Silence is palpable. It is a kind of subtle substance, which we can almost reach out to feel. And yet it is not there around us unless it is also here within us. It has favorite gathering places, such as the natural world, a forest, the mountains, the empty plains; the outback is thick with it. Other places of subtle congregating are cathedrals, caves, sacred sites, and cemeteries. In meditating we run into it at the moment when our interior becomes a vast exterior and we no longer know if we are inside or outside. Sometimes it gathers between human beings. It presents itself at births, at deaths, and at most religious ceremonies. It sometimes comes when we pray. The religion of the Quakers is founded on it. But it requires going to the edge of selflessness before it will appear, so religion itself does not guarantee its presence.
These places of gathering are fast disappearing. A friend in Japan recently told me that he went one Sunday on a train to the mountains to get away from the press of people in the city. As he was walking in the woods, he suddenly heard a loud beep. He looked up to see a loudspeaker attached to a tree through which a long announcement suddenly blared. The Silence immediately fled. We are not yet quite in that situation in this country. It is still possible to seek Silence in nature. But cathedrals are less quiet than in the past, religious ceremonies are completely pre-fabricated to ensure the numinous stays away, and we only take a "moment of silence" to remember the dead. Caves and sacred sites and art museums are insulated from this mystery by guided tours filled with the noise of information. We now have to learn to invite the silence, and having invited it we now have to learn to enter it.
In our ordinary sensing, perceiving, and thinking, everything around us exists as "outside" and "over there." We are spectators to ourselves and to the world. But in Silence everything displays its depth, and we find that we are part of the depth of everything around us. We are not adding our subjectivity to the world but discovering that the kind of separation between ourselves and the world we have adopted is illusion. We do not dissolve into the world, nor does the world dissolve into us in Silence; we and the world each mirror the other within the depths of the soul. We discover that each thing of the world lives deeply within us. But more, we discover that each of us, in the region of the soul, lives deeply within the soul of the world and the crossing point is the centering heart.
Drawing attention to the heart focuses the mystery we are entering. As both physical organ and spiritual-imaginative center, it is the only true organ for perceiving Silence. Once activated in the heart, Silence spreads throughout the body, and we feel as if our entire physiology alters. Instead of perceiving things held apart from other things in sharp and heavy outline, as is usual, we enter into a feeling-perception of the interior space around us that gives birth to all things. Artists have an intuition of this kind of interior in working with negative space. But the space of Silence is something more than that because it is not merely the void from which things spring up; it is a living presence. The deeper we enter into Silence the more we become aware that this living presence is primary and the contents of our perceiving are the secondary bursting forth of this original presence. For a moment we are dizzied beyond belief. If only we had the courage to ward off the dizziness and stay in its presence, who knows where we would be taken. Instead, we recover our usual sensing and, at most, feel the continued resonance of the Silence.
We can learn, however, to cultivate the feeling of resonance so that it becomes an indicator that lets us know when we are near the gateway to the interior world of Silence. The word resonance comes from the Latin verb resonare, meaning "to return to sound". When we sound an object such as a bell, it continues to ring or resonate the original sound. There is another kind of resonance called sympathetic resonance: when a bell sounds and continues to resonate, another object with qualities of the same pitch as the bell begins to vibrate with it. The human soul functions similarly as an activity of resonance, and our soul connection with Silence is a form of sympathetic resonance, though it is an inverse resonance because it is not the sound that resonates but the currents of Silence.
When we cultivate the capacity to be alone without feeling lonely, we enter into solitude where we find ourselves anew. Solitude, however, too easily turns into spiritual narcissism. It is like the single bell resonating only its own sound. We become filled with ourselves, imagining that we are in the presence of the larger world of Silence. Yet sympathetic resonance, a term that comes from the world of physics, is not quite descriptive for getting beyond ourselves. Perhaps it is better understood as requiring empathetic resonance, the resonance of the individual soul coming into resonance with the Soul of the World.
In Silence, everything is experienced as "within" but not as "within us". We, along with everything else, are within Silence. Here new laws of perceiving hold. In our ordinary sensing and perceiving we experience things as outside of us, in front of us, to the side of us, above, below, and behind us. The physical body limits our perspectives. When we perceive something while we are in the realm of Silence, we perceive qualities of the interior of things from the place of our own interior being. For example, in ordinary perceiving, the tree that sits outside a window is "over there". As long as we perceive it as "over there" we are not present to the Silence. From within Silence, the boundary between us and the tree becomes diaphanous substance. We are then taken out of the kind of perceiving that knows in advance what it perceives into a way that is present to the unknown. Here, feeling ascends, not emotion, but feeling. It is a new way of knowing, knowing as artists or musicians know when doing their art.
ROBERT SARDELLO
SILENCE
