I have recently completed Julia Cameron’s series of workshops on The Listening Path, the final part of which is centred on listening to silence. I have a lot of respect for Julia, even though her world view isn’t the same as mine. I learn a lot from following her exercises with an open mind. My copy of The Artist’s Way is corner-turned and scribbled on, bright with agreement highlights and refusal exclamation marks. I go back to it again and again. When I finally get my copy of the book accompanying The Listening Path (currently Covid-delayed), I’m sure it will begin a similar existence.
I mention all of the background, because in the final workshop, listening to her talk about silence, sitting in silence, entering silence really surprised me. She gave us lots of reassuring quotes about silence. My favourite was this from Rumi: Silence is the language of God, all else is translation.
I don’t believe in Rumi’s god, but even so…there is truth in what he said. In silence we touch something that we cannot reach in any other way: not through art, not through music, not through conversation, or movement. Stillness and silence if we are lucky enough to access them are among the most profound experiences we will ever encounter.
If we are lucky enough, I say – and yet these things are there for the taking if we choose to seek them out. I grant you that true, absolute, silence is hard to come by in this over-engineered world. I went to sit in a cathedral cloister, and whilst I would allow the occasional squawking pigeon, the drone of an aircon unit was an unwarranted frustration. Perhaps then, we might settle for “quiet” rather than silence. Not least because while we live and breathe we will hear our own self if nothing else.
The reason Julia was giving us such reassurance is because she seems to believe that we might be afraid of silence, that we would find it threatening. Is that because she did so to begin with? Or because many of her students have told her that they do find it so? I find that strange.
Although I have lived alone for much of my life, I lived with the “delights” of noisy neighbours, angrily noisy neighbours, until very recently. Having now been just over a year in my new home, I still delight to wake in the morning to nothing more raucous than a robin. Traffic noise is muffled beyond the buildings. If I go to bed to the sound of a conversation in the street, I know it will pass before any chance of it disturbing my sleep.
I sit now in my office and if I pause the tapping of fingers on keyboard, I can hear the soft hum of the PC cooling fan and nothing else. When I sit in the early morning with my journal, I can hear the ticking of the clock, and occasional whoosh from the boiler, and the creaks of the house doing its wake-up stretches.
I am blessed with silence – as near as the modern world allows it. Silence does not scare me. It wraps me in daydreams, allows me to think constructively, calms me and prompts me. Silence lures me to the page…read…write…come to the words it whispers. Words because words are my thing… I know that for others it would say, just stay, be open, follow your breath… To others – and sometimes also to me – it would say, come walk with me, come play.
Silence is a security blanket. Silence is a friend.
The sound of silence is the sound of our own breathing. The pulse of our blood, the beat of our heart. The sound of silence is the first and last sound of life itself. And it comes from within us.
Julia asked us to sit in silence, and hear whatever it might have to say to us. On this occasion, she (I think of silence in the feminine) said again, and simply, “Trust.”
Again, and simply, because I am hearing this word all the time at the moment. As my directional shift comes to rest and I start to move forward, I am being asked to trust in the process, trust in the teachings, trust in the people. Not to shut down my critical faculties, but to allow that where there is uncertainty, trust is the key, since I am also asked to trust my own instincts and intuition, trust my skill and knowledge.
Trust does not come before the decision or choice; it is what must immediately follow upon it. We decide on the basis of instinct or on the basis of science or on the basis of empirical experience (scientific or otherwise) or on the basis of grounded or ungrounded theory, we decide. Then we need to trust that we have decided rightly, until we have reason to be determined otherwise, which – let’s face it – is nothing more than the next decision.
It is often in silence that we learn whether or not the next decision is an instinctive one or one where we need to follow whatever evidence we can accumulate. We learn to trust our instinct by hearing it when it says, Er…No idea…sorry! Because when we learn to hear that gut reaction, and respond by going out and searching for the idea(s), then we know that when we get a positive (or positively negative) response from our instinct, from our gut, from our higher self, we know we can have faith in what it is telling us.
We can only hear any of these messages in silence.
Silence, or quiet, is not only about looking for answers though. The whole point about silence, is that often she does not speak. When silence invites you to sit within her, she is asking you also not to speak. Not to ask. Not to off-load. She will take these things on if you need her to, but her invitation is for you to sit within her, to enter into her essence of no-thought, no-need, no-worry, no-thing, nothing.
At its best, entering into silence (or deep quiet) can be like stepping into the void of space but still being able to breathe. The pull of gravity feels lessened. The weight of life feels lighter.
You might want to label this “meditation” and I’m not here to tell you not to. Only for me meditation feels like something you do. Listening to silence is also something you do. But entering silence is when you stop even listening. That isn’t something you do, it’s just something that happens, sometimes, if you give it a blank permission to do so. You might call it zoning out and think it’s not a good thing. For me it is like being softly swaddled and settled and almost but not quite sleeping…entering a different brain-state…an under-consciousness.
When I enter silence (or deep quiet), beyond listening to it, I am not unconscious or subconscious, I remain aware of the chair I am sitting on, the pen in my hand (because usually there is one when I do this), the room, the view. It is a deeply calm feeling. When I come out of the silence back into the world, I cannot tell you what I was thinking about. Any thoughts that chose to wander through my head-space, found it off-line, un-distractable.
That for me is the difference. My understanding is that in meditation, thoughts come up and you simply observe them as they pass by. In the silence, if they come up, you do not even observe them, they simply wander, silently, away.
I have found then, that listening to silence or to quiet is as active thing. It is something I do with intention. That intention may be to seek guidance, or to lay something on the altar, hand it over, stop worrying about it, let it go, or it may be to ask for strength or calm or creativity. Whatever the intention, it is active listening, noticing…starting with the noticing of the things that are not silence, the ambient sounds that frame the silence as tree branches or clouds might frame a sky…to noticing what the silence itself has to say. Listening in order to hear.
And I have found that entering silence is a passive thing. It cannot be done with intention. It can only be allowed to happen. It cannot be controlled and it has no purpose. I emerge from silence (or deep quiet) non-the-wiser at an intellectual level. I have heard nothing, learned nothing that I am aware of. I always emerge calmer, and curious. I do think that something happens in the silence – but I have no idea what it is.
And I’m ok with that.
