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- Author: Maggie Ross
- Full Title: Silence
- Category: #books
- Without awareness of this, we become, more than ever, “poor little talkative Christianity,” in E. M. Forster’s stinging phrase.
- The work of silence is neutral: it is not necessary to believe anything, but only to observe one’s mind at work with the silence, to discover its permutations, its portals, and its gifts; and to realize the trans-figuring effects that deepest silence can work in us.
- The basic message of those who have done the work of silence consists in this: if self-consciousness makes us human, then its elision opens the door to what was once called divinity.
- if we can get beyond our manipulative thinking to focus on not focusing, we open ourselves to insight and change; we access a vast, spacious, generous, silent, thinking mind that seems to have knowledge we have never self-consciously learned; that makes unexpected connections; that has its own ethics; and that not only gives us insights but can tell us when an insight is correct.
- We cannot self-consciously suspend self-consciousness until we find ways for self-consciousness to subvert itself. There are many ways “in” to silence, though it can happen spontaneously. A common technique is to concentrate on a single point—a single word, or counting exhalations—which allows self-consciousness gradually to fall away for a time.
- no form of medi- tation—and there are many—can be done in isolation, but rather must be part of a program that involves the refocusing of the entire person.
- religion’s history of opposition to the work of silence is instructive.
- Silence traditions are rarely heard of or cited today, yet such a tradition was handed down unbroken until the high Middle Ages in the West, when it was quenched by the mainstream religious institution of the age.
- It is not an exaggeration to say that when the silence tradition as part of the mainstream teaching authority was finally quenched in the mid-fifteenth century, Western institutional Christianity, always struggling to justify itself, began its death-throes.
- They conveniently ignored the inherent contradictions in the institution they were developing, which reflected the very structures and practices in Jewish religion and the Hebrew Scriptures that the teacher, Jesus, had called into question and spent his entire ministry trying to undermine.
- those intent on institution and hierarchy urged second-century Christians toward martyrdom.
- creating and sustaining a self-certifying and self-serving hierarchy,
- this conflict contrasts the lesser, often stunted effort of “imitation,” with the open-ended task of “putting on the mind of Christ” (the work of silence), which is entirely opposite.
- In psychological terms, to put on the mind of Christ means relinquishing imaginative stereotypes and projections into the silence, and receiving back a transfigured (in the literary as well as the psychological and theological senses) perspective, so that we are freed from the trap of our own circular thinking; while “imitation” means pursuing a life based on our own imaginative stereotypes and projections, impressions that are easily formed and controlled by a hierarchy.
- However piously and devoutly meant, imitation becomes a kind of religious performance art, regressively reductive with the passage of time.
- the desert hermits were very clear: “Flee bishops” they said. They wanted no part of hierarchy, and they would not presume to think of what they did as “sacrifice”
- The message of these desert dwellers was simple and compassionate: life and truth are to be found in the work of silence.
- True prayer, he says, begins only when we are no longer aware of praying. The mind is snatched.
- Early on, the hierarchy created a shift in emphasis in the eucharistic rite from a gathering of the people giving thanks, to a religious drama of sacrifice performed by the ordained.
- The institution, especially in the wake of the Council of Constance (1414-18) judged sanctity by the degree of adherence to imposed rules, which inevitably marginalized conversion of the heart. The institution was the will of God, and its members were required to conform to that will. Conformity was bought at the expense of insight; and the vision of God, always fragile in transmission, was easily overwhelmed by noise in the form of rules, devotions, and activities.
- The institution was the will of God, and its members were required to conform to that will. Conformity was bought at the expense of insight; and the vision of God, always fragile in transmission, was easily overwhelmed by noise in the form of rules, devotions, and activities.
- these pages invite readers to look at their own minds, to reflect on what is happening there, and to understand the essential role of silence for being human, and for living our own truth with one another.
- the first step toward restoring the circulation between silence and speech is to make our selves at home within the liminal spaciousness of our own minds, in the equipoise of attentive receptivity that opens the flow between these two aspects of knowing, that frees us from the strictures of time and the persecution of our own thoughts.
- Too often the word rational is used when linear is meant.
- We need to acknowledge that it is not our discriminating and reflexive self-consciousness that makes us human, but rather the ability to move beyond this self-consciousness to engagement and beholding, the irruption of our core silence into everyday life.
- the surrounding culture prefers to subject us to unrelenting noise so that we literally cannot hear ourselves think.
- This idolatry of experience is a poisoned chalice. The current use of the word (banking experience, eating experience, religious experience, and most absurd of all, worship experience) conveys the deceptive message that what is being sold is personalized, and that we are somehow in control.
- to rely on the ephemeral interpretations we call “experience” is really the same as depending on what we call “spin” to give us a true accounting.
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- Note: i.e.? experience is not direct perception of reality, but an interpretation of it
- Spin is little more than habitual lying, a practice that is now so pervasive and unquestioned that it invades our private interpretations and exacerbates our tendencies to lie to ourselves, to self-dramatize.29 When something happens that brings us up short and casts doubt on our interpretations, we tell ourselves and others yet more lies, tying up all our energy to maintain this inflation.
- it pretends to offer a haven, while in reality it assaults, removing all possibility of dignity, silence, thought, reflection, or genuine exchange with any other person unfortunate enough to have entered this dystopian nightmare.
- it also encourages fast, mindless eating. There is no time for consideration; if there were, we might discover how disgusting are the items saturated with fat, sugar, and salt that pervade the malign, addictive combination of substances that we are shoving into our mouths. The atmosphere renders impossible the time-honored value of meals as gatherings for appreciation of healthful, lovingly prepared food to be shared with conversation and the renewal of relationships.
- Blaise Pascal (1623–62) suggested that “man’s unhappiness arises from one thing alone: that he cannot remain quietly in his room.”35 His remark is symbolic of the fear of engaging the space of limitless interior silence, fear that by his day had taken hold of institutional Christianity.
- restoring communion with, and re-centering in, the deep mind within us, the process I call the work of silence. It is the choice to turn away from noise toward an unfiltered reality, to receive its gifts of fulfillment and joy. The purpose of the work of silence is to re-establish the flow between self-consciousness, which discriminates, dominates, and distorts our lives, and the clarity and wisdom of the deep mind, which is not directly accessible, but whose activities we can influence.
- to ungrasp so that we may be “grasped” by illumination.
- few people seem to understand the mutually exclusive character of higher education and religion, on the one hand, and market forces, on the other—
- The work of silence is the source of healthy community, for the health and character of community is dependent on the quality of solitudes that make it up; the reconciling character of shared silence is formed in the deep mind of each person.
- apparent resemblances among various cultures of belief arises not from what has come to be known as the so-called perennial philosophy, which is based on interpretation, but rather from its opposite: observations of mental processes that are common to all human beings, no matter how differently their manifestations may be culturally interpreted and expressed.
- institutions cannot help but have a stake in stunting the maturity of their adherents, even if this means they must destroy the original visions and insights on which the institutions originally were founded.
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- Note: Bonhoeffer: God hates visionary thinking.
- All institutions over-claim for themselves and end up believing more in their own existence than in the vision that propelled them into existence in the first place.
- Rather, the work of silence restores our full humanity, enabling us to engage reality directly through self-forgetfulness (beholding) for increasingly longer periods and with progressively greater facility. As open exchange with deep mind refines our self-conscious critical, analytical, and interpretative processes, and breaks open the self-conscious mind’s feedback loops, it becomes possible to bypass the intrusion of these interpretative filters.
- Engagement with deep silence leaves traces and marks of transfiguration (as opposed to transcendence or transformation, words which are wrongly applied to these texts and this process) on the person—in the literal sense of changing the way we figure things out, from which the religious sense of the word derives. The account of the Transfiguration is a narrative about changed perspective, not about becoming space aliens.
- The effort to go beyond layers of inner chatter to explore the depths of silence is not in itself religious. Propositional belief of any sort is not a prerequisite for engaging silence; as mere chatter it may even interfere.
- Meditation practice is but one very minor aspect of the work of silence: it is an entry-level, beginning step in an all-encompassing commitment.
- While it is not essential to believe the tenets of a particular sect, it is vital to be aware of one’s own beliefs, one’s own ethics, and the purpose for which one is meditating—that is, intent—and intent is supremely important in this process, for meditation accesses the deep mind, and the attention of the deep mind is influenced by intention.
- Tags: #deliberate-practice
- The work of silence is not a separate compartment of life called “spirituality”: it is living the ordinary through trans-figured perception.
- a life of unimaginable richness, animated by contemplation; living the ordinary through trans-figured perception;61 what, in the New Testament, is called the kingdom of heaven.
- this sort of silence—not an affect or a feeling, but a way of being in the world
- the older Christian spiritual tradition also holds that there is an additional faculty of the soul, whose function is apprehension of God and the true natures of created things.
- It is only by attentive, responsive, receptivity to the silence, by allowing the deep mind to do its work out of sight, and by relocating the person’s source of animating energy from the self-conscious to the deep mind, that outward behavior undergoes permanent change.
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- Note: Lean into the idea that we decide first (via the deep mind), deduce later (self-conscious mind figures it out later, or at least does its best to do so)
- The teacher of the work of silence can only point the way; each person has to experiment—or “prove” it, as the author of The Cloud of Unknowing would say, for him or her self.28
- While metaphors of direction such as “raise up” or “closer to God” are widely used in many texts about the interior life, their meaning is closer to “more optimal” or “less optimal.”
- the person who is contemplating has given over initiative and is animated from the deep mind (in Christian terms, by the Holy Spirit).
- Humility is seeing clearly, seeing things as they are, the implicit acknowledgement that most human ideas are provisional, that the characterizations of the self-conscious mind are partial and distorted. Humility has an aspect of deep listening, wonder, and respect for the mystery that inheres all creation.
- Intention is often a seed, the germ of an unknown future which we can glimpse only obliquely and then must forget. When intention bears fruit, if it does, it is only in retrospect that we can trace a new perspective or a major shift in our lives to a moment of long-forgotten choice.
- In light of the above discussion, a mystic would simply be someone who has committed to re-centering their life in the deep mind, no matter what the cost; mystical would refer to beholding++, when self-consciousness is effaced, and the effects that irrupt within beholding__ from the deep mind—which definition would exclude all interpretation, experience, and phenomena, such as visions; and mysticism would refer to the effort, process, and effects of living the absolute primacy of re-centering in the deep mind so that one’s daily life is informed by continual beholding. To return to my earlier definition: mysticism is living the ordinary through transfigured perception.
- “the difference between these two modes of knowing can also be understood as a difference between an understanding of what something is, this and not that, and an understanding that does not ask for what something is, but simply opens itself to the mystery of its being [N.B., this is a good definition of the biblical word behold ]
- In other words, when the self-conscious mind ceases its activity, then, out of its sight, direct perception—the indwelling God undertaking what the active intellect ought to be doing—becomes available and informs and refines the knowledge of appearances to something closer to what things are in themselves. In other words, the person in whom this indwelling has manifested is seeing with God’s eyes.19
- a primordial understanding that behavioral change cannot occur without interior work at a very deep level.
- Socrates is attributed with saying that “The secret of happiness … is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less.”
- such a perspective fosters a greater appreciation for material things as they are in themselves and the created world in general; it exalts a life of simplicity, detachment, and respect.
- We need to keep in mind, once again, that for the ancient, patristic, and medieval worlds right up to the twelfth century, philosophy meant a way of being in the world, not a merely abstruse exploration of abstract concepts.26
- To watch people laying waste to their minds and bodies, their lives and every living thing, when a remedy is available, is very difficult.
- It is not only that people do not want to change, finding security in their suffering as opposed to risking healing that is unfamiliar; they simply do not care enough to try, even if, as today, the neuro-psychological and ecological evidence is staring them in the face.
- while the way needs to be chosen, at the same time the basic elements of the process are innate in the human person, and that no statement of dogma, propositional belief, theologizing, or pietism can replace or reproduce it. And that once someone has chosen the way, most of the effort is devoted simply to staying focused and open to what grace will give.
- Another indication of maturity is a growing disinclination to engage in activities that will leave the person feeling jangled, or that introduce a lot of static.
- Slogans, half-truths, political insincerity, being told what someone thinks he or she wants to hear (the speaker is often trained to manipulate instead of relate), as opposed of being told the truth, become so naked that it is a source of wonder why anyone falls for these ploys—until one sees the expressions of lostness, bewilderment, and pain on the faces of the people still shackled to noise.
- Far from being a selfish undertaking, a life lived from the wellspring of silence influences other lives—but without anyone’s being aware of this fact. Silence itself has resonances, and people who are centered in silence quietly open the potential of transfiguration to everyone and everything around them, living the ordinary through transfigured perception.
- We seem able only to “sample” reality before creating the largely distorted narrative we call experience.
- In Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad observes that one of the hallmarks of civilization is restraint.