A useful prompt from Messrs. Laurel and Hardy. We usually mean "not talking" when we talk about silence. Keeping quiet.
I can imagine few more terrifying things than total, absolute, zero-sounds silence. On earth, we can make rooms so effectively sound-dampened and insulated that if you go into one and don't talk, it's pretty close to absolute silence. An anechoic chamber.
People really don't enjoy being in them. The record endurance in there is, apparently, 45 minutes. Total absolute zero silence I guess you'd get in space, because without atmosphere you can't have the vibrations we call sound. (I'm now going to doggy-paddle hastily back into my depth in the physics swimming-pool...)
So a silent retreat, a silent meditation, is simply a time during which we don't speak, and we seek therefore not to listen to words. On retreats, we are usually encouraged not to read much either. The final touch is to avoid extensive eye contact. Nothing wrong perhaps (views vary) with a quick friendly smile when passing someone in the corridor, but too much direct gaze can break the...whatever it is that's going on in your head.
Is it scary, lonely, oppressive, to keep quiet for a day or two? I don't find it so, particularly if you are with a group of like-minded people similarly intent on it. It certainly has a gentle but powerful cumulative effect over a few days. The quiet can be broken - a "how's it going, anything to tell us?" discussion or a one-to-one chat half-way through I found very valuable.
So it's not silence. Hearing natural sounds can be a great help, for example. I don't recollect anyone saying "curse that blackbird, singing away, he's broken the silence!" It's simply not talking, and not listening to much other than guidance at the start of or during a meditation.
The effect is powerful but difficult to describe, other than it helps you to feel you are in the present moment. When I come out of silence, I often don't want to talk much for a bit, to ease myself gently back into the richness of verbal discourse (and its frequent and sometimes enjoyable banality, of course.)
Similarly, in ceremonies funereal or matrimonial, people sometimes shy away from the idea of a minute or two's silence; yet communal silence, when all present are thinking of the same person or people, can be very powerful, joining up those present at a different level, in a different way from speech.
We shy away from silence, I think, because we are surronded by, conditioned by and perhaps addicted to verbal input. How often have you, sitting alone to eat, reached out for something, anything, to read? Just this morning I reached unthinkingly for the cereal packet. I mean, who cares about riboflavin anyway? I thought I needed words. How about just eating, and being with that?
Then there's the mobile phone. I'll just pop it beside me on the table because...I don't know why because. It is comforting. I exist. Someone is getting in touch, so I must mean something out there in the cosmos.
Well you do, but however powerful your mobile is (I love mine, too!) it can't tell you what you mean in the cosmos. Silence and meditation are much more likely to get you There. The phone can wait, monkey-mind!
You can't phone the Tao, and if you could, you'd just get - silence.
There may not be much to be gained from banging away rationally and conceptually at some of these terms, but let's have a try (again...)
If a Quaker says she is waiting for the Spirit to move her to speak, to find some ministry for the Meeting, I take that to have some relationship to a sense of God, of a power beyond human dimensions. Possibly but not necessarily to a supernatural entity.
Her own feeling may simply be of something greater than we can know, of something within each of us, of...well, perhaps it's better left as a general term covering an intense communication with, er...
OED: "Spiritual: having a relationship based on a profound level of mental or emotional communion." Whatever the relationship might be, and with whoever or whatever the communion might take place, I can run with that.
If a Benedictine monk talks about his spiritual path, he'll mean something very different to what my Buddhist friend may mean when she talks about her spiritual path. But both of them seek some profound significance, something beyond the usual intellectual and emotional framework of our lives.
Spirit:
(OED) "the non-physical part of a person which is the seat of emotions
and character; the soul." I can't see that there is a non-physical part of a person, in the sense of a supernatural entity, and the word "soul" is the problem here, because for me it relates back to the fairly traditional and conventional Christianity of my school days. But there may be a universal common self, the Light within us that we all have, a self below and beyond the ego.
When Gautama Buddha was close to death, he didn't tell his followers to believe in him and he would lead them to the Father, so they would be saved. He simply said that each of them had to light his own lamp.
That individual light may relate to a "spiritual path" that could chime with Quakers and Buddhists.
But the Tao Te Ching reminds us right at the start that
"A way that can be walked
is not The Way
A name that can be named
is not The Name.
Tao is both Named and Nameless."
To reach a profound sense of communion beyond the ego, we have to break through the frame of either/or, of comparisons and polarities, of conceptual analyses. I think that's valid whatever your "spiritual path." There's only so much we can do with ordinary speech and writing. The rest, the other, may involve being in silence for a while.
I'm minded, as politicians rather pompously say, to carry on with the theme of how we face the declines and dependencies which many fear in old age. However, I've just read something truly extraordinary so of course I have to write about it.
May I introduce you to
Angharad Price. She is an academic and a writer in Welsh; mercifully, for speakers of mere phrase-book Welsh such as me (mae'n drwg gen i) her book about her family roots in a Merionedd valley was translated into English. I've just started reading it; it's going to be a wonderful read.
In the foreword, Ms Price writes about tranquillity,
"the reversal of creation. The perfection of an absence."
She goes on: "Tranquillity can belong to one place, yet it ranges the world. It is tied to every passing hour, yet everlasting. It encompasses the exceptional and the commonplace. It connects interior with exterior. The creator of tranquillity was the guardian of paradox. From the moment of conception until the moment of death, tranquillity is within and without us. But in the tumult of life it is not easily felt. .... when our senses are spent we seek tranquillity. And as we age, our search for it becomes more passionate, though never easier."
She writes about peace, tranquillity, as "a transparency between myself and the world," and she says she has encountered it many times, only to lose it again.
You can't hold on to it. There's no point striving for it. It's not amenable to conceptual analysis. It's there all the time. You just have to let yourself be with it by leaving your self behind.
Call it the Peace of God which passeth understanding, call it the Way, the Tao, a mystical experience, a sense of unity with the world. Call it a transparency between myself and the world. We can find it in meditation, in listening to what the water says, what the hills say. Call it what you like. "The name that can be named is not the eternal name."
I find more and more often I want to be with what Ms Price calls tranquillity. "As we age, our search for it becomes more passionate, though never easier." Very true!
I think, as I read on, that this will prove to be a deceptively
profound, simply written and very wise book.
