Golden: The Power of Silence in a World of Noise by Justin Talbot-Zorn & Leigh Marz
Part I A SHARED YEARNING
CHAPTER 1 An Invitation
Take a moment to consider what might sound like a strange question: Is the silence simply the absence of noise—or is it also a presence unto itself?
If there’s one common denominator to all these improbably diverse varieties of deep silence, we believe it’s through the answer to the last of the questions that we posed to you. The deepest silence isn’t just an absence; it’s also a presence. It’s a presence that can center us, heal us, and teach us.
In our exploration of the meaning of the proverb Silence is golden, we come back again and again to the notion that true silence, profound silence, is more than the absence of noise. It’s this presence, too
It’s hard to find open space in a world of noise. There are mighty forces today devoted to hijacking attention and keeping things loud. The most powerful institutions in business and government and education tell us that our responsibility is to get more prolific and efficient at the production of mental stuff. The clamor of advertising and expectations of busyness are subtle instruments of social control.
Yet here’s the thing about silence: it’s always available
It’s in the breath. It’s in the gaps between breaths, between thoughts, between words exchanged among friends in conversation. It’s in the cozy moment in the blankets just before the alarm clock rings
When we seek the very deepest silence, we’ll find that it doesn’t really depend on the auditory or informational conditions of our lives. It’s an unalterable presence that’s always here and now, deep inside. It’s the pulse of life.
This is a book about why and how to tune in to it.
NAVIGATING NOISE
It’s good news that mindfulness is now mainstream
Joshua Smyth, a professor at Pennsylvania State University and a leading researcher in the field of biobehavioral health and medicine, explains, A lot of the claims about the benefits of mindfulness pertain to individuals who are serious practitioners. Smyth sees great value in these studies but warns against extrapolating the findings too broadly
As people, we all have different styles, different preferences, different ways of learning, and different ways we make meaning as we go
So, how, then, do we respond to the onslaught of noise? If meditation isn’t for everyone, then how do we bring remedies to the scale that’s necessary in today’s world?
In this book, we propose an answer
Notice noise. Tune in to silence.
There are three basic steps to the process:
When it comes to the work of finding equilibration and clarity amidst the noise, we can look beyond the formal rules and tools of what’s typically called meditation these days. We can forget about questions like Am I doing it right? Each one of us—in our own way—knows what silence feels like. It’s something inherent to being human. It’s a gift of renewal that’s available to us, always, even if it’s sometimes hidden
In the chapters ahead, we’ll explore how to understand and manage the noise so that we can more consciously tune in to nature, to one another, and to the sonic essence of life itself.
We’ll explore ideas and practices that might help you to become more patient, aware, and even effective in your work, your home life, your management of big and small challenges. Yet we want to be clear that silence isn’t a resource you can control in a tidy or formulaic way. We can’t assess its value on the basis of what it can do for us. As the aphorism silence is golden suggests, silence has intrinsic value. And, as the words of Thomas Carlyle Silence is of Eternity imply, it can’t be quantitatively measured and employed for our own purposes. Over the past couple decades, we’ve seen mindfulness practice often sold as a productivity tool, a performance enhancement for anything—even for sharpshooters to improve their aim or CEOs to conquer the world
CHAPTER 2 The Altar of Noise
noise is the unwanted disturbance in the literal soundscape. Yes, it’s the speed and scale of information overload. Yet it’s ultimately bigger than either of those. It’s all the unwelcome sound and stimulus, the loudness both inside and out. It’s also what distracts our attention from what we truly, deeply want
A TAXONOMY OF NOISE
And yet something right now is different from at any time in known history. These days, it’s not just loud.3 There’s an unprecedented mass proliferation of mental stimulation
At one level, it’s the literal, auditory noise
In an age when at least a third of Earth’s natural ecosystems have gone quiet to the point of aural extinction, all kinds of sounds—mechanical, digital, human—have been amplified
There’s a second kind of noise that is ascendant: informational noise. In 2010, Eric Schmidt, then CEO of Google, made a striking estimate: Every two days we now create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003.
There’s no question the growing amount of information in the world brings many blessings. We’re grateful for digital contact with faraway loved ones, remote learning and work opportunities, streaming movies, and all the other bounty that the mighty interwebs bestow upon humanity. But we have to remember this: the data is increasing, but our ability to process it is not
This points us to the third category of noise: internal noise. With so much stimulus consuming our attention, it’s harder to find silence inside our consciousness
So, how do we find peace in this hurricane of external and internal noise? How do we find clarity and wonder? How do we tune in to meaning and purpose?
One first step is to understand the nature of noise: What is it? How does it work? Why is it proliferating in our world? Today’s poverty of attention isn’t solely a by-product of the internet or workaholic tendencies or a talkative culture or challenging global events. It’s the result of a complex interplay of auditory, informational, and internal interference. Noise begets noise
We don’t use the word noise lightly
There’s a common element to the three kinds of noise we describe—in our auditory soundscapes, in the informational realms, and in our own heads—that makes them distinct from what we might call sound, data, or thought more generally. Noise, in two words, is unwanted distraction. The neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley and the psychologist Larry Rosen have a useful way of defining what’s happening when we encounter noise. They call it goal interference.11 It’s when you find focused attention, even to simple tasks, to be impossible due to nonstop banter in your open-plan office
Understanding and realizing our goals, in this sense, requires the reduction of noise
It’s not just possible or preferable to get beyond the interference; doing so is one of the most important commitments we make to ourselves and to those around us. Transcending the noise that distorts our true perceptions and intentions is a deeply personal pursuit, but it has social, economic, ethical, and political implications, too
OUR MOST CELEBRATED ADDICTION
Modern society doesn’t just tolerate the maximum production of mental stuff; we celebrate it. It’s no exaggeration to say that we’re addicted to making noise
But why?
One simple answer is that we don’t think much about the costs
Consider a seemingly mundane example from the world of work: group emails. The computer scientist Cal Newport, author of the books Deep Work and Digital Minimalism, reckons that they might cost any given small- to medium-sized company tens of thousands of employee hours of valuable thought and attention annually
While the attention economy produces benefits to global society that now measure in the tens of trillions of dollars, we’re only just beginning to comprehend its costs
Cal Newport’s concept of the convenience addiction is instructive. And yet the underlying dynamic here runs deeper than just expediency of access to information. It gets to the idea of progress—the set of values that constitute the organizing purpose of modern society
THE ECONOMICS OF AGITATION
How we measure progress and productivity in modern society explains why our systems are optimized to produce maximum noise. GDP goes up with the buzzes and roars of industrial machinery. But it also goes up when an app’s built-in algorithm deduces that you’re in a quiet moment of your day and swoops in with a notification that wins your attention, boosting usage statistics and juicing company earnings
That’s why the world keeps getting noisier
HOLY USELESSNESS
Just as our economy is structured on the idea that success means GDP growth—the maximum possible production of sound and stimulus and stuff—our personal success is all too often contingent upon a similar kind of growth: continuous accumulation of social capital, informational capital, and financial capital. On the macro-level scale of society, the message is Production is prosperity. At the micro-level of the individual human consciousness, the message is You can rest when you’re dead.
But what if savoring silence is precisely what we ought to be doing for the good of ourselves and the good of our world?
What if there’s an ethical imperative for getting beyond the noise?
CHAPTER 3 Silence Is Presence
Is there even such a thing as silence?
Our conception of silence isn’t the total absence of sound. It isn’t the total absence of thought. It’s the absence of noise. It’s the space between and beyond the auditory, informational, and internal stimuli that interfere with our clear perception and intention.
When we tell our friends that we’re writing a book about silence, we often hear the same joke: Oh, is it going to be a bunch of blank pages?
There is really no such thing as an expert in that which cannot be spoken.
As Professor Smyth’s answer to our question about the definition of internal silence suggests, it’s a fool’s errand to try to fit this ineffable presence into any kind of rigid box. It’s up to each one of us to go inside and explore what silence really is.
HIGHER SYNONYMS
These different people—through their varied backgrounds, life situations, and styles of expression—all point to an active experience of silence. This experience of silence clarifies our thinking and bolsters our health. It teaches us. It centers us. It wakes us up
When we think about silence as a presence, we notice something seemingly paradoxical: this silence is quiet to the ears and quiet in the mind, and yet the experience in the consciousness can be thundering
This kind of silence, Gordon Hempton agrees, isn’t just a matter of transcending that which we don’t want. It’s not just the absence of noise. He calls it the presence of everything.
Gordon’s word—everything—is a good encapsulation of what we mean to say is present
But, for us, there are other words, too
Humility is one. Renewal is another. And clarity. And expansion. You could also call this presence the essence of life itself.
PERFECTION IN THE MUCK
When we describe the presence of silence as wholeness, we don’t mean that it’s a kind of sanitary separateness from the world of noise. Like the lotus, this flowering silence can emerge from the muck.
NADA
When we enter the most profound silence, we’re not extinguishing the vibration that is the essence of life. We’re dropping the distraction and ego and restlessness so we can better tune in to it. The nothing we’re talking about is this: No noise. No interference. A direct encounter with the essence of what is.
CHAPTER 4 The Moral Dimensions of Silence
For at least half a century, the notion of silence as complacency, complicity, or even violence has been a prominent cultural current.
Today, the notion of silence as oppression is as relevant as ever. The actress Lupita Nyong’o’s 2017 New York Times op-ed described how Harvey Weinstein attempted to assault, harass, and manipulate her. She wrote about the conspiracy of silence that enabled the predator to prowl for so many years.
This kind of silence—the refusal to speak and act in the face of injustice—is real. And we oppose it to the core of our beings.
The silence of apathy is a function of fear. It’s a distortion of perception and intention that’s born of anxious clinging to one’s narrowest self-interest. This kind of so-called silence is, we believe, both a cause and a consequence of noise in our consciousness.
While complacency in the face of injustice is a genuine evil in our world, it’s more accurate to call it noise rather than silence. True silence—the kind that enables presence and discernment and sympathetic understanding of nature and humanity—is an antidote to the noisy distortion that drives self-centeredness and apathy. It’s a resource for uncovering our hidden biases, understanding other perspectives, and more skillfully addressing what’s wrong.
Every Monday, Gandhi observed a day of silence. In addition to meditation and contemplation, he continued his correspondence by letter, he selectively took visitors, and he listened closely in meetings and attended important summits without speaking. He kept to his weekly day of silence even during moments of intensity and upheaval in his multi-decade work to dismantle the British Empire’s occupation of India. When others, including close friends, pleaded for him to make an exception and speak, he refused. His weekly day of silence was a centerpiece of all his work. It has often occurred to me, he wrote, that a seeker after truth has to be silent.
SANCTUARIES
We believe that it’s possible to weave silence into a fully engaged life. If we want to live in the current reality—and if we want to cultivate the strength and focus necessary to make the current reality better—then we need spaces of immersive rest, spaces of minimum sound and stimulus, spaces where we simply don’t have to say anything
Even in the noisiest spheres of life, even amidst the most constant barrage of sound and stimulus, the paths to silence are often surprisingly simple
THE TYRANNY OF THE GRIND
The noise of the world is on the rise.
But so, too, are the signals. So, too, are the indicators of what really requires our attention
There’s not just a growing amount of unwanted interference but a rise in genuine and important cries for help. Whether it’s alarming news about refugees or environmental crises or personal outreach from loved ones feeling mired in depression and despair, so much of the sound and stimulus of the modern world is justified. It’s not distraction. It’s signaling the need for change
So, what is the place of wordlessness in the work of justice? How do we balance the necessity of decisiveness with the necessity of calm and clear seeing? How do we respond to the cries of the world with timely earnestness, nonetheless avoiding the distortions of noise and urgency? How do we drop beneath the artifice of intellectual concepts so that we can feel another person’s pain—or even our own?
Hersey, Odell, and other contemporary voices echo what Gandhi emphasized seventy-five years ago: finding silence is an ethical necessity. As Saint Bernard, the patron saint of the Cistercians, once reflected on the message of the prophet Isaiah: Silence is the work of justice.5
But this work requires continual care and attention.
THE FINE ART OF DISCERNING
A key pillar of the reparations work is quiet listening. It’s listening to the descendants of the people who were enslaved, understanding how to be fair and effective and how to build genuine partnership and trust. It’s listening internally, too
TRUTH AND POWER
As with the galvanizing speeches Gandhi delivered on Tuesdays after coming out of his weekly retreats, there’s a certain moral dimension to the words that emerge from silence. Gandhi used a particular Sanskrit term, satyagraha, to describe the spiritual power of the movement he helped to lead. It’s a word that conveys this particular quality of speech that arises out of the wholeness of the ineffable.
Like the Quaker value of speaking truth to power, the word satyagraha is translated as the force which is born of truth. Clear perception. Clear action. It’s the bridge between silence and justice.
Part II THE SCIENCE OF SILENCE
CHAPTER 5 Florence Nightingale Would Be Pissed
What is the biological basis of the power of silence to heal the body and clarify the mind?
EXPECTATIONS IN THE MIND
Silence—at the auditory level—has historically been of little interest to mainstream science. It’s been a control variable in laboratory research rather than a primary subject of investigation. In fact, most scientists who have uncovered useful insights about silence have done so accidentally
NOISE BEGETS NOISE
In the modern world, bottom-up interference usually starts with something beeping or vibrating in your pocket. As innocuous as a gentle buzz or custom ringtone may seem, they conjure mental projections that bloom like algae in the mind. Whether or not we realize it, that bottom-up interference often devolves into a feedback loop of both external and internal noise
Here’s an illustrative example from Gazzaley and Rosen. Say you’re driving through busy traffic on a highway, and you get a text (a bottom-up interference). You stay focused on driving safely to your destination (your top-down goal). But, as hard as you try to ignore it, the vibrating begins to feel, in their words, like a burning ember in your pocket that is accompanied by rising anxiety—‘who is texting at this hour, and what do they have to tell you?’ (This is a bottom-up distraction from your own mind.) With your attention diverted, you miss your exit, and you have to interrupt your safe driving yet again to pick up your phone and reroute your course. All of this has to happen in order to get back on track toward your original top-down goal.
That one simple buzz—that bottom-up distraction—produces a cascade of internal and external interference. Noise begets noise
We spoke recently with Judson Brewer, the neuroscientist and psychiatrist, about the relationship between anxiety and internal noise. It’s a direct link, he tells us. Anxiety, he says, is not only having a bunch of repetitive thoughts; it’s getting caught up in them. Brewer emphasized that those repetitive thoughts arise when we don’t have enough information to accurately predict the future. We’re subject to perseverate on them, to get stuck in worry.
Fear + Uncertainty = Anxiety he summarizes
Our economic and social systems increasingly seem to be built on vicious feedback loops of inner and outer noise.
There’s one common element to all the unwanted interference in the inner and outer soundscape. It is, in a word, stress. Noise drives the fight-or-flight response, pulling our physical and cognitive systems out of equilibrium. Different kinds of noises feed each other, creating pernicious feedback loops that strain our felt sense of well-being and tax our bodily health—down to the cellular level.
THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON THE OCEANIC EXPERIENCE
So, in short, there’s something active about listening to nothing. It’s not just zoning out. It is, rather, a positive sort of exertion
The intense state of focused receptivity is a kind of exertion, too. It requires concentration. It’s the good kind of stress.
CHAPTER 6 A Mute Button for the Mind
What is silence in the mind?
We’ve posed this question to neuroscientists, physicians, and academic psychologists, and we’ve gotten answers that sound strikingly similar to those offered by modern physicists and Vedic mystics: A living mind, like a living universe, is always vibrating, firing, buzzing, churning. It’s always gathering and synthesizing sense data. To be literally silent—in the sense of no thought, no perception, no activity—is to be, in a word, dead.
Still, many of the technical experts we’ve talked with agree there is such a thing as silence in a living human consciousness. There is a condition of presence that’s beyond the noise. How do they know? Because they’ve experienced it for themselves.
There’s an intuitive link between silence and flow. When Jamal describes hitting a free throw or receiving the ball from a teammate, he’s clearly transcending the noise. But there’s also a less obvious commonality. Csikszentmihalyi and other scholars note that flow happens when we’re in eustress. Like the mice immersed in the anechoic chambers in Professor Kirste’s study, we enter the state of flow in the sweet spot between distress and boredom, when we’re engaged in a challenge but not overwhelmed—like when Jamal and his teammates are well matched against an opposing team.2 Csikszentmihalyi and his longtime colleague Jeanne Nakamura describe this sweet spot as perceived challenges, or opportunities for action, that stretch (neither overmatching nor underutilizing) existing skills. It’s when we turn all of our conscious awareness over to the task at hand, thereby entering a state of pristine attention
MAPPING MENTAL NOISE
In the Wall Street Journal in 2014, the author and researcher Michio Kaku declared, The Golden Age of Neuroscience has arrived. As he put it, We have learned more about the thinking brain in the last 10–15 years than in all of human history.
Still, amidst all the advances, we shouldn’t deceive ourselves into believing that we’re unraveling any of the big mysteries of human consciousness. When we spoke with neuroscientists about the potential of neuroimaging technologies to decipher the mental states of internal silence, they were generally adamant about their disclaimers. For example, we still don’t have anything like a moving fMRI machine to non-intrusively track the brain in an active flow state, like the one Jamal is in when he’s dunking a basketball. Even when you can view real-time brain activity, it reveals little about what a person is actually experiencing in the moment
We spoke recently with Arne Dietrich, a neuroscientist at the American University in Beirut who specializes in the neurocognitive mechanisms of a brain like Jamal’s when he plays ball. He coined the term transient hypofrontality to describe what’s happening in the internal quiet of the flow state.6 Transient describes the temporary state of this form of consciousness. Hypo describes a slowing of activity in the frontality—or, the prefrontal cortex (PFC) of the brain, where we formulate our sense of a separate self. According to Dietrich, flow states and other expanded forms of consciousness—including mental states brought about by psychedelic and entheogenic substances—facilitate an experience of oneness because the areas of the brain where we formulate our sense of self and time dissolve. Dietrich is quick to point out this irony: while these states are often heralded as a more evolved form of consciousness, they arise through diminished activity in our most evolved, most celebrated region of the brain, the PFC.
Evolution or devolution aside, what Dietrich’s talking about is a pathway to silence in the mind. He’s talking about a biological mechanism for transcending the internal distraction that plagues so much of the modern world.
He’s talking about a potential mute button.
Yet this isn’t the only idea of what constitutes the neurobiological basis of a silent mind. While the prefrontal cortex deactivates during some flow activities of physical exertion, other flow activities—like arithmetic or jazz improvisation—seem to require more executive controls and an increase of activity in the PFC. So, the mute button, in fact, might not simply be about resting one part of the brain. It might be more about launching an intricate ballet throughout the whole organ
Some of the biggest clues about the location of a potential mute button have come through research over the past few decades on our minds’ default states.
Judson Brewer has found through his research that the noisiest aspects of human consciousness correspond to activities in two primary parts of the brain associated with the DMN: the PFC and the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC). While the PFC is responsible for the verbalized sense of your name and intellectual identity, the PCC is more responsible for the felt sense of self. The PCC is associated with the ineffable noise of self-consciousness—the kind of bodily sense of ugh that’s associated with pangs of guilt or uneasiness around self-image
This is good news. We can make our default state less noisy. We can build the skills to do so and, with practice, the capacity for our inner environment to be less constrictive and more expansive. By working with our PFC and PCC, we can find not just an occasional, temporary mute button but a way to turn down the everyday noise in the ambience of our consciousness.
So, even if there’s no perfect mute button, we can learn how to dial down the noise
THE NEUROSCIENCE OF SELF-TRANSCENDENCE
While we typically associate flow with physically active states—like Jamal dunking a basketball—the link to sitting meditation makes sense. Flow, like breath concentration practice, is about grounding in the present moment. It’s about the integration of mind and body. Csikszentmihalyi has, in fact, often written about meditation as a way of training for flow
In a recent conversation, Brewer pointed out to us that awareness and loving-kindness practices do, in fact, share a core element—one that links directly to flow.
What does it feel like when you think of a time when somebody has been kind to you? Brewer asked us, referring to a key reflection in loving-kindness practice. Does it feel contracted or expanded?
And what does it feel like when you’re just resting in awareness of breath or an object and not being caught by the chatter of your mind? Is the feeling contracted or expanded?
For us, the answer to each question was clear: expanded. Brewer’s research shows that there is a shared quality that emerges in the consciousness when a person does any of these practices. It’s not just the eustress of physical flow—when the brain has to be so utterly focused on the task at hand that it lacks the attentional resources to entertain even a modicum of self-cherishing or worry. It’s a feeling of expansion beyond the tight clinging to a sense of the separate self
Expansion quiets the mind
There’s an emerging area of multidisciplinary academic study focused on self-transcendent experiences (STEs), a category of experience that encompasses mental states of flow, mindfulness, awe, and mystical encounters, to name just a few
STEs—almost universally—bring us this subjective feeling of expansion.
They also typically do something else: they shut our mouths.
Consider awe. The UC Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner, founder of the Greater Good Science Center, and his colleague Jonathan Haidt define awe as a combination of two factors: perceived vastness and the need for accommodation.14 The first, perceived vastness, is when you’re around things that are vast or that transcend your frame of reference—either spatial or temporal or meaning-based.
The second characteristic of awe, the need for accommodation, is when an experience or realization transcends your knowledge structures
So, what is silence in the mind?
Is it a reduction of activity in the prefrontal cortex? In the posterior cingulate cortex? In the whole default mode network?
Is it an active state of flow on the ball court—leaving all defenders and all self-referential thoughts behind?
Is it the passive state, where we feel the vastness of existence and have to abandon our old mental models to accommodate it?
Is it the rarefied mystical encounter, where we get a cosmic right sizing that corrects our sense of separateness and egoic self-importance?
Yes. The science points to all of the above
Thanks to substantial advances in neuroimaging and in our understanding of the biological bases of mind and consciousness, we’re able to explore many more aspects of the meaning of silence—especially internal silence. This is a good thing. It can help us make sense of the world
But just because we’re living in the golden age of neuroscience doesn’t mean we’ve arrived at any kind of mechanistic understanding of the mysteries of silence in the mind. As Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most rigorously logical minds in human history, said, there are things that we will never be able to analyze, things we will never be able to verbally or logically explain. There are limits to what the decibel meters and hydrophones and fMRIs and EEGs can ever tell us
And that’s okay
As he puts it, there are some things we must pass over in silence.
Part III THE SPIRIT OF SILENCE
CHAPTER 7 Why Silence Is Scary
Take a moment to join us in a thought experiment. Or really, more of a feeling experiment.
Imagine you just committed to spending the next five years of your life in total silence.
There’s no need to take care of any logistics. No concern about how you’re going to earn a living or provide for loved ones. All the practical arrangements have been made.
What’s your first thought?
THE FIRST RUDIMENT OF CONTEMPLATION
The name Pythagoras might evoke fearsome flashbacks to middle school math class. For many, the Greek philosopher’s namesake these days is that geometric theorem for finding the long side of a right triangle. But Pythagoras has a lot more to teach us.
About twenty-five hundred years ago—around the same time Gautama Buddha and Confucius walked the earth—Pythagoras of Samos did what some of us would consider impossible today. He transcended the apparent chasm between science and spirituality, combining numinous contemplation with rigorous investigation
Some say Pythagoras was the first person to fulfill the formal vocation of philosopher: a lover of wisdom. According to Manly P. Hall, a scholar of the mystery schools of the world, Pythagoras meant something specific by the term wisdom: understanding of the source or cause of all things.1 As he saw it, attaining wisdom required raising the intellect to a point where it intuitively cognized the invisible manifesting outwardly through the visible, reaching the point where it could become capable of bringing itself en rapport with the spirit of things rather than with their forms.
If you wanted to become a student in the inner circle of the Pythagorean school, you had to commit to a host of guidelines, including dietary restrictions, study regimens, personal ethics, and lifestyle choices. If you wanted to gain access to the esoteric teachings, you had to undertake one commitment, though, that was bigger than the rest: you had to pass through a five-year period of not talking
Why did Pythagoras see silence as the key to wisdom? Why did he require his inner circle of students to spend five years not talking before beginning their formal studies? There’s no known record of his exact thinking on the topic or the specific rationale behind the requirement for members of the inner circle of the school.
But let’s see if we can home in on his reasoning
Return, for a moment, to the feeling experiment from the start of this chapter. Imagine you’re one of the initiates
How might five years in silence change the architecture of your mind?
In meditation retreats, extended times in nature, and other periods of contemplative practice in silence, we’ve gotten some clues. Silence, of course, forces us to face ourselves. Without distraction, we have to learn how to deal with our own internal noise. This enables us to tune in to what’s really happening both within ourselves and outside ourselves. In the absence of judgment and conjecture and performance, the mind turns magnetically, like a compass, toward the truth.
But we don’t want to imply this is an easy process. In profound silence, we first burn through heaps of habitual patterns and thought forms and fantasies and ambitions and lusts and delusions. In silence, we’ve both felt an intense desire to run away, to do anything to fill the space
In The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche writes of the horror vacui, the horror of the vacuum, or the dread that a human being feels in the absence of sense data or mental stimulation. This phenomenon is real. In a 2014 study, Timothy Wilson, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia, left undergraduate and community member volunteers alone in a sparse room with no cell phones or entertainment for fifteen minutes.2 The participants had a choice: they could either sit in silence alone or push a button that would administer a painful electric shock. While all participants had initially stated that they would pay money to avoid being shocked with electricity, 67 percent of men and 25 percent of women eventually chose to shock themselves rather than sit in silence
That was fifteen minutes. Imagine five years.
THE BASIC PHENOMENON
Filmmakers and sound editors often employ the total absence of sound and information in these kinds of scenes as a tool to evoke a particular degree of terror. That’s because silence creates a loss of reference points. In silence, there are fewer guardrails to hold on to, fewer hints to help you make sense of what’s going on.
In Alfonso Cuarón’s Academy Award–winning 2013 film, Gravity, high-speed debris strikes a space shuttle, leaving Sandra Bullock’s character tumbling alone in a space suit through the pitch-black vacuum of space. The scariest thing about the spectacular destruction of the spacecraft—her only lifeline—is that it happens in total silence
It’s hard to be with another person in the vacuum
But it’s harder to be utterly alone in it
SILENCE IN GRIEF
Sometimes, entering the challenging kind of silence is not a choice. Sometimes, life thrusts silence upon us
Silence is a primary container for grief. It’s the space where we can be most fully present in feeling and memory. While it’s tempting to run away and find diversion, silence—if we can stay with it—has a way of metabolizing loss. When we let words fail, meaning emerges
THE STILL, SMALL VOICE
The inscription on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi in ancient Greece comprises two words that are sometimes attributed to Pythagoras: Know thyself. We’ve found that Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, and Taoist scriptures, among many others, enshrine this same teaching in various ways. They all advise studying your own thoughts, words, and actions as preparation for understanding that which lies beyond you
As the study of the University of Virginia students who eagerly electroshocked themselves in less than fifteen minutes demonstrates, time in silence isn’t always a straightforward path to self-knowledge. Delving straight into silence can amplify internal noise. Meeting the deepest silence is, as Cyrus puts it, an active process of discerning the signal of what’s really, truly in the heart, in contrast to the static of the socially conditioned brain. There’s a reason we so often avoid this work. It takes courage.
INSTANT MONASTICISM
As we’ve explored the scientific, psychological, and spiritual implications of self-transcendent experiences—including mystical encounters, flow states, and moments of awe—we’ve noticed striking similarities between these brief events and periods of long-term silence, like what Pythagoras required of his inner circle of students. There’s the inward turn and the impossibility of diversion.
A DIFFERENT KIND OF WISDOM
For the Pythagoreans, there are different core elements to the process of becoming wise: emptying, opening, receiving. The Pythagoreans were, of course, defined by extremely rigorous order and practice. They did debate and analyze. And yet their general theory of clarifying consciousness is more like mystical rapture than like the vaunted productivity secrets of modern innovators.
This is a timely and important lesson
We’re living in an age when humanity is tiring of the superficial. We’re weary of medicines that attack symptoms rather than addressing deep causes.
Today, it’s becoming evident that we need what Pythagoras prized most: insight into the source of things. We need answers that bubble up from this depth
With that in mind, we should consider the recommendation from Pythagoras, one of the most generative geniuses in all of recorded history:
Go deep into the silence.
Absorb it.
Let it scare you.
Let it reshape you and expand your awareness.
CHAPTER 8 Lotuses and Lilies
Speech is silvern, Silence is golden. In the opening pages of this book, we shared the Scottish philosopher and mathematician Thomas Carlyle’s interpretation of the maxim Speech is of Time, Silence is of Eternity.
Throughout the world, spiritual and philosophical traditions emphasize the balance of speech and silence as a state of flow between the worlds
We’ve noted that many of the great religious and philosophical traditions don’t just look to silence as a path to wisdom. In the deepest contemplative practices across traditions, we find a recognition of silence as the essence of wisdom itself. Rumi called silence the voice of God and all else poor translation.
THE FINGER AND THE MOON
The Zen master Thích Nh?t H?nh interprets the sutra this way: A finger pointing at the moon is not the moon.2 The finger is needed to know where to look for the moon, but if you mistake the finger for the moon itself, you will never know the real moon
There’s a science to how our words work. They separate that which is named from that which is not named, so that we can tell what’s what. In fact, in Hebrew the word for word is milah, meaning to circumcise or cut. With our words, we divide and dissect in order to describe and indicate.
It was Michael Taft, the meditation teacher and author, who first offered us the term to capture this phenomenon: conceptual overlay. He describes it as what happens when we encounter most objects: we think about them rather than using our senses to fully observe and experience them
FLOATING IN THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING
Meditation almost always connotes silence. Buzzing flies notwithstanding, the word evokes images of sitting quietly on a cushion—endeavoring to transcend the conceptual overlay in the mind and seeking harmony with what is.
THE MOST ACTIVE OF ALL LISTENING
The teachings of lilies and lotuses illustrate Aldous Huxley’s notion that the highest prayer is the most passive. These teachings—with such gentleness—point the way to presence and show us how to transcend the noise of self-referential thought and our preoccupation with past and future
And yet, with immense respect to Huxley, we’re not so sure about the word passive.
Of course, there’s receptivity in wordless contemplation. The flower isn’t active in the sense of creating sound or motion. But emulating a flower is a truly radical departure from the ordinary human condition. It’s hard to call that action passive.
The deepest kind of listening is, in a sense, passive. It is an act of receiving. It is, to paraphrase Huxley, about laying oneself open to the cosmos. Yet the practice of ordering one’s whole life to be able to overcome the noise, to be able to concentrate fully on the grandeur of the present moment is, inarguably, active.
MA
Take a moment to come back, once again, to the feeling experiment we presented in the last chapter
Imagine how five years of silence would shift the architecture of your mind.
When we personally imagine this depth of silence, we, of course, imagine devoting a whole lot less energy to formulating arguments and opinions. We imagine less emphasis on the conceptual overlay of distinctions and naming things—less attention to the pointing finger and more to the felt sense of the moon. Five years, we imagine, would take us a little closer to the rishis of ancient India who could hear the fundamental vibration of life.
In Japanese, the word Ma combines the kanji characters for gate and sun. Together, these written ideograms create an image: golden light streaming through the slats in the entrance to a temple.
A common definition for Ma is negative space. It’s also described as a gap or a pause or even as silence itself.
Ma—like silence—is something more than absence. Ma is perhaps better described as pure potentiality. It emanates through both space and time. It expands perception.
In the Japanese traditional art of ikebana flower arrangement, Ma describes the dynamic balance between the shapes, colors, and textures of the flowers and the empty spaces between and surrounding each meticulously placed item
Society hasn’t always been as noisy as it is today. But our inquiry, how we can know silence amidst the internal and external din, is nonetheless ancient.
Interior noise, says Pope Francis, makes it impossible to welcome anyone or anything. Welcoming humanity and nature—affirming life—requires a willingness to float in unknowing, to be like a flower, to stand in the mystery of silence.
Part IV QUIET INSIDE
CHAPTER 9 A Field Guide to Finding Silence
In 2007, mounting evidence suggested that Jarvis Jay Masters hadn’t committed the crime for which he was imprisoned on San Quentin’s death row. The California Supreme Court issued an unusual order for prosecutors to reappraise all the evidence in his case, laying the groundwork for an eventual new trial. A group of activists had built and publicized a rigorous case showing that Jarvis was, in fact, innocent—that he had been the fall guy in a conspiracy to murder a prison guard more than twenty years earlier
As Jarvis thinks about his practice of navigating the noise of San Quentin, he finds that it has cultivated one surprisingly important resource in him: compassion.
We spent a lot of time with Jarvis talking through the meaning of this experience—a strange, unexpected, healing encounter with silence. I don’t call those kinds of things miracles, he said, describing the flash of insight that came to him. But it was a gift to me: that I was in a position to perceive it, to receive it.
THE SPHERE OF CONTROL
How do we find silence in a world of noise?4
The answer is different for everyone.
Sometimes it’s spontaneous. But usually it’s the result of a conscious effort.
As human beings, we all have different means of finding quiet Even Jarvis, a meditation teacher, will tell you that sitting alone in meditation isn’t the only way
We all have different degrees of autonomy over how we can choose to spend our days and organize our lives. A single parent working full-time at a minimum-wage job has a different capacity to structure his or her day from the retiree, the college student, or the small-business owner. These differing degrees of autonomy influence how and when we can find silence in our daily lives
Jarvis is on one far end of this range of autonomy. He spends twenty-three hours of every day in his cell. The prison administration controls nearly every aspect of his life, including whether he can shower. He has virtually no control over the levels of noise and distraction that surround him. And yet Jarvis has become adept at managing the noise in his life. He’s able to curate periods of silence. He modulates those buzzing vibrations of anxiety and fear. Although the moments of quiet serenity are scarce, he’s able to enter into those moments with a depth of attention. Perhaps most important, he’s able to be present for a merciful silence when it graces his life—as it did as he read the label on the medication bottle and heard the words It’s not about you right now. As he says, with thankfulness, he was able to perceive it and receive it.
The obvious place to look for an expert on silence is among cloistered monks or cabin-dwelling hermits. But that would miss the point. We’re looking to Jarvis precisely because he lives in a high-volume hellscape. It’s one thing to find silence in a remote Himalayan hermitage, but it’s another to find it amidst anxiety, polluted soundscapes, fear, and trauma. This is what’s relevant to most people alive right now
For Jarvis, the key to finding silence was determining his sphere of control. When he first thought to himself I’m being buried alive, he knew, instinctively, that this line of thinking was catastrophic—even if it seemed to contain a kernel of truth. He’d have to take control, to find the willpower to eradicate that thought. And he did. While Jarvis wouldn’t start formal mind training through Buddhist practice until years later, he did, at that time, have a personal guiding motto he learned from the song by Funkadelic’s front man, George Clinton—Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow. He took this to mean he’d need to find some point of leverage to manage his thoughts. Only then could he work toward some semblance of control over his circumstances. Only then could he find some freedom.
We’re usually skeptical of the word control.
We live in a probabilistic world where billions of seen and unseen forces shape everything around us—from the microscopic critters in our guts to Federal Reserve interest rate policies to the configurations of planets and stars in the heavens. Nevertheless, this concept of a sphere of control can still be very helpful when we’re working to navigate a noisy world
Leigh once offered this sphere of control concept to Justin to help him out of a bind. Justin was in a professional relationship with an active volcano of a man—an influential but highly volatile player in politics. The work was in support of a positive social cause that Justin believed in, and it was a good financial opportunity for his growing family. But the noise it created in his world was unrelenting.
On a check-in call, Leigh asked Justin what he yearned for in the situation—what was the best-case scenario he could possibly imagine? Justin paused to take a seat under the high desert sun. He took in a few deep breaths. He wasn’t just yearning for a break or some work-life balance. There was a specific feeling, almost an energy, he was yearning for. It came in the form of an image of standing in the early morning before a serene ocean. After he described that yearning, Leigh asked him what he feared most. He said that he was afraid of having to continue to endure this same noise and of being kept away from this oceanic feeling of reset.
Leigh presented Justin with an image: an archer’s bull’s-eye. The inner circle, she told him, was what he could control, the middle ring was what he could influence, and the outer ring was everything else. Focus on the two inner rings, she said
For Justin, this wasn’t a Take This Job and Shove It kind of moment. He wasn’t in a position to walk away, at least in the short term. So he started looking more systematically at what was in his sphere of control and what was in his sphere of influence—where he could still exercise autonomy to reclaim the quiet he needed in his life.
There’s a certain liberation that comes from knowing what we can change and what we can’t. Complex systems like stock markets and global cultural preferences generally fall outside the realm of our personal influence; they land in the everything else ring of the bull’s-eye. Questions like local ballot measures and our partner’s behaviors often land in the territory of events we can influence. But, unless you’re Angela Merkel, Warren Buffett, or Beyoncé, the number of factors you control is probably small. But that’s okay. A tiny space at the center of the bull’s-eye is actually all we need, since the most important work happens inside
Transcending the noise of this world requires more than high-grade custom earplugs or a digital detox at a cabin out of cell range. As with Justin’s experience, it requires a certain archery of the heart and mind. Just as you get better with a bow and arrow with practice, this form of archery improves the more you do it
The noise of life is, to some degree, inevitable. Yet we can set our aim for a serene internal soundscape, for a quiet consciousness. We can identify what’s in our spheres of control and influence and, accordingly, apply strategies to steer our lives in the direction of what we want while letting go of everything else
We’re going to look at specific strategies for finding silence, starting in the next chapter. But before we can apply these strategies, we need to be able to identify when they are needed—in other words, when there is, in fact, too much noise.
SIGNALS OF NOISE
There’s no rigid formula to Jarvis’s day-to-day practice. As he works to navigate the noise—to figure out when and how to apply his control or influence—he emphasizes one essential starting point: paying attention. He studies the thoughts in his head and the feelings in his body. He emphasizes that we have to look for signals, even tiny ones, so that we can continually steer and course correct.
There’s a certain kind of important signal that we can look for within ourselves—in our own minds and bodies. These are personal signals that we’ve let too much noise seep in; that we’ve become too overstimulated or distracted. It’s important to recognize these signals and to be able to act upon them. Jarvis walks us through an example.
These physical sensations are in themselves important signals. At the edges of our awareness live the noisy emotions—the ones we tend to marginalize most, like rage and despair
We can wait for signals to find us, or we can seek them out proactively. We can take inventory of the noise by asking ourselves questions:
How is the noise reflected in my work and my behaviors? In the tone of my relationships?
Once you sense what the noise of your life is actually like, you can apply the agency you have to make a shift, however small. It’s an iterative process—wash, rinse, repeat—or, for our purposes: set your aim, assess your spheres of control and influence, notice the signals, repeat.
CHAPTER 10 The Healthy Successor to the Smoke Break
In this chapter, we will offer you a variety of strategies for finding pockets of silence in your day. These are not meant to be strictly prescriptive but rather as guiding ideas and inspirations. Only you know your life circumstances, your preferences, and your needs. Only you know what’s within your spheres of control and influence
Before we start exploring, we want to share a few general recommendations
领英推荐
IDEA 1: JUST LISTEN
This practice of just listening—opening your ears, along with your attention, to what’s present in yourself and your immediate surroundings—has a cleansing and awakening effect
There’s no one right way to do it.
For the vast majority of us in the vast majority of situations, just listening—simply noticing noise and silence—is within our sphere of control. Take two or three minutes. Maybe step outside, as Justin did on that spring day of 2020, or sit down on the couch after work as Jay regularly does. Stop and listen to the sounds around you and within you. Pay attention. Let it go.
IDEA 2: LITTLE GIFTS OF SILENCE
How do we savor the moments when the noise ceases?
How do we make the most of these little gifts that unexpectedly come to us?
Perhaps most important, how do we recognize and accept these gifts in the first place?
Brigitte van Baren has built her career on getting executives of large multinational corporations to overcome their type A tendencies and honor little unexpected moments of silence when they arrive
Silence is always with you, she reminds them. These apparent delays are gifts—if they only view them as such. She believes that one of our greatest assets is the ability to access silence, especially when something unforeseen has happened. To cultivate this skill, Brigitte offers simple instructions when plans get waylaid:
Pema Ch?dr?n, the Buddhist teacher and author whom Jarvis calls Mama, writes about cultivating our capacity to rest in the open space, even when things fall apart.3 With this phrase, she’s generally referring to the bigger situations in life, where our reality maps fall away and we lose our bearings—like the loss of a job or the unexpected dissolution of a relationship
From the trivial moments—like the break in leaf blowers—to the bigger moments—like when we stop to consider our own mortality—a strangely similar line of inquiry applies: How do we become more perceptive and receptive to the silences that find us? As with the practice of just listening, the most important first element here is noticing. It’s paying attention to when these unexpected openings arise. When we really notice, we can start appreciating. We can shift our attitudes to these open spaces, honoring the gaps as gifts.
IDEA 3: WHAT YOU’RE ALREADY DOING—BUT DEEPER
Where do I find my silence? I find it in between—in the breath, says Pir Shabda Kahn, the Sufi teacher.
According to his spiritual lineage, the breath tells you everything you need to know about your internal state. If you study the mysticism of breath, you will see that every disturbing emotion—if you’d like to call it that—interrupts the rhythm of the breath. He explains further, If you’re lonely, you will be stuck on the out breath. If you’re angry, you will be stuck on the in breath, and so on.
When Pir Shabda speaks of the in between—in the breath, he’s referring to the moment between the in breath and the out breath, the swing from one to the other. No matter where I am—in a busy airport, a busy anything—I can, even in the moment, enter the consciousness through the breath and find my way to silence. He adds, Making a habit of a rhythmic breath, long-term, is the panacea for everything. The quality of the breath’s swing is both the diagnostic and the remedy
IDEA 4: SILENCE IN MOTION
Science is just beginning to recognize the link between physical movement and inner quiet. But the link is intuitive. Have you ever gone on a walk to clear your head? Sure, walking is not as intense an activity as Jamal hitting a slam dunk or Clint just barely escaping getting whupped. But the simple and repetitive movement of the feet and the heightened respiratory and heart rates it generates can lead us to fundamental elements of flow. These include what Csikszentmihalyi describes as the merging of action and awareness and the tendency toward the autotelic experience where activity becomes intrinsically rewarding.
Your physical practices don’t have to be the epitome of athletic eustress. You might just be rolling around like a worm on the floor of the meditation hall.
What matters is that you’re fully into it
IDEA 5: MOMENTARY MA
I’m a big believer—whenever I can remember—in taking one deep breath before I do anything, he says. Whether that’s opening the door, standing up to leave the room, turning on the tap for some water, or turning on or off the lights—just one deep breath. He adds, And it takes nothing—like two or three seconds. He applies the practice in his workday. Before I start a new document, before I read a new email—one deep breath—and then I continue
In our own lives, we’ve found that instead of stretching and savoring time, we too often race through it, like aspiring Formula 1 champions. We tend to view transitions and unstructured moments as voids to urgently fill. In a split-second pause, we might succumb to the itch to check email, shoot off texts, or get a quick hit of today’s news. But—as the wisdom of Ma advises—we find connection to eternity in these hidden spaces. Even though Aaron’s day job centers on the prose of policy making, he seeks to make his everyday experience more like poetry, where what is unsaid is as important as what is said, where the space between is as cherished as matter itself
IDEA 6: DO ONE THING
Doing one thing isn’t that: it’s a string of ‘one things,’ Faith tells us. And almost every ‘one thing’ is a doorway to a moment of satisfaction.
For most of us, making coffee is too often just another part of the grind. We speed recklessly through it as another to do, spilling grounds and splattering water. Running to stop the beeping microwave. Cursing curdled milk
Faith challenges us to make a ritual out of little everyday chores. Which is to say, she challenges us to find an experience of the sacred in the ordinary
The etymology of the word ritual comes from the Sanskrit root R. ta, meaning natural order or truth. Rituals are not just about enshrining positive daily or weekly habits. They’re about connecting to something higher. That which we regularly do with attention and reverence brings us closer to presence.
IDEA 7: SILENCE WITHIN THE WORDS
In The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains—a 2010 book that’s more relevant than ever today—the journalist and sociologist Nicholas Carr laments that online life is all about interruption.5 And this changes how we process information in fundamental ways. Even if efficiency is increased when we gather information by reading online, Carr contends that we’ve lost our capacity to employ a slower, more contemplative mode of thought.
A simple practice of reading a poem or passage each morning can set the tone for the whole day. One read just before bed can seed your dreamland. Even if you’re not reading the most highbrow literature, seek to make the reading itself a practice of pristine attention—an effort that leaves silence in its wake.
IDEA 8: QUICK HITS OF NATURE
What about birdsong?
Over years of conversation with others about how they find silence, we’ve heard variants of this question scores of times
But there’s something about listening to birds that, for many people, generates the felt experience of quiet
For some, it’s the essence of silence
The incident—which happened in the midst of COVID lockdowns—coincided with a spike in downloads of birding apps and unprecedented numbers of public submissions of photographic and audio recordings documenting birds near their homes
While the word wildness implies deep immersion, we can often find it through a quick hit, like a moment simply listening to birdsong. This connection—even momentarily—is one of the most direct ways to find silence in the consciousness. Thankfully, there are so many paths to it.
Connecting to nature quiets the mind. It helps us dislodge the noisy delusion that life is just the mental stuff of a human-centered society
Your hits of nature might be quick, but as research underscores, they’re not trivial. Try to do these two things at least once a day:
Reconnecting to nature helps us to right size—to diminish the egoic self as we simultaneously connect with the vastness of life
IDEA 9: SANCTUARIES IN SPACE AND TIME
When Michelle Millben served as a White House adviser and congressional liaison for President Obama, the idea of finding time for silence and quiet reflection often seemed impossible. But as a practicing minister and a professional musician, Michelle recognized silence as a spiritual necessity
Sanctuaries ought to be simple. Create a physical space for stretching, bathing, reading, journaling, sitting on a patio, lying on the floor, or finding some other relaxed and quiet way of being. Make space in the calendar. See if you can wake up a little earlier or preserve the evening for intentional emptying time. Keep the appointment with yourself. Honor it as though you were meeting an important colleague or a beloved friend
IDEA 10: MAKE FRIENDS WITH NOISE
In the early pages of this book, we defined noise as unwanted distraction. We described the auditory, informational, and internal interference that diverts our attention away from that which we truly want. While there are myriad ways to evade and overcome the interference, we think it’s also important to reckon with a simple fact: noise is inevitable
We asked the neuroscientist and longtime meditator Judson Brewer how his research findings inform his own personal practices. He says he now simply pays attention to when he feels contracted, as opposed to expanded, either mentally or physically. Crucially, he tells us that he doesn’t have to do anything when he notices that contracted feeling—the feeling that’s associated with internal noise. He doesn’t judge it. He doesn’t try to force it away. He just pays attention to it. The act of noticing the contraction, of becoming aware of internal noise, is, he notes, sufficient to transform it.
So, finally, he took a deep breath and just felt all the bodily and mental contraction. He really paid attention to it. He said a reluctant hello
HOW TO REMAKE THE SMOKE BREAK
We spoke recently with a smoker who let us in on some bad news. Most people who go on cigarette breaks these days don’t actually relish deep inhales or bask in sunlight. They check their smartphones. Our idealized vision of some of the last socially sanctioned do nothing time is really just nostalgia
So, we think it’s time to create a new, healthy, socially acceptable, widely recognized category of break in the day. You might call it quiet time. It could vary according to need on any given day. It might be a pause for deep breathing or focused reading or immersive movement or just listening. But regardless of its format, it ought to be structured into every day
CHAPTER 11 Rapturous Silence
The legendary scholar of world religions Huston Smith once wrote that the goal of spiritual practices and rituals is not altered states but altered traits.
In the last chapter, we explored moment-to-moment and day-to-day practices for working with our states—our everyday experiences of noise and quiet in our minds and bodies. These efforts can, cumulatively, help to shape our traits. When we imbue our ordinary lives with pockets of silence by identifying our sphere of control and our sphere of influence, we can, over time, increase our attention, empathy, and patience. These experiences change who we are.
But the effect of silence on our perceptions and proclivities isn’t always just a slow trickle. Just one profound encounter with silence—one mystical experience or moment of awe—can, in and of itself, change our traits. It can challenge our assumptions and shift our perspective. It can set us on a new trajectory
We’ll look at principles and practices for finding an uncommon and transformative silence
We’re talking about the kind of silence that elevates our way of perceiving
While we sometimes tend to associate the deepest silence with solitude, rapturous silence is something different. If anything, it’s transcendence of the ordinary forces that make us feel separate and alone.
IDEA 1: TAKE YOUR TO-DO LIST FOR A HIKE
Gordon Hempton has a simple indicator for determining whether his life is out of control. He checks to see if his to-do list has gotten beyond thirteen single-spaced pages
Take your worries and assumptions to the preferred natural setting of your choosing. If you like, grab your to-do list, your notebook, or maybe just the thoughts that are swirling around in your head. Take some time there. Absorb the silence, as Pythagoras counseled his students. See what happens
IDEA 2: TAKE A WORDLESS WEDNESDAY
Earlier, we discussed how Gandhi observed a day of silence once a week. He wasn’t totally free from external inputs or mental exertion during this time. In addition to meditation and reflection, he sometimes read or even met with people. But he didn’t speak
While Gandhi opted for Mondays, we recognize that the first day of the workweek is an especially heavy lift for most of us. We like a Wordless Wednesday as a way to find renewal at the midpoint of the week.
IDEA 3: GO FLOATING IN THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING
Here’s the thing about apophatic theology: it ain’t so easy to package into everyday life.
The apophatic approach to spirituality—wordless dissolution of the separate self into the totality of the cosmic mystery—is typically a lot less accessible than the kataphatic approach that centers on verbalized, conceptual practices like reading scripture, listening to sermons, or even most kinds of prayer or guided meditation
So, here’s a practice to consider: Reserve a few hours to be in silence—in nature or somewhere peaceful by yourself. Safeguard the time. Put it in your calendar. Make whatever arrangements you need in order to be undisturbed, if possible. In this space of intentional silence, you might do breath work or meditation or prayer. If it’s in your practice—and you’re of the right mind set and environmental setting—you might choose to consciously work with sacred plants or psychedelics. Or you might just rest and relax. What matters is that you leave all the problems and worries behind. You consecrate the space as a safe container for forgetting everything.
As a preparation to enter this space, see if you can first do some practices that help facilitate internal silence. There’s no one right way to do it. The way you prepare specifically for finding internal quiet depends on the nature of your own internal noise. For example, in the days or even weeks before you enter this special period of silence, you might think about the important relationships in your life. You might devote some time to thinking about any issues that are lingering and how it might be in your sphere of control or your sphere of influence to address them. Of course, you’re not going to resolve decades-old issues with a parent or partner, but perhaps you make an actionable plan for helping to strengthen an important relationship and take one or two small steps forward on it. Perhaps you clear off some genuinely important items from the to-do list. In the time immediately before you enter your period of silence, maybe you prepare your body and mind by exercising, doing yoga, chanting, journaling, or singing.
Here’s a simple pointer: if you know you’re not going to be able to let go into the space of internal silence because you haven’t sent that email, taken out the trash, or cleaned the fridge, then just do it.
The idea here is to actively create the conditions to be able to float in the cloud. It’s about preparing the vessel for silence
It’s one thing to just take a break from your busy day to try to spontaneously forget everything and enter the apophatic realm beyond all thoughts or concepts. It’s another thing to give it some time and effort: to carefully correct, organize, and align your life as much as possible to be able to confidently—for just a temporary period—say bon voyage.
IDEA 4: INTO THE DEEP
When we think about retreat in this sense, new possibilities emerge. Perhaps it’s less about what you leave behind and more about regaining traction to move forward
Every year, the renowned author, historian, and social theorist Yuval Noah Harari goes on a sixty-day silent retreat. Sometimes he goes for longer. You don’t have any distractions, you don’t have television, you don’t have emails. No phones, no books. You don’t write, he told the journalist Ezra Klein. You just have every moment to focus on what is really happening right now, on what is reality. You come across the things you don’t like about yourself, things that you don’t like about the world that you spend so much time ignoring or suppressing.
A change of scenery is always possible. If you can’t go away, rearrange the furniture in your room, Sheila tells us. Move some pictures around, do something to calm it down or liven it up. Bring in a plant, or buy yourself some flowers, she rattles off an array of options but sticks to her main takeaway: If the room feels different, it will, psychologically, have a big impact. It will be a retreat.
So call it what you will—a retreat or a mini-retreat, a forced or a chosen winter, a sabbatical or a Sabbath—it is your birthright. It is what you, and every living creature, deserve
IDEA 5: FUZZY PUPPIES LICKING YOUR FACE
In the past, Jon Lubecky usually found his flow states in death metal and dirt bikes.
But Iraq changed his relationship to loudness
In 2005 and 2006, he was a sergeant with an artillery unit in the U.S. Army living on Balad Air Base in the center of the Sunni Triangle—in the middle of some of the most intense sectarian violence of the war
One night in April 2006, Jon was exhausted and sitting on a port-a-potty when a mortar landed a short distance away, briefly knocking him unconscious. The shrapnel thankfully missed his body, but he was left with a traumatic brain injury
With PTSD, there’s no such thing as silence, Jon tells us. The deeper the trauma, the louder that internal noise—the more you’re willing to do anything to make it stop.
Jon’s one particular healing practice—MDMA-assisted psychotherapy—allowed him to talk about his feelings in a way that didn’t trigger his fight-or-flight response. He felt supported by the team and the carefully curated setting. He felt safe. Calm. Quiet
For the first time in a very long time, Jon could experience silence. It felt rapturous.
IDEA 6: DEEP PLAY
There is a way of beholding that is a form of prayer.8 So says the naturalist and poet Diane Ackerman. No mind or heart hobbles
These moments of beholding—when nothing need be thought or said—aren’t always so accessible in our verbally decorated, worry-drenched, grown-up lives
In her book Deep Play, Ackerman writes of play as a refuge from ordinary life, a sanctuary of the mind, where one is exempt from life’s customs, methods, and decrees. And deep play is what she calls the ecstatic form of play. It’s the kind of experience that brings us into the prayer-like state of beholding
While Ackerman says that deep play is classified more by mood than by activity, there are some kinds of activities that are especially likely to prompt it: art, religion, risk-taking, and some sports—especially those that take place in relatively remote, silent, and floaty environments, such as scuba diving, parachuting, hang gliding, mountain climbing.
We have to master the rules of a game like music or mountaineering before we lose ourselves in it. It’s like how Matt Heafy described practicing so hard that all the music was encoded in muscle memory, making it possible to let go into a profound state of quiet on the stage
So, think about how you migrate from the noise of names and distinctions to the silence of pure sensory clarity
What brings you closest to a childlike way of perceiving the world?
Which activities, people, or frames of mind support you?
How can you carry these ways of beholding into everyday life?
ALTERED TRAITS
Diane Ackerman uses the word rapturous to describe such an experience. It’s a word, she says, that literally means seized by force, as if one were being carried away by a powerful bird of prey, a raptor.
It’s a funny juxtaposition to the conventional meaning of silence
But if we accept true silence as a direct encounter with what is real, then it’s a profound break from ordinary life in the twenty-first century. It’s a radical contrast to the artifice of social media and hyper-speed information society.
Part V QUIET TOGETHER
CHAPTER 12 Working Quiet
It’s understandable to sometimes conflate the words silence and solitude. Sound and stimulus are the ordinary stuff of human relationship. In the presence of other people, we do what we do: banter, chuckle, bicker, commiserate
That said, some of the most poignant moments of silence that we’ve ever experienced have been in the presence of other people: moments of shared grief or breathtaking beauty, moments of shock or wonder. In these moments, we usually drop our social obligations to verbalize, rationalize, entertain, and analyze
But the value of shared silence isn’t just these rare moments that leave us speechless
The power of silence is magnified when it’s shared
In the previous chapters, we explored strategies that were focused on finding and creating silence as a solitary practice. Here, we’ll look at how to navigate noise in groups and how to find shared silence.
As we’ll see in the strategies to come, the essential work of finding quiet together is about understanding and refining our norms and cultures.
HOW TO TALK ABOUT QUIET
It’s a paradox, we know. But the work of finding shared silence often starts with more talking. It sometimes requires a lot of conversation
Careful communication matters because people can have radically different experiences of noise and needs for silence
These sometimes-difficult conversations about norms and culture take on different characteristics in different contexts. In our working lives, they often hinge on expectations around topics like constant connectivity, when it’s permissible to be off-line, and when it’s acceptable to reserve spaces of uninterrupted attention. In our home lives, among family and friends, the issues often revolve around questions like whether it’s permissible to have smartphones around or have the TV on in the background during meals. Across contexts, these conversations can get into deeper cultural questions like whether it’s possible to be comfortable in silence together rather than always trying to fill the space, or whether it’s okay to be multitasking when another person is sharing something with you.
We’ve found that across settings and situations there are a few general principles to apply when thinking about the work of quiet together
First, look inward
Starting a conversation about shared quiet doesn’t just mean seizing the opportunity to point fingers at other people’s noisy habits. The best starting point for a conversation on group norms is a check-in with yourself. How are you contributing to the auditory, informational, and even the internal soundscapes of the greater collective? You might consider asking yourself, In what ways do I create noise that negatively impacts others?
Second, identify your golden rules.
Think about your own sphere of control and how you can leverage it to minimize the noise in your shared surroundings. Start by creating your own personal norms that govern how you generate sound and stimulus in your own home, workplace, or other contexts in your life. One way to think about personal norms is as your own golden rules for mitigating noise or bringing in more deliberate quiet. Model what you want to see more of in the world. These might start as small-scale personal experiments. If they work, you can consider making them guiding principles for your day-to-day conduct.
Third, look out for others
Where it’s appropriate, and where it’s within your sphere of influence, consider how you can be a champion for quiet—not just in the whole organization, but specifically for the people who lack the power or autonomy to structure their own circumstances
Keep these three guiding principles—look inward, identify your golden rules, and look out for others—in mind as we explore the process of finding quiet together through a wide range of examples
IDEA 1: GET EXPERIMENTAL
Michael Barton was present at the creation of the modern open-plan office. As a longtime business executive and consultant focused on optimizing organizational culture and operations, he remembers the dreamy early aspiration that accompanied the concept: fostering collaboration by tearing down walls to promote an anti-silo mentality
It’s hard to imagine it now, but Michael tells us that the open-plan office was once seen as utopian. Proponents made the case that it improves communication, improves openness, improves transparency; it improves free flow from department to department. People argued that placing the CEO’s desk in the center of a sea of desks—or having desk space that is first come, first served—would create a flat organizational structure and an egalitarian culture.
Irrespective of the future of open offices, the takeaway here is simple: Consider what you really want or need. Start a conversation. Envision an experiment. Launch it, refine it, iterate. At some organizations, it’s no email Fridays or no meeting Wednesdays. At others, it’s eliminating the expectation of being available and on electronic devices during weekends or after 5:00 p.m. For some workplaces, a redesign of the floor plan might help specific kinds of workers get the focus that they need.
IDEA 2: MA ON THE JOB
Earlier, we introduced you to the Japanese cultural value of Ma—reverence for the empty spaces in between. It’s a principle and a value that permeates traditional arts and culture, from music to tea ceremonies and from theater to flower arranging. The value of Ma is perceptible as part of the country’s professional culture as well. In Japan, you’ll often find people leaving moments of silence in meetings and conversations and, in the process, leaving space for what’s left unsaid
Imagine for a moment what it would mean to imbue our standard business brainstorming processes with a little bit of Ma
IDEA 3: DEEP WORK, TOGETHER
Marie Sk?odowska, known today as Madame Marie Curie, was born into a loving Polish family of educators who quickly recognized her uncommon intellect
In addition to all the barriers she faced as one of the few women at a world-leading university, Marie had to catch up on years of scientific study that she had missed. She also needed a greater command of French. She realized she would need to study even more than she’d anticipated. In her words, she needed to find perfect concentration.
Bronya’s home was filled with visitors, music, and patients who would show up at all hours in need of treatment. Marie was unable to find perfect concentration there, so she set out in search of a room of her own and found an attic apartment. She nearly starved and froze to death there because she prioritized buying lamp oil to study by over food for sustenance or coal for heat. Still, the sacrifices paid off. She caught up and then surpassed her peers. In the best-selling biography of her mother’s life, ève Curie writes, She had a passionate love for the atmosphere of attention and silence, the ‘climate’ of the laboratory, which she was to prefer to any other up to her last day
At the Sorbonne, Marie met and married Pierre Curie, a professor and physicist. The foundation of their marriage was a shared love of this climate of the laboratory—a shared space of attention and silence
The Curie family was awarded five Nobel prizes—more than any other family, even to this day. They faced obstacles, including poverty, war, gender barriers in education, and societal norms around women in the professional sphere. But the Curie family shared a norm around the power of perfect concentration. Not just alone, but together; not only for men, but for women and girls, too.
It’s an example of what a culture of quiet clarity can generate
In his 2016 book, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, Cal Newport laments the loss of immersive attention—like the work of the Curie family—and advises readers on how to reclaim it.4 Newport defines deep work as professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit
Today, the challenge isn’t just that many of us, as individuals, lack the discipline or interest in the pure attention of deep work. It’s also figuring out how, as teams, organizations, and whole societies, we can formulate shared values and operational systems that enshrine it
IDEA 4: SITTING IN THE FIRE
While the word silence can sometimes imply withdrawal, here it connotes the essence of full engagement. Silence, in this sense, is the courage to face the utmost discomfort. It’s sitting in the fire. Whether we’re involved in a major conflict or a trivial workplace quarrel, we need to be able to be quiet together—to withstand the frightening nakedness of shared silence—in order to find direct and durable resolutions.
IDEA 5: SLOW DOWN, THERE ISN’T MUCH TIME
But the best way to arrive at transformative solutions is to create a general atmosphere of space and silence—an ambience where participants can calm the amygdala and expand beyond the frenetic mindset of the default mode network. It’s about being receptive and letting answers emerge, rather than simply powering through.
Some people struggle with the lack of mental stimulation during even this modest amount of time. But as the minutes progress, most people tune in. They reconnect with the why that brought them to the work. Many people gain insight into what’s within their spheres of control and influence for making change
CHAPTER 13 Living Quiet
We often use skillful means of finding silence on ourselves as well. Sometimes we create ways to lure ourselves away from the gravitational pull of work or nonessential communications. We tell ourselves that this is the one perfect time of year to see the maples turn colors or that the computer must be glitchy for a reason
We’ll consider deeper questions of what it means to prepare the soil for quiet together, including how we decide consciously on norms and shared cultures that respect our authentic and evolving needs. We’ll investigate seven different ideas for cultivating the space in our lives and our homes that invites rapturous silence.
IDEA 1: PUMPERNICKEL
A declaration of Pumpernickel! is like the pulling of a rip cord. It means, ‘What we really need is a subtractive process right now’ in order to create space and silence,
This leads us to a pertinent question: How can we call Pumpernickel! when the orchestra of our lives becomes discordant and the volume too high?
In many families, the idea of saying things are getting too loud in here is completely taboo. It might be viewed more as a personal attack than as a yearning for quality time. As a result, communicating the need for silence can feel daunting; there’s seemingly no way to reel in excessive screen time, overactive calendars, or over-the-top verbal processing. There’s no acceptable way to call Pumpernickel!
IDEA 2: REMEMBER THE SABBATH DAY
As you may know firsthand, Shabbat is quiet with respect to certain things but can be quite spirited with respect to others
Done well, Shabbat acts like a force field. When you reconnect with what’s important,
IDEA 3: INTENTION AND ATTENTION
Zach is a recognized leader in the field of social and emotional learning, which endeavors to introduce mindfulness to schools. He studies how young people reach states of inner quiet and deep engagement, and he advises school districts and administrators on how to facilitate the right conditions to enable these modes of attention.
What I’ve most noticed in my work with silence and mindfulness, Zach says, is that kids are most engaged when they have something to create. The quiet that comes in a focused state of creation—when they have the right materials, the right atmosphere, the right container for parallel play—that’s a marvel.
IDEA 4: SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL
And yet, based on our experience, there is one simple recommendation that we can offer for cultivating spaces of meaningful shared silence with friends and loved ones
Keep it small. Snack-sized, in fact
When Justin and his wife, Meredy, go hiking in the mountains near their home, it’s typically a special opportunity to really catch up, with no attention turned to work or the demands of parenting three kids or the distractions of electronic devices. They exchange lots of words, sharing stories, trading perspectives, and working out life’s details. But, when it’s possible, they’ll often take some time at the highest elevation or the best vista to just sit on a comfortable rock and be quiet together
The content of the conversation and the tone of the speech feed the quality of the silence. Likewise, the clarity of the silence can enhance the quality of the surrounding conversation. Holding space for both silence and speech makes the intentional practice of shared quiet manageable and accessible
IDEA 5: COLLECTIVE EFFERVESCENCE
A few years ago, we took a drive up through Northern California to speak with Bob Jesse outside his one-room cabin in the towering redwoods. Bob is the kind of man whose time horizon runs roughly twenty to thirty years ahead of convention
So, on Bob’s advice, the nascent group baked in some Quaker-inspired principles. Still today, with a community of five hundred, they refer to each other as Friends—in Quaker fashion—and they take turns speaking, listening, and holding silence to surface ideas, concerns, and resolutions. Crucially, they seek their version of what Rob Lippincott describes as unity.
We use a phrase, ‘reasonable community concord.’ Bob explains, ‘Concord’ is a contrast term to ‘discord.’ ‘Community means community-wide … and ‘reasonable’ means asking, are we reasonably close to full concord? This allows decisions to be reached in the face of a few dissents, if necessary. When a proposal is presented to the community, Friends may comment and the proposal may be revised, iteratively
Perhaps it’s the Quaker-inspired governing practices that preserve the group’s custom that each event—as high decibel as it may be—includes sanctuary spaces and moments of quiet. At every event, there is an altar that is usually visited in silence. Most venues include a tranquil healing space as well as at least one down-tempo chill space for resting and quiet conversation
IDEA 6: TUNING IN, TOGETHER
When we prepare the vessel, we ready ourselves to become like the tuning fork—enabling the mind and body to perceive the finest vibration. We can do this individually, as we’ve emphasized in previous chapters, but it’s often most powerful to engage in preparation and, once ready, to engage in a type of synchronization—together.
Still, the point of everything was to prepare to enter the rapturous silence together. You can’t count on such an experience to happen spontaneously. You have to put in the work
As with several other events we’ve highlighted, auditory quiet isn’t the goal here. For hours, Metzner gave elaborate invocations, guided visualizations, and told mythical Norse stories from his ancestral homelands—like the one about the three Norns who create and determine one’s destiny and the one about Mimir, the disembodied head that grants wisdom
IDEA 7: HEALING PRESENCE
Presence, says Don St. John, is having all your energy and attention at your disposal and not inaccessible because of worry, distraction, anxiety, or chronic tension. Growing up, he never thought this state of consciousness was actually attainable. I can’t remember when the beatings became a daily occurrence, he says, recalling the abuse he received at the hands of his fire-eyed and resentful mother. If I attempted to block her blows, she became even angrier, screamed louder, and continued her attack until she knew she had landed some solid hits.
The word silence evokes complicated feelings with regard to romantic relationships. As with the silences of childhood, we often think of silences in partnerships as signs of inattention or rejection. Nobody wants to get the silent treatment. Stonewalling is an age-old expression of emotional overwhelm to describe throwing up an invisible wall to withdraw behind
But intentional silence can be a tool for profound bonding in a partnership
One of the things we’ve done over the last ten years or so is to designate a weekend to simply be silent, Don tells us. They cook food ahead of time and avoid using their phones, sending emails, or doing anything else that might distract from resting in pure presence. They spend the days reflecting, doing movement practices, reading books, and taking walks in the mountains near their home in Salt Lake City
Part VI A SOCIETY THAT HONORS SILENCE
CHAPTER 14 Ma Goes to Washington
These are critical questions. But we believe there’s a bigger, overarching question that we should be addressing as well: How can we structure our society to preserve pristine human attention?
It was around the time of Nixon’s noise reforms that the Nobel laureate Herbert Simon wrote the words we quoted at the beginning of this book: A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.
Of course, it’s not possible to regulate or legislate the entirety of the problem of noise
We’ll imagine what it would be like, for example, to have a public discourse that follows the logic of a Quaker Friends meeting: where it’s prudent to speak if the words are believed to improve the silence.
IDEA 1: INVEST IN PUBLIC SANCTUARIES
So, how can we expand and democratize access to silence?
Some societies do find the money and the commitment to invest in these spaces
The quiet spaces we make shouldn’t be limited to outdoors.
IDEA 2: INNOVATE LIKE THE AMISH
As Kelly studied the Amish approach to technology, he found that they have an unusually thoughtful method to assess whether to adopt a new innovation. It usually goes something like this: Someone in the community will ask the elders (the bishops) in an area for permission to try out a new technology, such as a personal device or an agricultural tool. This first adopter will typically receive that permission. Then the whole community pays close attention to how the new technology is affecting the first adopter’s life. Is it making their work more efficient? Is it healthy? Is it making them self-centered? Is it negatively impacting their personality or work ethic? After the community has contributed their thoughts, the bishops will make a final assessment
In short, the Amish generally start with their own values as a culture, including values like community cohesion, humility, a strong work ethic, and, yes, quiet. Then they consciously assess whether a new technology can produce benefits for the community without undermining these values.
If the answer is yes, they’ll adopt the new technology for use
The case for an Amish approach to tech governance is getting stronger every year. The growth of AI, the expansion of the Internet of Things, and the emergence of wearable (and even implantable) informational technologies are likely to shift our internal and external soundscapes in ways that are hard to forecast. There’s nothing particularly radical or excessively interventionist about subjecting our most consequential technology decisions to rigorous review
IDEA 3: MEASURE WHAT MATTERS
So, here’s an idea: improve our measurements to better reflect what makes us flourish
This is one systemic shift that could help bring us closer to John Maynard Keynes’s optimistic dream. It could help dismantle the altar of noise.
Over recent years, there’s been some movement in this direction. Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, 2019 Nobel laureates in economics, recently wrote that it may be time to abandon [their] profession’s obsession with growth
Here’s how it would work: Given that the standard measure of GDP still has its practical uses, we shouldn’t totally abandon it. Rather, governments should transform economic measurement from reliance upon one single indicator (GDP) to a series of indicators. Similar systems are already in place for measuring unemployment (which is calculated as U1 through U6), the consumer price index, and the money supply
Under this approach, the series might look as follows
IDEA 4: ENSHRINE THE RIGHT TO ATTENTION
With that in mind, we wondered what it would look like to have an Office of Noise Abatement and Control that’s focused on addressing not just the auditory noise but the informational and internal noise, too.
In a world where platforms have strong incentives to extract attention as well as the capability to adapt quickly to the strictures of regulations, it stands to reason that any new public policies to address the harms of the attention economy should focus heavily on building public awareness and changing consumer behavior That means emphasizing transparency. Think back to cigarettes for a moment. The massive decline in smoking rates over the past several decades didn’t happen because governments banned tobacco products. Imagine a Surgeon General’s Warning—like on a pack of Marlboros—on the Facebook log-in page describing how the product uses sophisticated tools to intentionally manipulate your brain chemistry for the purpose of selling advertisements
Wong thinks this is possible. The tech community is sort of starting to wake up and, more importantly, their user base is starting to wake up, she told us
The right to attention harkens back to what the twentieth-century French philosopher Gilles Deleuze called the right to say nothing—the notion that we are all entitled to our own unperturbed interiority and the accompanying notion, that society should honor this fundamental aspect of being human. While this is a sweeping idea that has implications for politics, law, economics, culture, psychology, and even spirituality, the basic premise is simple: no one should have to submit to an unsustainable burden of noise.
IDEA 5: DELIBERATE LIKE THE QUAKERS
Sheeran notes that some of the most famous deliberative bodies in the world employ consensus as a way of doing business. The U.S. Senate, for example, typically proceeds through much of its agenda under unanimous consent. According to the rules, just a single senator has the power to block a good portion of the body’s proceeding if she or he denies consent. The UN General Assembly also operates by consensus in many situations. And many corporate boards make decisions primarily on a unanimous basis
The Quaker approach isn’t the only model of true consensus-based group decision making that’s grounded in contemplative silence. The Iroquois Confederacy—which is known as the oldest participatory democracy on Earth—built a diverse and highly egalitarian society on the basis of consensus deliberation at multiple levels
The capacity for consensus in the Iroquois model is directly related to the capacity for shared contemplative silence. If you attend an Iroquois decision-making meeting, you’ll likely hear a recitation of the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address. It’s a statement of gratitude to the waters, the plants, the animals, and all the forces of nature. After each part of the statement is a moment of shared reverential attention and a transcendent phrasing that repeats itself: Now our minds are one.
Try to imagine an institution like the modern U.S. Senate, the UN General Assembly, or a Fortune 500 board finding consensus through practices of union brought about by shared contemplative quiet. Imagine the participants in one of these gatherings seeking to make their minds one. The idea is pretty implausible
CHAPTER 15 A Culture of Golden Silence
In meditation or quiet contemplation, Joyce has only rarely experienced a kind of silence she would call rapturous. But, she tells us, I’ve had multiple times, plentiful times, when it’s come from the collective … There’s an attunement that comes in, and it is gloriously amplified.
THE DAY OF SILENCE
Dewa Putu Berata grew up playing games and music with friends under the shade of five giant banyan trees in his village, Pengosekan, near Ubud. In Bali, we have many ceremonies, he said, grinning. This is a charming understatement. Offerings and rituals are the centerpiece of Balinese life.
Nyepi forbids the ordinary activities of daily life. For twenty-four hours, very different rules apply: there can be no fire, including cooking and use of lights; no activity, including work; no leaving your home; and—last but not least—no eating food or partaking in entertainment. You have to be quiet, stay at home, and think, Dewa tells us. You let nature take a break for one day, and you let yourself take a break for one day.
On this day of purification, people are expected to appreciate all they have rather than grumble about what’s prohibited
REMEMBERING
But what does it mean to live in a whole society that honors silence?
What if the collective agreement at Joyce’s performance or the annual day of reflection in Dewa’s observation of Nyepi wasn’t a rare occurrence but, instead, an element of ordinary life?
Where can we look for a culture that cherishes clarity and wonder?
We recently explored this line of inquiry with Tyson Yunkaporta, the author of the book Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World
Tyson’s answer was unequivocal: It doesn’t exist.
There’s no Indigenous culture on the planet that is not infected with the same noise, he tells us. There are people who are still living in the same patterns, he says, speaking of traditional knowledge and modes of connection with nature. But those are also falling apart.
In the age of auditory, informational, and internal noise—when at least a third of the world’s natural aural ecosystems have gone extinct, when every square inch of Earth has some form of digital connectivity, when the welfare of a society is judged by the raw quantity of sound and stimulus and stuff it produces, and when the success of a human life is sized up according to one’s personal brand on the digital platform du jour
We’ve explored what it means to awaken a quiet and connected presence that feels utterly outside the noisy and isolated times in which we live
But these are two examples of what it means to recall the memory of silence
THE SIGNAL
He calls this concept the ability to perceive a signal.
It gets subjective, Tyson cautions, because we think one person’s signal is another person’s noise.
But he says there is a true signal that runs deeper than all our individual stories and opinions. At the foundation, at the bottom of the stack, he says, there is the law of the land, the law that is in the land, the forces and patterns of creation that provide for the growth and the limits to growth of all things.
And that, he says, is the signal.
EXPANSION
In the opening pages of this book, we expressed our sense that the most intractable problems won’t be solved with more talking or thinking. With due respect to the voice and the intellect and the buzzing machinery of material progress, we asked you to consider the possibility that the solutions to the most serious personal, communal, and even global challenges could be found somewhere else: in this place of expansion, in the open space between the mental stuff.
How does this presence shift our sense of what constitutes progress? Do we keep clinging to an idea of the good life as the endless accumulation of more and more mental and material stuff? Or do we ease, open, and slow ourselves—aspiring to harmonize more with nature and with one another?
How does this presence of silence change the way we make decisions, how we hold ourselves accountable, how we spend our time? How might this presence of silence change what we hold in our hearts?
Imagine if all of humanity could absorb this golden silence
What’s possible when we remember?
What happens when we all tune in?
Thirty-Three Ways to Find Silence
EVERYDAY PRACTICES FOR INDIVIDUALS
PRACTICES FOR FINDING DEEPER SILENCE
EVERYDAY PRACTICES WITH CO-WORKERS AND COLLABORATORS
EVERYDAY PRACTICES FOR FAMILIES AND FRIENDS
CHANGING PUBLIC POLICY AND CULTURE
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ONE OF MY GREATEST PLEASURE, THE DAILY URGE, TO LET THE ACTION OF THE WORD "PASIN" ACCOMPANY MY DEGREE. ONLY VOLUME IT TAKES TO COVER, FIBRE OF MY BEING AS WELL AS MY LIFE STYLE ALONG SIDE EXPERIENCES.
9 个月Consolidating To this time of noise polution
Psychotherapist, Workshop Leader, Continuum Teacher; Award Winning Author of Healing the Wounds of Childhood and Culture: An Adventure of a Lifetime
2 年Justin and Leigh’s book can serve as a beautiful secular/spiritual practice.