1184 - 1291)
Hmmmmmmmmmmm
I’d like to add something here but in the interests of silence let me leave you with nothing…that’s no thing……..
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