SILENCE ISN’T NOTHING

 

Pickeral Weed in Jenness Pond (2020)
CC Jean Stimmell

As a teenager, I avoided silence at all costs. Even in nature, I had a crackling transistor radio glued to my ear, tuned to the beat of rock and roll. Now, with the wisdom that comes with age, silence is my best friend.

Most of us don't give silence its due, regarding it merely as the absence of noise, somewhere to escape today's 24/7 drumbeat of raucous political combat and exploding doomsday catastrophes from around the world. 

 I recently read a Substack^⁠1 essay by L. M. Sacasas that finally gives silence the credit it deserves: It explains why silence, rather than the lack of something, is an active force that shapes us at every moment. 

He writes: "I came to describe the experience as the feeling of silence carving away at my interiority like a sculptor chipping away at stone, as if silence were stripping me of all that was not  essential.”^⁠2

If this sounds mystical or even religious, you would be right.  Sacasas is following up on the work of the religious thinker, Max Picard.^⁠3 This commonality shouldn’t be surprising to us  because, it goes without saying, silence is central to every spiritual tradition.

In Buddhism, the religious tradition I am most familiar with, the goal is to silence both the noise of the exterior world and the  chattering monkeys of our ruminating minds. The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh tells us we can switch gears quickly:

“In just two or three seconds of breathing mindfully, we can awaken to the fact that we’re alive, we’re breathing in. We are here. We exist. The noise within just disappears and there is a profound spaciousness—it’s very powerful, very eloquent..”^⁠4

Regular meditation is the preferred Buddhist method to reduce toxic noise. Escaping into nature alone is insufficient because, as Picard writes, people “will carry the noise of the great towns and the noise of their own souls out into the country with them.”^⁠5 

Picard wrote his book during simpler times and spent considerable time railing against that new-fangled device called the radio because it “pushed silence to the margins of our experience by filling our spaces with a practically infinite supply of noise.”

Regrettably, in the years since Picard ranted against the radio, our noise problem has worsened exponentially with the advent of TV, portable devices, the internet, and smartphones. Not only has it driven silence from our world, but crippled language itself. Words originally meant something: they were connected organically to what is really real: our bodies, nature, and sense of place.^⁠6 They were direct links back to silence.

Unfortunately, since technology's take-over, as Picard explains, we are no longer governed by words intimately connected to the realm of silence but to formulas and algorithms. “Words that merely come from other words are hard and aggressive,” he counsels. "Such words are also lonely, and a great part of the melancholy in the world today is due to the fact that man has made words lonely by separating them from silence."^⁠7

The more I explore the subject, the more I am convinced: Far from being nothing, silence is everything. Complexity Theory has even advanced the mind-boggling theory that silence is nothing less than what we call consciousness – but it is not ours alone. Rather than springing from our puny two-pound brains, it emanates from a source infinitely greater.

According to Neil Theise's "Notes on Complexity," our brains aren't fleshy computers that create consciousness but, instead, act like transducers that connect us to a single, all-encompassing consciousness in the same way my tiny transistor radio could link up to a rock and roll radio station when I was a teenager.^⁠8

That's pretty heavy stuff: Our consciousness lives not in our skulls but hides in a profound silence that permeates the universe.

xxx

¹ https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/the-thing-that-is-silence

² Ibid.

³ Picard, Max. The World of Silence. Originally published in Switzerland, 1948..Reprint edition copyright 2002, Eight Day Press

⁴ Hanh, Thich Nhat. Silence (p. 5).HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

⁵ Picard, page 132.

⁶ The Resurgence of the Real: Body, Nature and Place in a Hypermodern World by Charlene Spretnak

⁷ https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/the-thing-that-is-silence

⁸ Theise, Neil. Notes on Complexity (p. 153). Spiegel & Grau. Kindle Edition.