Silence: A User's Guide, Volume One: Process [1] 9781625647962, 1625647964

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Contents
Foreword
Permissions

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Silence: A User’s Guide

Also by Maggie Ross Writing the Icon of the Heart Seasons of Death and Life Pillars of Flame The Fountain and the Furnace The Fire of Your Life

Silence: A User’s Guide Volume 1: Process

Maggie Ross

With a Foreword by Rowan Williams

!!

CASCADE Books • Eugene,

Oregon

SILENCE: A USER’S GUIDE Volume 1: Process Copyright © 2014 Maggie Ross. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401. Cascade Books An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3 Eugene, OR 97401 www.wipfandstock.com isbn 13: 978-1-62564-796-2

Cataloguing-in-Publication data: Ross, Maggie. Silence: a user’s guide : volume 1: process / Maggie Ross ; with a foreword by Rowan Williams. xiv + 234 pp. ; 23 cm. Includes bibliographical references. isbn 13: 978-1-62564-796-2 1. Silence—Religious aspects—Christianity. 2. Spiritual life—Christianity. 3. Spirituality. I. Williams, Rowan. II. Title. BV4509.5 R67 2014 Manufactured in the U.S.A.

This book is dedicated to John Barton Oriel and Laing Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture University of Oxford

Questions Answered You ask why I live Alone in the mountain forest, and I smile and am silent until even my soul grows quiet. The peach trees blossom, The water continues to flow. I live in the other world, one that lies far beyond the human.

Contents

Foreword by Rowan Williams  ix



Acknowledgments  xi



Permissions  xiii



Introduction   1

ONE

Lost Silence  

TWO

The Work of Silence   38

THREE

The Language of Silence   66

FOUR

Knowing Silence  

FIVE

Suppressing Silence I   126

SIX

Suppressing Silence II   158

SEVEN

Suppressing Silence III   191

EIGHT

Conclusion: Living from Silence   221



Select Bibliography  227

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Foreword Trying to write about contemplative practice is to attempt something very risky and difficult; but the difficulty is not about someone trying to express in words an “experience that transcends speech,” or phrases to that effect. Maggie Ross is clear that this kind of rhetoric is misleading, indeed potentially self-deluding. The difficulty (as writers like Gregory of Nazianzus observed in the fourth Christian century) is not that we have a rich and wonderful experience of God that is hard to put into words, but that we face the risk of real self-deception and fantasy as to the nature of the encounter or contact between finite subject and infinite act. The risk is a risk to our honesty; the difficulty is the difficulty of not creating idols (of self or God). There is a sentimentality around so much of the current vocabulary for contemplative practice which can lure us into thinking that we are undertaking a set of tactics that will deliver commodities called spiritual experience or spiritual awareness (isn’t one of our most pressing problems at the moment the commodification of “spiritual experience” in a commodity-obsessed culture?). The beginning of wisdom, so this book insists, is to recognize that what we are invited to in contemplative practice is ultimately the sheer presence of finite subject to, with, in infinite act; and that this entails a relentless scrutiny of whatever words and pictures and habits we deploy, to do what we can to prevent them taking on the contours of some kind of description of infinite act or some kind of tactic to chart and locate it. And this means of course that we shall always be asking how what we say and do moves us towards silence: real silence, not a sense of vague devotional warmth. As Maggie Ross has written elsewhere, all serious speech about faith—or should we say, speech in faith?—is going to resolve itself into silence. It is a test before which most liturgical language these days, let alone a lot of our (my) preaching or theologizing, sounds glib and shallow. We shall go on failing, no doubt; but it matters desperately, for the sanity of religious communities, that we keep such a test before us. Without awareness of this, we become, more than ever, “poor little talkative Christianity,”

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Foreword in E. M. Forster’s stinging phrase. It is not that we are under orders simply to shut up, but that we need to learn new ways of listening to ourselves speaking in or of faith, asking whether our register, our tone, our performance, is or isn’t a way of framing silence. So it is important not to think that all this is some strategy for avoiding doctrine, liturgy, avoiding committing ourselves in words. We are not being told that we could or should be taking refuge in comfortable agnosticism. Quite the opposite: if the complex, sometimes strained, words and models that we draw from Scripture and Creed really mean what they say, the new life of Christ happens in us when we have learned to listen with an openness that demands everything; and the gift of Christ’s Spirit is the inexhaustible energy that makes possible and sustains such openness, an openness that we cannot create for ourselves by trying hard and being good. Genuine silence is gift, in the deepest sense imaginable. This book is the work of one of the most independent and ruthlessly realistic religious writers of our time. It is a distillation of many years of labor and reflection, drawing on enormous resources of close scholarly reading, consistently penetrating and demanding, yet opening a door of vital understanding. At a time when easy and rather cosy “spiritualities” abound, this is a quiet, firm recall—quite simply—to truth and life, the truth and life that is “Christ in you, the hope of glory.”   Rowan Williams

Acknowledgments This book represents a lifetime of work, and it is impossible to mention by name all the people who have supported me through the long years of its making. You know who you are, and I am profoundly grateful. But there are a number of people whose immediate influence is reflected in these pages whom I must thank. First, to Rowan Williams, not only for writing the foreword but also for nearly four decades of friendship and support. Thank you too, Rowan, for continuing to be the custodian of my vows. Next, to John Barton, to whom the book is dedicated. Thank you John, for your solid friendship of more than thirty years, and for your support and belief in my work even when I was tempted to give up. Vincent Gillespie: thank you, Vincent, for the many years we spent working on Julian of Norwich, for your ongoing friendship, and for your request for the paper “Behold Not the Cloud of Experience,” which enabled this book finally to gel. Thank you, Kevin Johnson, for the hundreds of emails and voicemails that contributed to this book as we dialogued about many subjects. Thank you for your belief in the paradigm, and for taking the risk to use it in your doctoral thesis. Thank you, too, to Mark Williams, for many fruitful conversations about Greek philosophy, gardening, and other shared interests. Your ongoing friendship is beyond price. Thank you to other dialogue partners, especially Frazer Crocker, Pauline Matarasso, Andrew Shanks, Graham Ward, and the late Abbott Conway. And thank you to those individuals who have supported me in various ways: Hugh Becker and Deborah Bartlett Pitt; David Burgdorf; Matthew Carlisle; Liz Carmichael; Gypsy da Silva; Beth and Graham Edwards and Andrew Shanks for reading the manuscript and offering suggestions; Ted Fletcher; Richard Ganz; Roger Greene; Pat Hobson; Herb and Cindy Holeman; Hank Levy; Diarmaid MacCulloch; Daniel McCann; the late Sally Mitchell; Rachael Kerr and John Mitchinson; Tom Moore; David Smith; Valerie Stark; George Swanson and Pixie Thayer; John and Margie Thelen; Deborah Wilde; Laura Anne Wood; and last but certainly not least, my editor at Wipf and Stock, Robin Parry, whose enthusiasm for my work has never flagged, and all the dedicated people at the press.

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Acknowledgments There is also one group of people whom I also wish to thank: the dedicated readers of my blog: ravenwilderness.blogspot.com. Your interest, comments, and support has meant more than I can possibly express. Bless you all.

Permissions Grateful acknowledgement is given for permission to print from the following sources: For the cover illustration from the Rothschild Canticles: The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. To Sam Hamill for permission to quote “Questions Answered” as an epigraph, from Crossing the Yellow River: Three Hundred Poems from the Chinese, translated by Sam Hamill. Rochester, NY: Tiger’s Bark Press, 2013. To James Danaher for permission to quote from The Second Truth. St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 2014. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers © Sister Benedicta. A Cistercian Publication title (CS 59). Collegeville, MN: Liturgical, 1975. Used by permission. To Boydell and Brewer, for permission to reuse a long section of the paper “Behold Not the Cloud of Experience,” first published in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England VIII, edited by E. A. Jones. Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2013.

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Introduction It is always paradoxical to write or speak about silence, but, as this book hopes to show, paradox is essential to understanding the work of silence in the human person, and the workings of the human mind with silence. Silence is opposite to speech, in that language is linear and selfreflexive, while silence in its truest sense means that self-consciousness is elided or suspended. Silence, then, requires that we approach it in a way that is not linear; otherwise the method would be at war with the content. In consequence, this book might best be regarded as an extended thought experiment that approaches silence in a more or less holographic way, and as an introduction to a very complex set of problems. There have been other books on silence: there are books that describe looking for an “experience” of silence; books that seem to discuss silence but are really about being alone; books that try to understand the presence of silence historically at work for good or ill in various cultures; books that discuss the “music” of silence, that are in fact not about silence at all but about language. But as far as I know, no one has written a book such as this one, which not only addresses the human relationship with silence directly, but also explores the ways silence or the lack of it affects the ordinary round of our daily lives; and the ways that we can cooperate with silence to lead lives that are simple, truthful, and incoercible, which will give us more joy than we could ask or imagine. Both the insights and the processes of silence are open to everyone because the fundamental workings of the human mind are universal and have not changed in recorded history. Social status and education are irrelevant: the work of silence can be undertaken by the literate or the illiterate, king or peasant. The work of silence is neutral: it is not necessary to believe anything, but only to observe one’s mind at work with the silence, to discover its permutations, its portals, and its gifts; and to realize the trans-figuring effects that deepest silence can work in us. It is only when people attempt to verbalize these processes that religious metaphor can arise. The basic message of those who have done the work of silence consists in this: if self-consciousness makes us human, then its elision opens the door to what was once called divinity. To put this statement in

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Silence: A User’s Guide modern terms, if we can get beyond our manipulative thinking to focus on not focusing, we open ourselves to insight and change; we access a vast, spacious, generous, silent, thinking mind that seems to have knowledge we have never self-consciously learned; that makes unexpected connections; that has its own ethics; and that not only gives us insights but can tell us when an insight is correct. The mind’s layers as they pertain to silence can be stated very simply: there is a level of noise, there are ways to get beyond the noise, there is the level of silence where the observing I/eye is present, and the deepest one where it is not. Movement through this process is ruled by a paradox called “the paradox of intention,” for our self-consciousness is useless if we wish to hush the noise and find clarity. We cannot self-consciously suspend self-consciousness until we find ways for self-consciousness to subvert itself. There are many ways “in” to silence, though it can happen spontaneously. A common technique is to concentrate on a single point— a single word, or counting exhalations—which allows self-consciousness gradually to fall away for a time. Or, more simply, at any time during waking hours, some people, when they become conscious of being assaulted by interior noise, seek— metaphorically speaking—to turn away and “reach into the dark” where silence dwells. Or, as Guillaume de Guilleville puts it, to “raise the face of the mind” in beholding.1 In the beginning they may self-consciously make this shift many times a day. When this intention has become a ground note of their living, then they are increasingly open to the gifts silence has to offer. However, contrary to popular belief, no form of meditation—and there are many—can be done in isolation, but rather must be part of a program that involves the refocusing of the entire person. Lacking that focus, the meditator opens him or her self to the hidden parts of their psyches that have potential to do harm. But if seekers persevere in working with silence, they come to discover that the most fruitful parts of the human mind are in its depths, which are out of sight and beyond control, but which are influenced by intention. While the paradoxical key to insight has been the subject of recent scientific studies, the rule of paradox is no news at all for many authors of the great texts that come down to us from the ancient and medieval worlds. The problem is that because we have lost sight and understanding 1.  With thanks to Graham Edwards for this translation of a fragment from a hymn in honor of saints Benedict and Scholastica.

Introduction of the work of silence, we no longer know how to receive paradox or to interpret these texts. From time out of mind, those who reflect on the roles of self-consciousness and deep mind have been aware of both their gifts and their liabilities. Often people who reflect in this way have often been persecuted by people who fear such interior examinations, who wish ambiguous or unanswerable questions to be forced into the templates of rules, rites, and hierarchies, where they can be controlled. Worse, the latter often have co-opted the insights of the former and twisted them to their own ends. The tension between silence and speech persists throughout the human historical record, particularly in the West, and it is important to remember that none of the religions of the Book have ever been uniform or monolithic at any time, in spite of what may be claimed by the myths of their making. Whether one accepts or rejects religion, we in the West are heirs to the language, mythology, allusions, and cultural assumptions of these traditions, and religion’s history of opposition to the work of silence is instructive. Some of the early Christian traditions suggest that, however else the New Testament is interpreted, the inheritance of the life and death of Jesus points to a silence tradition, which we might call the en-Christing process. Many of the sayings of Jesus and key passages of Paul’s epistles can be read as commentaries on traversing the structures of the mind as one opens to the deepest silence to receive its life-renewing gifts. Silence traditions are rarely heard of or cited today, yet such a tradition was handed down unbroken until the high Middle Ages in the West, when it was quenched by the mainstream religious institution of the age. The work of silence is still ignored by scholars today who do not want to be thought religious. They do not seem to realize that the processes of silence are themselves neutral. In consequence, their attempts to translate and interpret the texts and artifacts that make up the silence tradition—which comprise much of the Western canon—are often very wide of the mark. It is not an exaggeration to say that when the silence tradition as part of the mainstream teaching authority was finally quenched in the mid-fifteenth century, Western institutional Christianity, always struggling to justify itself, began its death-throes. In the early days of its formation, the victors—those who would create hierarchy and institution—determined the contents of what we now think of as the New Testament. They conveniently ignored the inherent contradictions in the institution they were developing, which reflected

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Silence: A User’s Guide the very structures and practices in Jewish religion and the Hebrew Scriptures that the teacher, Jesus, had called into question and spent his entire ministry trying to undermine. Opposed to these developing structures, and very much in the disorganized minority, were those who took Jesus’s message to refer to the work of silence, and the en-Christing process, the transfiguration that occurs in the depths of the human heart. The work of Karen King and Elaine Pagels in Reading Judas sheds grim light on this conflict, as those intent on institution and hierarchy urged second-century Christians toward martyrdom. At the same time, many of those groups now labeled “heretic” were repelled by what they perceived as human sacrifice in the service of creating and sustaining a self-certifying and self-serving hierarchy, a hierarchy that preached a bloodthirsty god that demanded death as payment, a god whom the advocates of Jesus’s message as a silence tradition could not stomach. This conflict among early Christians is far more than a difference of political opinion, and it is important to the study of the work of silence because the position one takes is absolutely fundamental to the notion of what it means to be fully human. In terms of human growth and maturation this conflict contrasts the lesser, often stunted effort of “imitation,” with the open-ended task of “putting on the mind of Christ” (the work of silence), which is entirely opposite. In psychological terms, to put on the mind of Christ means relinquishing imaginative stereotypes and projections into the silence, and receiving back a transfigured (in the literary as well as the psychological and theological senses) perspective, so that we are freed from the trap of our own circular thinking; while “imitation” means pursuing a life based on our own imaginative stereotypes and projections, impressions that are easily formed and controlled by a hierarchy. In other words, imitation does not allow us to break out of the circular squirrel cage of our own constructs and prejudices. However piously and devoutly meant, imitation becomes a kind of religious performance art, regressively reductive with the passage of time. Imitation breeds dependence and fear. By contrast, the mind of Christ results in a healthy autonomy and an inviolable integrity for the sake of the community. This is not to say that these two points of view are mutually exclusive: it is possible for the failure of imitation to point the way to the work of silence. The implications of these observations for today’s celebrity and consumer “spirituality” are only too obvious.

Introduction In spite of persecutions and anathemas, the early advocates of the work of silence were not entirely stamped out. When Christianity was legalized by Constantine, some of the adherents of silence decamped for the desert, to the great embarrassment of the institution. The institution spun this as “white martyrdom,” but the desert hermits were very clear: “Flee bishops,” they said. They wanted no part of hierarchy, and they would not presume to think of what they did as “sacrifice.” They came from all classes of people. Anthony the Great, who had an agricultural background, was inspired to solitude simply by hearing the Gospel read in church. Arsenius had lived in the court of the Emperor in Constantinople. Moses had been a slave, a thief, perhaps even a murderer, and suffered from the prejudice attached to his race: he was black. John was a dwarf. There were women, Theodora, Syncletica, and Sarah among them. The message of these desert dwellers was simple and compassionate: life and truth are to be found in the work of silence. Even if their ways seem austere to us today, their wisdom is just as valid as it was in the fourth century: sit in your cell (the cell of your heart, if not an actual hermitage) and your cell will teach you everything. In their day, the corollary to this first saying was: consult the elders and reveal what troubles you. In ours it might be, “Behold, and everything will be added unto you.” But for those in the twenty-first century who are trying to revive the tradition, the statement about the elders has become problematic: nearly five centuries have passed since the death of Nicholas of Cusa in 1464, the marker date for the disappearance of the silence tradition at the official level. This means there are few, if any, elders. What Abba Macarius said to the weeping Abba Poemen is applicable to us. Poeman asked for a saving Word, but Macarius replied, “What you are looking for has now disappeared from among us.”2 The simmering conflict between hierarchy and silence erupted once again in 451 at the Council of Chalcedon. Institutional and imperial advocates sought to nail down definitions so that everyone would believe in the same way. They were opposed by those who understood the provisionality of language, who sought to restrain the temptation to define, categorize, and politicize the indefinable, which they regarded as blasphemous. They lost, of course. Language shouts down silence, and its advocates were labeled heretic, monophysite.

2. Ward, Sayings, 112.

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Silence: A User’s Guide But the desert witness to silence and interiority was too powerful to be entirely negated, at least for a time. Cassian, Benedict, and his hagiographer, Gregory the Great transmitted some of its wisdom. The monastic terms lectio, ruminatio, meditatio, contemplatio are metaphors describing the work of silence, one of the passages to its depths. Monks who sought the vision of God were, until the twelfth century, said to be doing the work of philosophy. Educators taught silence in school; it was considered as important as the abc, for the organization of the mind determines how we think, perceive, interpret, and behave. In the East, writers such as Isaac of Nineveh in the seventh century analyzed the insights of the desert with an acute sense of human psychology. The only demons are those that arise in the human heart, Isaac remarks, commenting on a popular metaphor that too often became literalized and used as an excuse. True prayer, he says, begins only when we are no longer aware of praying. The mind is snatched. But the conflict between the work of silence and imitation would not go away. From the ninth to the eleventh century it came to crisis. The influences that created this crisis are many and complex, and only a few of them can be mentioned here. Early on, the hierarchy created a shift in emphasis in the eucharistic rite from a gathering of the people giving thanks, to a religious drama of sacrifice performed by the ordained. Clerics sought ever wider control over behavior and thinking. There was a growing fascination with the Celtic emphasis on penitential rites—extremes in religious practice seem always to be more interesting than the humble work of silence. Gregory VII’s (1015/1028–85) reforms in the eleventh century sought to centralize Christianity in Rome and to extend the political power of the papacy, which, coupled with the innovations that had begun in the seventh century with Columbanus, made Hildebrand’s (as Gregory VII was also known) programs almost inevitable. This crisis may be symbolized by events coinciding in the years 1084–85, marker dates for the foundation of the Carthusians and the translation of Aristotle, respectively. Over the next three centuries, tensions rose to the breaking point between a political camp that used words as weapons for oppression under the guise of dialectic, and a “spiritual” camp that insisted that familiarity with the silence from which the words sprang and to which they referred, and into which they elided, must not be lost, that dialectic is to be used in service of silence. Aquinas and Bonaventure, who both died in 1274, signal the end of scholarship seeking this balance between silence and speech.

Introduction The efflorescence of contemplatives at the end of the thirteenth and throughout the fourteenth centuries may be understood in part as a protest against the confinement of words and definitions. In response, the hierarchy became increasingly threatened by any speech about silence that did not fit accepted formulas, that threatened the stories it told about itself to justify and sustain its self-inflation. The institution’s renewed emphasis on rigorous observance and rules, and its suspicion of individual interpretation, vitiated religious expression, and made writing or speaking about the work of silence almost impossible; it was too dangerous. The institution, especially in the wake of the Council of Constance (1414–18) judged sanctity by the degree of adherence to imposed rules, which inevitably marginalized conversion of the heart. The institution was the will of God, and its members were required to conform to that will. Conformity was bought at the expense of insight; and the vision of God, always fragile in transmission, was easily overwhelmed by noise in the form of rules, devotions, and activities. And so the sorry story lurches through the centuries until today, when silence is so alien from most of the population that the very mention of it instills fear into the majority of Western human hearts. There is a fundamental disconnect between a mind that drinks from the well of silence, and one that relies almost exclusively on language. A healthy and mature mind functions organically and focuses away from itself, while understanding that language can only ever be provisional, dualistic, and self-referential. Religious language—or any language— thus becomes distorted when silence is no longer the ground from which it emerges and to which it returns. This relationship between silence, language, and behavior is the same for atheist scientists as religious nonscientists: science is a series of metaphors about what we can measure; religion is a series of metaphors about what we can’t. Both can be useful; both can inflict horrors on the world. This book seeks to restore the basic common understanding of the essential role of silence in our minds, how it works and benefits our lives, how we can cultivate it and find an unshakable peace and stability. A second purpose of this book is to establish some neutral ground from which reasonable conversation can emerge, a space protected from ideology, especially religious fanaticism and fundamentalism, and the ideology of scientism and rationalism, disproved long ago by mathematician Kurt Gödel, among others. This book has no religious or scientific agenda, though there are stories involving religion because of Christianity’s role

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Silence: A User’s Guide in the formation of Western culture, and there is some discussion of the ethics that arise from the work of silence. Rather than trying to “prove” a particular point of view, however, a project that would be merely linguistic, and therefore futile, these pages invite readers to look at their own minds, to reflect on what is happening there, and to understand the essential role of silence for being human, and for living our own truth with one another. Chapter One gives an overview of the dilemma in which we find ourselves. Chapter Two describes a model of the mind, and the process I am calling the work of silence. Chapter Three examines some of the most commonly-used and mis-used vocabulary relating to silence and the interior life. Chapter Four looks at the way texts and translations have been negatively affected by the absence of understanding of the work of silence from scholars’ repertoires of interpretation. Chapter Five talks about the relationship between silence, ways of knowing, and integration (or not) into the ecology, and suggests ways in which urbanization fractures the mind. Chapter Six discusses the work of silence as it appears in the centuries up to the Edict of Milan (313). Chapter Seven follows the trajectory of the decline of the work of silence from the desert fathers and mothers to the present day. Chapter Eight, the conclusion, sketches what a life lived from the wellspring of silence might look like. To make this work affordable, we have split it into two volumes. Volume 2 will contain the following chapters: Chapter One will discuss reading texts in general with an eye to the work of silence, and will contain a rather unorthodox reading of the Pseudo-Dionysius. Chapter Two will suggest ways of reading the Old Testament for its silences so that the subversive Old Testament God may be revealed. Chapter Three will show how the work of silence appears in the New Testament, particularly in the sayings of Jesus and some of the letters of Paul. Chapter Four will discuss ways that silence could and should be restored to liturgy, and why. Chapter Five will be an ecomium on the world behold, which sums up everything that is said in these two volumes and infinitely more.

Introduction The human race is sleepwalking into extinction. If we are not to destroy our beautiful planet and our selves with it, then we must learn to live more simply, more carefully, more joyfully. If religion is to be a viable catalyst for this way of living, then it must recover the work of silence. It is my hope and prayer that this book may contribute in some small way to accomplishing these very large goals. Feast of the Annunciation, 2014

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ONE Lost Silence An Overview If any man cannot grasp this matter, let him be idle and the matter will grasp him. —Henry Suso 1

We can live with such clamor, it is true, in spite of what assails nervous systems attuned to the past, but we pay a price, and do so at our peril. I think the loss of quiet in our lives is one of the great tragedies of civilization, and to have known even for a moment the silence of the wilderness is one of our most precious memories. —Sigurd Olson 2

The mark of the Divine in things is preserved by their connection with the world of silence. —Max Picard 3

Why does something so utterly simple require so many words? —Marion Gl asscoe 4

The driver stopped his battered car in front of the ornate nineteenthcentury stone building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Before I could drag my bags out of the vestibule into the icy north wind, he was 1.  Henry Suso (1300–1366), The Exemplar, quoted in Shaw, Paradox, 1. 2. Olson, Open Horizons, 104. 3. Picard, World of Silence, 20. Picard’s approach to silence is phenomenological; it celebrates language. By contrast, the present work is a postmodern practicum—with lashings of theology, science, and history—that celebrates silence in itself. 4.  Private communication.

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Lost Silence there, gently lifting them across the dirty snow. He held the car door for me as if his aging sedan were a long black limousine, and I, a Park Avenue grande dame. We seated ourselves. He asked me if I would like to have the radio on. I declined, but encouraged him to use it if it facilitated our drive to Newark. “It is so hard to find silence in this city,” he replied, and we drove in peace under an intense blue winter sky across the George Washington Bridge into the squalor of New Jersey. To share silence with this unknown, courteous man seemed almost subversive. We traversed a concrete overpass, whose pylons were sunk into the mud of a ruined estuary, and continued along the desolate turnpike, then veered off at the exit that led to the bleak concrete expanse of airport. The protected space we had made for our selves inside the car was continually assaulted by the wrecked landscape passing by its windows, the ugliness that is visual noise, the destructiveness that is the consequence of noise and the heedlessness of noise that had irreversibly paved and poisoned the environment, that blighted the lives of people who were forced to live and work in it, an apocalypse far beyond the reach of any semblance of restoration.5 I might have despaired but for the depth of the unexpected and welcoming silence I encountered that day with that thoughtful stranger. Life hangs in the balance. The choice for silence or noise, for carefulness or carelessness, is ours in every moment. To choose silence as the mind’s default in an accelerating consumer culture—a culture that sustains itself by dehumanizing people through the unrelenting pressure of clamor, confusion, and commodification—is indeed a subversive act. For the reality is that our lives do hang in the balance: between speech and silence, action and reflection, distraction and attention, extinction and survival. We bear responsibility for maintaining this balance, just as our choices for or against silence can affect the choices of everyone around us, choices that have both material and psycho-spiritual consequences. We seem to have forgotten this responsibility, for in the present time we are disconnected from the wellspring of silence and stillness that is necessary for human beings to thrive. These living waters no longer animate the speech and activity of our minds and bodies, lost as we are in a wasteland of our own making. If there is to be a viable ecology, 5. “The beginning of evil is heedlessness,” said Abba Poeman (fourth century). Ward, Sayings, 173.

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Silence: A User’s Guide if we are to remain human, if our lives are to have any meaning, if we are to continue as a viable species, it is essential that we restore the flow that enables our everyday lives to be informed by the riches found in silence.

Life hangs in the balance This thought may provoke profound insecurity, yet the first step toward restoring the circulation between silence and speech is to make our selves at home within the liminal spaciousness of our own minds, in the equipoise of attentive receptivity that opens the flow between these two aspects of knowing, that frees us from the strictures of time and the persecution of our own thoughts. To inhabit this balance, to have the wellspring of silence inhabit us, is the source of true happiness;6 there is security only in the apparent insecurity of this spacious silence. This descriptor paradox is but one of many associated with silence, for it is often through entering the gates of paradox that hidden passages to the deep mind become unblocked, enabling us to wait receptively, without striving, without expectation for this or that—the first step in restoring the natural flow between the direct knowledge of our core silence, and our always-interpreting self-conscious rationality.7 The world is out of joint not only because, from a cultural point of view, our bodies have been cut off from our minds—just one of many consequences of our having lost our relationship with the natural world—but also because our minds, overloaded with extraneous information, and stressed by the frenetic speed required merely to stay alive in our artificial world, have lost their relationship with the original silence from which, and within which, we evolved; silence that is essential to language, insight, poetry, and music. This loss of communion has gradually eroded our humanity, for what makes us human is not language, tool use, artifice, or self-consciousness—current research is showing us that many animals have these gifts as well—but rather the ability of the human mind to come full circle and forget itself in silence. 6.  There appears to be a growing realization of the need to restore this balance. See, for example, Critchley, “Happy Like God.” 7.  Iain McGilchrist has addressed this issue from the point of view of brain hemisphere research in The Master and His Emissary, passim. This research is considerably more subtle and refined than that which was popular in the 1970s. In addition, mind should not be confused with brain, though, as McGilchrist reminds us, form follows function. Thus we should not be surprised to find correspondence between ancient, late antique, and medieval accounts that reflect observation of the workings of the mind, and contemporary neuro-psychological findings.

Lost Silence For millennia our survival in the natural world depended on the flow between deep silence and our developing self-consciousness.8 In our technological age, this flow has been choked off, and in consequence our survival is under threat. Few of us who live in the industrialized societies of the West today have contact with anything that is not a product of our own making. Inner city children, taken to the country, are frightened of chickens, cows, and grass. We harbor within our selves a secret homesickness, yet we seem unable to follow our longing except by creating yet more artifice, which only drives us farther away with its projections of nostalgia and romanticism, of sentimentality and violence, of the glorification of the ugly. Artifice is designed to disguise the reality, the horror of what we have done to our earth and to our selves. Deprivation of nature psychosis is not confined to the theoretical, but is the ugly, insidious, and stultifying fact of our everyday lives. Yet beneath the crackling static and numbness generated by the phantasms of the age, the greater, hidden part of our mind, the source of authentic life, is still intact—at least for now. Our fascination with wildlife films provides but one example: we are riveted by the beauty and strangeness of animals interacting with their environment and with one another. Their survival depends on intra- and inter-species communication to be sure, but even more on their attentiveness to the silence, listening with every fiber of their being. We are enthralled not only by their uniqueness and their beauty but also by the realization at some deep level that we are beholding our own lost nature. “Watching animals fills some larger, less purposeful appetite in much the way that reading poetry does, or listening to music.”9 “When we enter the silence, we return from the exile that is our ordinary, virtual, manufactured state of mind. To become receptive to the natural world is to come home.”10 Silence is our natural habitat, and the work of silence is, as it were, a process of returning to the wild.11 If we are to recover our balance—and our humanity—we need to unblock the flow of communication between the limited world of our self-consciousness that is linear, finite, two-dimensional, static, and 8.  By self-consciousness I mean the everyday term, as in, “Don’t be so self-conscious; be yourself.” 9. Conniff, “Consolation of Animals,” no pages; opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/ 2009/05/27/the-consolation-of-animals/ 10. Nicholsen. Love of Nature, 25. 11.  Cf. Bringhurst, The Tree of Meaning, 268–73.

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Silence: A User’s Guide dead,12 and our core silence—our deep mind—that is global, infinite, dynamic, and multi-dimensional. It is a mistake to say that the former is “rational” and the latter “irrational.” Too often the word rational is used when linear is meant. Both are rational ways of knowing, both are necessary; but the world of self-consciousness is rational only in the artifice of two dimensions, it can only reify; while the rationality of the deep mind is global, holistic, holographic, alive, and perceives directly. If we are to be human, we need to seek and sustain a flow between these two aspects of knowing,13 between deep, multidimensional, interior silence, and the superficial linearity with which we negotiate what appears to be the exterior world, so that the two ways of knowing inform each other. We need to acknowledge that it is not our discriminating and reflexive self-consciousness that makes us human, but rather the ability to move beyond this self-consciousness to engagement and beholding, the irruption of our core silence into everyday life. Robert Bringhurst notes, “If you divide the world into them and us, and history into ours and theirs, or if you think of history as something only you and your affiliates can possess, then no matter what you know, no matter how noble your intentions, you have taken one step toward the destruction of the world.”14 Life really does hang in the balance in every moment. It hovers horizontally between the past, which cannot be changed, and the future, which is refulgent with potential but fraught with our projections. It is poised vertically between self-conscious rationality, which is the source 12. McGilchrist, Master and His Emissary, 164. Today’s post-Cartesian scholarly insistence on the validity of linear thinking alone does not correspond to the neuropsychological reality. 13.  Alvenio Mozol suggests [posted on ravenwilderness.blogspot.com on April 25, 2013. See also his post on May 25, 2013 on the same blog for an illuminating analogy] that the phrase two epistemologies would be misleading, as it “connotes a binary, an intellectual fissure, a neat bifurcation in the brain, even a hierarchy of thinking, the primacy of logos over non-logos/the unsayable/ruah.” He proposes instead the neologism epistemephasis: dynamic co-existence of the hemispheres of the brain; dynamic transfiguring interplay between logophasis (chapter 3) and apophasis; cycle of gestation and birthing of sapiential knowledge/theology; marriage of knowledge and wisdom; resurrection of the mind; creative (as in the priestly creation account in Genesis); coinherence of silence and speech; contemplative stance/presence in the world. If one confines logos to the expressed word, then he is correct. However, if one understands logos in a less restricted way, e.g., “the structured thought behind the speech” (MacCulloch, Silence, 5), then the phrase is not so problematic. However, I have tended to shy away from it and use two ways or two aspects of knowing as a compromise. 14. Bringhurst, Tree of Meaning, 194.

Lost Silence of these projections, and deep silence, where we touch reality directly. We need to recover the ability to live at the intersection: in the present moment, energized by the upwelling from deep silence where, in Christian terms, our shared nature with God becomes manifest.

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We should not be surprised that we are mired in the circularity of selfconsciousness: contemporary Western culture programs us to confine ourselves to the limited capacity of the merely linear, the superficial. As the philosopher Karmen MacKendrick has noted, paraphrasing Wittgenstein with more than a little irony: “Many of us scoff at the ineffable, at the very possibility of ineffability, and assume that whereof one cannot speak, one is simply inadequately educated and articulate—or lying.”15 James P. Danaher agrees: “Both modes of thought are within our power and both have a logic, which governs their reasoning. To prefer one mode of thought to the exclusion of the other is to limit our rational capacity and leave us ‘half-witted.’”16 Neuro-psychiatrist Ian McGilchrist continues this thought: I believe that over time there has been a relentless growth of selfconsciousness, leading to increasing difficulties in cooperation [between the hemispheres] . . .    Both hemispheres clearly play crucial roles in the experience of each human individual, and I believe both have contributed importantly to our culture. Each needs the other. Nonetheless, the relationship between the hemispheres does not appear to be symmetrical, in that the left hemisphere is ultimately dependent on, one might almost say parasitic on, the right, though it seems to have no awareness of this fact. Indeed it is filled with an alarming self-consciousness. The ensuing struggle is as uneven as the asymmetrical brain from which it takes its origin . . .    . . . it is as if the left hemisphere, which creates a sort of selfreflexive virtual world, has blocked off the available exits, the ways out of the hall of mirrors, into a reality which the right hemisphere could enable us to understand. In the past, this tendency was counterbalanced by forces from the outside the enclosed system of the self-conscious mind; apart from the 15. MacKendrick, Immemorial Silence, 4. Or, as Frances Young remarked in her Bampton Lecture of February 15, 2011, it is irrational not to acknowledge the limits of [linear] rationality. 16.  Danaher, “Plato’s Cave and the Bicameral Brain,” no pages. www.the-philosopher.co.uk/plato-and-bicameral-brain.htm

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Silence: A User’s Guide history incarnated in our culture, and the natural world itself, from both of which we are increasingly alienated, these were principally the embodied nature of our existence, the arts and religion.17

In reality, as those who have observed their minds from ancient times have written, and as neuro-biological research has shown, the human mind has paradox and ineffability built into its operating system. It is those who deny that there is anything beyond linear rationality who are lying, for to promote the virtual over the actual is contrary to the very essence of empiricism. Ancient, late antique, and medieval writers were obsessed with the mind; they described what they observed about the workings of their own minds under the guise of myth, philosophical language, and religious metaphor. If one knows how to decode these texts, there is a remarkable correspondence between their discoveries and those of contemporary neuro-psychologists.18 These authors tell us that if we choose to learn how to use silence, how to meet it on its own terms and engage it, we will discover that it provides us with the means to move from living less than half a life toward the possibility of living a whole life in freedom, even in the face of efforts by multinationals and false scientism to enslave us. The ideology that confines thought to linear, self-conscious rationalism is fallacious, as the mathematician Kurt Gödel, echoing Socrates, demonstrated in the early twentieth century, when he published his famous proofs, showing that formal, closed systems, are both incomplete and inconsistent. Gödel noted that his proofs had implications for religion, but if he developed his thought in this direction, written evidence has not been preserved.19 Gödel lived in a time when religion had already lost most of its credibility; for more than four centuries it had been severed from its source in silence, thanks to pre-Reformation policies, such as those pursued by the Inquisition; and, in academia, the divorce of so-called historical theology from praxis in the seventeenth century. But instead of formal logical philosophical systems, Gödel might as well have been talking about the sterile closed systems that characterize much of contemporary institutional religion, as well as academic theology.

17. McGilchrist, Master and His Emissary, 6. 18.  Cf., Ibid., 200. 19. Goldstein, Incompleteness, passim.

Lost Silence Contemporary neuro-psychology has parallels to Gödel’s findings, and the findings of earlier writers. McGilchrist continues: In our time each of these [the embodied nature of our existence, the arts, and religion] has been subverted and the routes of escape from the virtual world have been closed off. An increasingly mechanistic, fragmented, decontextualised world, marked by unwarranted optimism mixed with paranoia and a feeling of emptiness, has come about, reflecting, I believe, the unopposed action of a dysfunctional left hemisphere.20

Anselm (1033–1109) expresses the vacuity of such proofs in the Proslogion, after he has completed his own proof of the existence of God: Have you found, o my soul, what you sought? . . . For, if you have not found your God, how can He be that which you have found and that which you have intellected Him to be with such certain truth and such true certainty? If you have found Him, why is it that you do not feel or experience [sentis] that which you have found? Why, Lord God, does my soul not feel or expereince you if it has found you?21 [My soul] looks about, and it does not see your beauty. It listens, and it does not year your harmony. It sniffs, and it does not perceive your odor. It tastes, and it does not know your savor. It reaches out to touch [palpat] and it does not feel or experience [sentit] your softness.22 There is no vision in Anselm’s reason; and, when he tries to see “beyond reason” he encounters nothing but darkness (tenebras).23

Anselm’s over-reliance on scholastic method means that he commits the “experience” fallacy; he is as locked into his self-consciousness and as split as any modern seeker after experience as commodity. See below. The self-conscious mind, which corresponds to what McGilchrist says about the left hemisphere, is very limited in its capacity, and in the number of items it can hold in play in any moment; while, by contrast, the deep mind appears to have an almost infinite capacity. Yet most of us act, react, and rely on the distorted representations of the self-conscious 20. McGilchrist, Master and His Emissary, 6, brackets mine. 21. Anselm, Proslogion, XIV (Opera 1:111) in Cranz, Nicholas of Cusa, 154. 22. Ibid., Proslogion, XVII (Opera 1:113) in Cranz, Nicholas of Cusa, 155. 23.  Ibid., XIV (Opera 1:111) in Cranz, Nicholas of Cusa, 155.

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Silence: A User’s Guide mind when trying to evaluate the state of our relationships with people and the material world—and, if Anselm’s lament over lost experience is anything to go by, the invisible world as well.24 If we cling to this delusion, we shut out the counterpoise of silence that is our true context, not only in the deep mind, but also as the loss of flow from deep mind affects our way of being in the world.25 It is by working with this silence that communication and exchange between the deep mind and the self-conscious mind can be restored, opening us to direct perception, which in turn leads to more profound, contextualized, polyvalent interpretations. But the self-conscious mind wants to hide this fact from us: through its twisted ideology and strategies it tries to delude us that silence is to be avoided at any cost, even if that cost is the loss of our humanity; at some level it seems to be afraid that we might realize that the would-be emperor has no clothes on. To choose to live the fullness of our humanity is costly; but so is learning to swim or any new skill. In the cacophonous world we inhabit, the self-conscious mind would have us believe that it is much easier to yield to the noise and drown. This temptation to surrender and drown, to yield to the “whatever” attitude, is the wrong sort of letting-go.26 Instead of setting us free, it opens us to exploitation by a consumer culture. It demands that we disbelieve any information that cannot be proven in the laboratory, stated in linear terms (preferably in buzz words or slogans), or sliced and diced into bits and bytes. It preaches scientism, a utilitarian, mechanistic, materialistic gospel of repetition, which is a distortion of true empirical knowledge. It locates the center from which we draw energy in the hamster cage of self-consciousness, a closed system infiltrated and compromised by those who control the media: hype is might. We are urged to believe that frenetic activity (preferably shopping to the accompaniment of the canned caterwauling and thumping that passes for music, or participating in violent computer games, or being swamped in a cultural environment infused with orgiastic sexual images) leads to happiness. As Richard Grant has noted: 24.  As McGilchrist notes, 56: “the left hemisphere is more at home dealing with distorted, non-realistic, fantastic—ultimately artificial—images . . . [; it] has a positive bias towards whatever is bizarre, meaningless or non-existent . . . [; as things] become over-familiar, inauthentic and therefore lifeless, they pass to the left hemisphere.” 25.  “Silence is context and end, beholding the means. In the final analysis, this is all we need to know.” Ross, Writing the Icon of the Heart, xvii. 26.  Every so-called spiritual attribute has a counterfeit.

Lost Silence People today are greedy. They have a lot of food, and a lot of things, but it doesn’t satisfy them. They venerate nothing they have. They can never be satisfied .  .  . [;] the [Berber] nomads call themselves the Free People. They have no identity cards. They pay no taxes. They want no services. They think the rest of us have been tricked into giving up our freedom, that we have become lost from the most important things in life: nature, the open sky, the sun, the moon and the rain. They are Muslim, but they still pray to these things.27

In order to sustain the inflated short-term high these activities may give us, we find ways to feed off our own adrenalin—we can become addicted to our own adrenalin—by yet more consumption; by immersing our selves in events that provoke mass hysteria; or by taking drugs. The self-conscious mind and the ambient culture want to make us fear silence, to disbelieve the doubts, intuitions, and warnings that sometimes break through from a deeper, global awareness that repeatedly attempts to awaken us to our peril. By contrast, the surrounding culture prefers to subject us to unrelenting noise so that we literally cannot hear ourselves think. Under the guise of empiricism, a consumer culture creates the illusion that the skewed and limited perceptions and subjective interpretations of our self-consciousness that we call experience are the only reality. We search for ever more thrilling experiences. This search becomes the sole focus of our lives: experience becomes an idol, a god. If we buy into this illusion, the market can influence both what happens to us and how we interpret these events.28 The exaltation and absolutizing of experience forces us to relate to everyone and everything as objects to be manipulated and exploited, distorting them to serve our prejudices and reinforce our consumer-oriented feedback loops. There is a different paradox here, a pseudo-paradox, one that slams the door to reality instead of opening it. By giving us the illusion of choice, the onslaught of advertising seeks to make us passive. This cacophonous, pseudo-rationality funnels us into a dead-end. We become like Sartre’s characters in No Exit (original title: Huis clos, “to give us true representations”; a French legal term referring to discussions 27. Grant, “Morocco: Walking with Berber Nomads,” no pages. www.telegraph. co.uk/travel/destinations/africaandindianocean/morocco/9847593/Morocco-walkingwith-Berber-nomads.html. 28. We seem able only to “sample” reality before creating the largely distorted narrative we call experience.

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Silence: A User’s Guide behind closed doors); and like Sartre’s characters, we immerse ourselves in denial until it is too late. This idolatry of experience is a poisoned chalice. The current use of the word (banking experience, eating experience, religious experience, and most absurd of all, worship experience) conveys the deceptive message that what is being sold is personalized, and that we are somehow in control. In an age that insists on conformity, even while giving us the illusion that we are individual, this reliance on so-called experience eliminates all possibility of genuine personhood. It implies that our experience somehow gives us an “objective” platform from which to evaluate what is desirable, when the opposite is true: to rely on the ephemeral interpretations we call “experience” is really the same as depending on what we call “spin” to give us a true accounting. Spin is little more than habitual lying, a practice that is now so pervasive and unquestioned that it invades our private interpretations and exacerbates our tendencies to lie to ourselves, to self-dramatize.29 When something happens that brings us up short and casts doubt on our interpretations, we tell ourselves and others yet more lies, tying up all our energy to maintain this inflation. In other words, in spite of the fact that we live in a culture that worships the idol of laboratory science, we irrationally insist in basing our lives on what amounts to deception and deceit. While this approach leads to our observing everything and everyone as objects, it is the antithesis of objectivity.30 Similarly, the subjectivity entailed in claims for “experience” eliminates the living subject who would be present in a genuine “I-You” engagement,31 from which we would receive a far more objective (as 29. In Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad observes that one of the hallmarks of civilization is restraint. 30.  “The polarity between the ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ points of view is a creation of the left hemisphere’s analytic disposition. In reality there can be neither absolutely, only a choice between a betweenness which acknowledges itself, and one which denies its own nature. By identifying blueness solely with the behavior of electromagnetic particles one is not avoiding value, not avoiding betweenness, not avoiding one’s shadow being cast across the picture. One is using the inwardness of consciousness in a very specialised way to strive to empty itself as much as possible of value, of the self. The paradoxical result is an extremely partial, fragmented version of the colour blue, which is neither value free or independent of the self ’s disposition towards its object.” McGilchrist, Master and His Emissary, 222. 31.  Martin Buber was an innovative Jewish philosopher active in the first part of the twentieth century. His seminal work I and Thou was first published in 1937. Its perspective on the perils of technology as well as its dehumanizing effects was decades ahead of its time. It is urgently relevant today. The best edition is that translated by

Lost Silence opposed to objectified) impression than “how-I-experienced-you” claims would give us. The difficulty is that this impression is impossible to articulate except from its traces, owing to the self-forgetfulness involved in the liminal character of an authentic I-You engagement.32 Marketing exploits the self-conscious mind’s inflation to compound this confusion. It pretends to offer freedom, but in fact takes it away; it pretends to create choice, but narrows vision; it pretends to enlarge potential, while slamming the door; it pretends to offer the opportunity to become a bigger and better person, while reducing human beings to obese, uncritical, and robotic infants. Recall the experience of eating in a fast-food joint. The interior is made of molded plastic in nursery colors. It is designed to make you feel as if you had entered a badly made television cartoon. (Life no longer imitates art: it imitates cartoons.) The lines on the floor guide customers like cattle, gently toward the slaughter. As you shuffle along, your steps unconsciously take up the rhythm of the background thump and hiss of the broadcast noise. There is a rising sense of isolation, unease, claustrophobia, incipient panic, and wild weeping. The only possible way to alleviate this extreme anxiety is to consume. You reach the counter: “A triple Vacuity, a medium Frozen Scream, and a large order of Lies, please.” You are then provided with a blasphemous parody of what a meal should be. The hard plastic stall provided as a place to sit and eat mimics special chairs for children, such as potty chairs; it pretends to offer a haven, while in reality it assaults, removing all possibility of dignity, silence, thought, reflection, or genuine exchange with any other person unfortunate enough to have entered this dystopian nightmare. The only option is to shut down, to go through the prescribed motions: order, pay, munch (huddled and hunched) as quickly as possible, and depart. Fast food means not only fast delivery of imitation edibles into the hand of the corralled consumer; it also encourages fast, mindless eating. There is no time for consideration; if there were, we might discover how disgusting are the items saturated with fat, sugar, and salt that pervade the malign, addictive combination of substances that we are shoving into Walter Kaufmann. Although I read part of Buber’s book nearly fifty years ago, it had dropped out of mind until, during the final revision of this book, a chance reference in Janet Soskice, The Kindness of God: Metaphor, Gender, and Religious Language sent me back to him. 32. “I-You” refers to relationships with the material world as well as human relationships. More on self-forgetfulness in the next chapter.

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Silence: A User’s Guide our mouths. The atmosphere renders impossible the time-honored value of meals as gatherings for appreciation of healthful, lovingly prepared food to be shared with conversation and the renewal of relationships. The advent of the computer has further degraded the art of relationships. The companionable silences that once deepened the friendships of those physically present to one another have become almost inconceivable. The noun friend has become a verb to friend; the so-called friends that are counted on social networks are no longer persons but consumables, notches on the belt of popularity. Radios, TVs, iPods, tablets, mobile phones, in-store broadcasts in diabolical concert with the unrelenting environmental assaults from machine noise and background micro-radiation, not to mention increasingly complex bureaucracy, keep difficult questions, painful insight, and genuine emotion at bay. They make ambiguity intolerable; they permeate our lives with horror vacui.33 The poet Christian Wiman provides a summary: The whole notion of sacred experience, the sense that there are holy moments in this life that should be honored and consecrated as such, is being systematically eliminated by contemporary culture. I see poetry and poets as a bulwark against this tendency, this metallic materialism that, so far as I have seen, is never present without inconsolable despair.34

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In the seventeenth century, the mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623–62) suggested that “man’s unhappiness arises from one thing alone: that he cannot remain quietly in his room.”35 His remark is symbolic of the fear of engaging the space of limitless interior silence, fear that by his day had taken hold of institutional Christianity. Jorge Luis Borges interprets the unease of the age in this way: In that dispirited century, the absolute space which had inspired the hexametres of Lucretius, the absolute space which had meant liberation to Bruno, became a labyrinth and an abyss for Pascal. He abhorred the universe and would have liked to adore God; but God, for him, was less real than the abhorred universe. He deplored the fact that the firmament did not speak, and he 33.  The title essay in Travels in Hyperreality by Umberto Eco, is the ultimate guide to horror vacui. 34.  Kaminsky and Towler, A God in the House, 246. 35. Pascal, Pensées, 38.

Lost Silence compared our life with that of castaways on a desert island. He felt the incessant weight of the physical world, he experienced vertigo, fright and solitude, and he put his feelings into these words: “Nature is an infinite sphere, whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”36

Pascal’s remark speaks by implication of restoring communion with, and re-centering in, the deep mind within us, the process I call the work of silence. It is the choice to turn away from noise toward an unfiltered reality, to receive its gifts of fulfillment and joy. The purpose of the work of silence is to re-establish the flow between self-consciousness, which discriminates, dominates, and distorts our lives, and the clarity and wisdom of the deep mind, which is not directly accessible, but whose activities we can influence.37 The term work may be slightly misleading, for the only effort involved—and in today’s world, to refocus and relax into letting go paradoxically can require a great effort—is to choose to be still, to allow the noise to fall away, to be receptive, and, as Suso notes in the quotation at the beginning of this chapter, to ungrasp so that we may be “grasped” by illumination.38 The descriptive paradox signals this engagement, the breaching of the wall, the restoration of flow between the two different ways of knowing, between self-consciousness and deep mind. This simple work restores balance to our lives; it bestows equilibrium and equanimity.39 Because the fundamental operations of the human mind are universal and have not changed in recorded history, and in spite of centuries of religious and secular propaganda to the contrary, 36.  Borges, “The Fearful Sphere of Pascal,” 224–27. This image of the sphere is a kind of Ariadne’s thread in the history of the work of silence. It should be noted that what Borges says about Pascal is disputed: while it is descriptive of the age, it does not necessarily apply to Pascal himself. 37.  “Flow” is a modern buzzword, but it has a long history. Richard of St. Victor uses it in The Mystical Ark, for example in V.14, where he specifically contrasts it with experience. See next chapter, note 71, below. 38.  Grasp in this context is to be understood as an oxymoron or paradox; the process of understanding is one of ungrasping, although there is sometimes a sense of being grasped in the occasional compulsion to remain resting in stillness, in liminality. In addition, once the re-centering has taken place, there is an extreme reluctance to do anything that would unsettle the equilibrium, openness, and flow that has been reestablished, which is out of sight but can be known through its effects in the ordinary round. 39.  Not the forced equanimity described by Sir William Osler in his famous essay “Aequanimitas,” but rather an equanimity that arises spontaneously from the person’s being centered in the silence of the deep mind.

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Silence: A User’s Guide silence is open to everyone, literate or illiterate, king or slave, secular or religious, saint or sinner. It is never too late to seek silence, and one of the most important insights that comes from working with silence is that nothing in our lives is wasted. This work of silence been described by philosophers and other contemplatives from time out of mind. But a complex series of events and trends in the West have resulted in the sometimes deliberate suppression of the work of silence, and the balance and communication between the two aspects of knowing that it fosters. Few people today bother to observe their own minds. Amid increasing market pressures, especially in higher education and religion—and few people seem to understand the mutually exclusive character of higher education and religion, on the one hand, and market forces, on the other—there are hardly any scholars who understand how to interpret the important texts that speak of the work of silence, or, more important, who have the time necessary for the reflection required to do so. This failure is due in part to their insistence on applying, however inappropriately, the prevailing Cartesian methodology that allows only for linear epistemology, which arises from self-consciousness, and which is antithetical to understanding texts that discuss self-forgetfulness, whose authors assume a model of two ways of knowing. In such readings, the methodology is at war with the content. While it is not necessary to believe anything to interpret these texts, it is necessary to have some understanding of the dynamic that underlies the authors’ assumptions. Without praxis, however, this understanding will be severely limited, in the same way that understanding what an Olympic gold-medalist has gone through to reach her goal is impossible to understand except in the most abstract terms. Silence and the observation of the mind are so far removed from most of today’s readers’ lives and consideration that few recall that silence—and wonder, which is a form of silence—was once context, subject, and goal of many ancient, late antique, and medieval discussions of the good life.40 In consequence, interpretations and translations of these texts have been sieved through the ideological filters of scholasticism, neo-scholasticism, Cartesianism, Calvinism, existentialism, Freudianism, positivism, phenomenology, and scientism—to name but a few -isms—so that the contemplative threads inherent in ancient and medieval 40.  Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle declare that philosophy begins with wonder. See the discussion in chapter 6.

Lost Silence languages have been lost, and with them much of the sense of these texts. In consequence of the application of this very unscientific methodology, many of the most important texts in the cultural heritage of the West have been mis-translated, mis-interpreted, and mis-represented.41 By the middle of the fifteenth century, the power struggles of institutional religion in the West and its descent into formalism had suppressed the work of silence, and by the time of the Counter-Reformation, it had become unavailable to the ordinary Christian—unless an individual rediscovered it for him- or herself, or was taught by another layperson. The church reserved “contemplation” to a mythological elite. This meant that not only were both the Protestants and their opponents encapsulated in their self-conscious minds, but also that those who practiced and taught the work of silence, such as Francisco de Osuna, Teresa of Avila, and John of the Cross, had to write with one eye on the Inquisition. This suppression has meant that for centuries readers have been unaware of the meanings and literary strategies of these texts. Their highly metaphorical and internally filtered narratives have been misinterpreted so that they often have been taken for literal descriptions of experience as opposed to being understood as textual experiences that point beyond themselves, engaging the reader in their process. Today, the resurgence of interest in so-called mysticism (a dog’s breakfast of a word that needs to be eliminated from the discussion) is tainted with voyeurism and selfaggrandizement, and has become a consumer circus based on quests for “experiences” that lead customers away from, not toward, the silence and illumination they seek.42 Engaging deep silence does not depend on specialized language, celebrity gurus, exotic practices, weird phenomena, education, or belief. It costs nothing. It is quintessentially simple, and therefore difficult for modern people to realize fully; and it is, paradoxically, both far more personal and far more objective than any claims of the self-conscious mind. It is personal because no two people are alike, and because interpretation— what we call experience is always interpretation—is unique to the individual, expressed in culturally linked images, language, and ritual. At the same time, it is the inclusiveness of the work of silence toward which this 41.  See Ross, “Behold Not the Cloud of Experience,” 29–50. 42.  Would-be celebrity gurus often advertise that they have secret knowledge of “consciousness”; they focus on dubious forms of “experience,” so-called mysticism, and the discredited “perennial philosophy.” The fallacious and deceptive nature of such approaches will become evident in the next chapter.

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Silence: A User’s Guide diversity tends, and in which these particulars coinhere in seamless harmony. What is common to our humanity is found not through interpretation of certain texts, as with the so-called perennial philosophy—texts themselves are already interpretations of interpretation (experience) at several removes—but rather through fundamental neuro-psychological structures and processes that all human beings share, and which become evident through the silence itself. It is the effects of this work of silence that are culturally interpreted and expressed in these texts. Engaging deep silence enhances objectivity, not only because direct perception is one of the functions of the deep mind, but also because the work of silence obviates solipsism: it leads away from contemporary, selfauthenticating notions of “experience”—and therefore away from narcissism—into open and inclusive engagement. Ultimately, this engagement relinquishes all claims to experience. The degree of self-forgetfulness is the degree to which a person’s unfolding truth, depth of engagement, and fecundity are revealed.43 The work of silence is the source of healthy community, for the health and character of community is dependent on the quality of solitudes that make it up; the reconciling character of shared silence is formed in the deep mind of each person. The energy generated by engagement with deep mind in silence seeks expression.44 This expression varies widely from person to person, and from community to community. Sometimes a particular set of metaphors and practices will set fire to the intuitive imagination of communities because they have specific resonances for that historical moment; they act as catalysts for re-establishing balance and wholeness within individuals and communities alike. Such resonances can be usefully expressed only when there is acknowledgment of the provisional nature of language: language that is animated by insights arising from silence is inherently inadequate to its task; a linear epistemology cannot accurately interpret a holographic way of knowing, and as noted above, there can be no phenomenology of the deep mind, because it is inaccessible to self-conscious mind except by intention.

43.  Recent debates about happiness have also been impaired by the loss of the work of silence and the understanding of its paradoxes: for example, in the moment one asks the solipsistic question, “Am I happy?” happiness is precluded. 44. In Gregory of Nyssa and the Grasp of Faith, Martin Laird refers to this dynamic as logophasis. Logophatic expression in turn plunges the person more deeply into silence. See “Practical Adoration” in Ross, Writing the Icon of the Heart, 86–97.

Lost Silence For all its provisionality, language is not necessarily isolated in linearity, self-consciousness, reflexivity, and discrimination; it has the potential to engage in a dynamic reciprocity with silence and the work of silence from which it arises. Silence is a resonance chamber where words are tested. Thus the saying in early Christianity, “If you are a theologian you will pray truly. And if you pray truly you are a theologian.”45 This saying speaks not of mere piety, but rather is an observation about the way the mind works, and how doctrinal statements in the early centuries of the church emerged from those observations. Unfortunately, this essential relationship between theology and praxis has been broken for centuries. In his Letter to Anatolius, Evagrius says specifically that contemplation gives rise to theology. In early Christianity and in Buddhism there is a direct correlation between the simple model that anyone can arrive at through observing his or her own mind, and the basic tenets of these two very different systems of belief. (This model of the mind will be discussed at length in the next chapter.) As we have noted—and it is worth saying again—the apparent resemblances among various cultures of belief arises not from what has come to be known as the so-called perennial philosophy, which is based on interpretation, but rather from its opposite: observations of mental processes that are common to all human beings, no matter how differently their manifestations may be culturally interpreted and expressed. The development of institutions, particularly religious institutions, which are hierarchical and linear and preoccupied with self-perpetuation, invariably destroys the flow between language and silence; institutions cannot help but have a stake in stunting the maturity of their adherents, even if this means they must destroy the original visions and insights on which the institutions originally were founded.46 When praxis is allowed to lapse, or is suppressed, interpretation of the metaphors of the work of silence becomes confined to the level of the merely verbal and logically linear.47 They are read “literally” instead of literarily.48 Institutions reify what was once global and relational and alive into lifeless artifact; they 45. Evagrius, Chapters on Prayer, 60. 46.  To paraphrase John 14: “You can behold, but the system cannot behold, and because it cannot behold, it cannot receive the spirit of truth” (my paraphrase). 47.  There is a story that Neils Bohr once rebuked Albert Einstein, saying, “You are not thinking. You are merely being logical.” 48.  Reading literarily will be discussed in Volume 2.

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Silence: A User’s Guide move away from manifestation to re-presentation. What was once holographic and open becomes closed, hierarchical, systematized; language is no longer provisional but carved in stone as doctrine or dogma; praxis is forgotten, and language that was once full of resonance is reduced to slogan. In the inimitable words of Richard Holloway, All institutions over-claim for themselves and end up believing more in their own existence than in the vision that propelled them into existence in the first place. This is particularly true of religious institutions. Religions may begin as vehicles of longing for mysteries beyond description, but they end up claiming exclusive descriptive rights to them. They segue from the ardour and uncertainty of seeking to the confidence and complacence of possession. They shift from poetry to packaging, which is what people want. They don’t want to spend years wandering in the wilderness of doubt. They want the promised land of certainty, and religious realists are quick to provide it for them. The erection of infallible systems of belief is a well-understood device to still humanity’s fear of being lost in life’s dark wood without a compass. “Supreme conviction is a self-cure for infestation of doubts.” That is why David Hume noted that, while errors in philosophy were only ridiculous, errors in religion were dangerous. They were dangerous because when supreme conviction is threatened it turns nasty.49

While it is true that there is a human tendency toward laziness, which contemporary culture encourages, Holloway is wrong in saying that the shift from poetry to packaging in religion is what people want. It may be what some people (mostly clergy) want, or think they want for a short time, but the cartoonish nature of the packaging quickly becomes stale. Rather, it appears to be the case that many, if not most, of the people who have left institutional religion are looking precisely for the poetic resonances that resound in the silence of the deep mind. The importance of poetry in restoring the balance of the mind cannot be over estimated, as it draws on both aspects of knowing simultaneously.50 It is also not true that “certainty” resides only in the banalities of the self-conscious mind. There is certainty, but it is counter-intuitive, what may feel like a free-fall into silence—into the love of God, if that is 49. Holloway, Leaving Alexandria, 151–52, italics mine. 50. Hirshfield’s Nine Gates, which I first read in August 2012, offers incisive examples of how poetry obliges the mind to draw on both of its capacities simultaneously.

Lost Silence still a useful phrase.51 Genuine certainty arises from a confidence in what emerges from the deep mind in which we have re-centered our selves. Its source is out of sight and out of our control, but not beyond our influence; and from it arises wisdom. It is related to the poet John Keats’ negative capability, but goes much further.52 Institutional practices become twisted and unresponsive when metaphor is severed from the work of silence. They become the tools of ambitious, exploitive individuals who bend and flatten them to satisfy their lust for power. In such a context, religion devolves into a destructive caricature of itself, a caricature all too prevalent today, one that is argued over by militant atheists and religious fundamentalists with equal ferocity, inaccuracy, and irrelevance. The work of silence is empirical, not in a laboratory sense—to apply the context and methodology of the lab would be nonsensical, making self-conscious what is essential self-forgetful, thereby blocking access to content and process. The work of silence is empirical because the mind’s progression into silence, and the realization of the gifts it receives from silence, can be and have been described consistently for millennia across cultures by those who have cared to observe their own minds. Learning to use this rich heritage from the past involves recognizing certain technical patterns, such as paradox and reversal, specific techniques of grammar and syntax, certain types of imagery—in poetry, art, dance, and music, as well as in texts. In other words, there is nothing “bad” about the self-conscious mind: it is vital to critical thinking and to stimulating the activities and expanding the scope of the deep mind. What is important to remember is that it is not operating on its own in a vacuum, and that the deep mind is a thinking mind—the greater part of our thinking mind. There is a double paradox here: the objective nature of the work of silence restores true subjectivity. When we are authentic subjects, we do not define our selves and objectify what we relate to. Rather, the work of silence restores our full humanity, enabling us to engage reality directly through self-forgetfulness (beholding) for increasingly longer periods and with progressively greater facility. As open exchange with deep mind 51.  A frequent error of modern interpreters, who do not understand the model of two ways of knowing, is to mistake an author’s description of what something feels like for abstract “philosophy.” 52.  Negative capability is Keats’s term for being able to receive knowledge without the compulsion to categorize it: “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason .  .  .” Keats, letter to George and Thomas Keats, dated December 1817. Selected Letters, 41–42.

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Silence: A User’s Guide refines our self-conscious critical, analytical, and interpretative processes, and breaks open the self-conscious mind’s feedback loops, it becomes possible to bypass the intrusion of these interpretative filters.53 When we are authentic subjects, our relationships with others reflect our abiding in beholding, sharing with them the spaciousness of mutual beholding that enables them in turn openly to express their truth, receptive to their own mystery and that of those around them. But it is dangerous to push this notion too far. While it is possible to establish a simple model of the dynamic of the work of silence that is useful, among other applications, for deciding what sort of text one is looking at, and for translating, interpreting, and understanding texts and art, and for creating liturgy, it is equally fallacious to assume that the processes of the work of silence can be studied merely by reading, or through applying the ordinary tools of literary criticism.54 Again the athletic analogy is useful: no one can read a how-to book and then expect to run a marathon. To fully understand the dynamic of running and to build up muscle, stamina, reaction times, and strategy, there must be years of long praxis. The ordinary linear tools of criticism are useless when applied to texts based on the work of silence because it is impossible to apply a methodology that demands closure to texts that are describing a process that leads into infinite openness without grossly distorting them. Most telling is the fact that the linear approach cannot cope with paradox. By contrast, the work of silence unifies and includes, as contrasted with language that is notoriously slippery and always reflexive (selfreferring), as it makes distinctions and exclusions. It is misleading and contradictory (not paradoxical), to talk about grasping insights in a text about ungrasping. Scholars who apply the language of grasping, control, and self-elevation to such texts are trapped in a linear, Cartesian mentality that allows for a single epistemology only, which is in conflict with the process such a text describes. Ironically, once it is realized that a text is describing the process of the work of silence, then words such as “cling” as in “cling to God” also must be understood paradoxically: one clings to God by ungrasping (see the diagram in the next chapter). The word 53.  “What is offered by the right hemisphere to the left hemisphere is offered back again and taken up into a synthesis involving both hemispheres.” McGilchrist, Master and His Emissary, 206. 54.  Pseudo-Dionysius, among others, heaps scorn on those who try to learn from secondary texts instead of praxis. See, for example, DN 684A, 70.

Lost Silence “user” in the title of this book should be understood in the same way: the work of silence is far more a matter of being done to by the silence than doing. Engagement with deep silence leaves traces and marks of transfiguration (as opposed to transcendence or transformation, words which are wrongly applied to these texts and this process) on the person—in the literal sense of changing the way we figure things out, from which the religious sense of the word derives. The account of the Transfiguration is a narrative about changed perspective, not about becoming space aliens. These traces and effects are often described in ancient, patristic, medieval—and some modern—texts, and, again, are often wrongly understood as “philosophy.” These are but a few of the problems we shall explore in later chapters. In all of this we need to remember that mind is not brain: that is to say, while we can now observe changes in cell structures and electrical activity in the brain as it responds to how the mind is used, and while certain findings—work on insight at the cellular level, for example—may seem to reinforce what older authors have to say about the work of silence, the results of these experiments are incidental, however suggestive they might be. Even the scientists who work on these experiments admit that we may never know how mind and brain relate.55 And it is important to be aware that any description of the attributes of either brain or mind is highly metaphorical. We can only approximate: “The brain is the place where mind meets matter”; “One could call the mind the brain’s experience of itself.”56 But we cannot ignore the fact that what we think—how we use our minds—changes the structure of the brain, which influences subsequent behavior; hence the ancient and hard-won teachings on the need for vigilance. Neither textual analysis nor neuro-psychological studies prove or disprove any proposition or predication beyond their own protocols and parameters, precisely because the work of silence evades proposition and predication. Having said that, trans-cultural, trans-religious consistency over the centuries—and apparent trans-disciplinary correlations—preclude dismissing the work of silence and its effects as mere irrational

55.  An accessible account may be found in “The Eureka Hunt” by Jonah Lehrer in The New Yorker, 40–45. 56 McGilchrist, Master and His Emissary, 1, 19.

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Silence: A User’s Guide fantasy. Witness, for example, the now widespread medical use of onepointed meditation for pain control.57 The effort to go beyond layers of inner chatter to explore the depths of silence is not in itself religious. Propositional belief of any sort is not a prerequisite for engaging silence; as mere chatter it may even interfere. The only requirement is to observe one’s own mind at work, to discover its permutations, to engage, receive, and realize the effects that arise from learning to inhabit deepest silence. It is in part because the process is so simple that people tend to be dismissive of it. The fact that it requires perseverance is another of the reasons it is slandered, especially by those who do not want to put in the effort, who often accuse it of elitism. A third major block appears to be the unwillingness of people to accept that the greater part of the mind that is out of sight and out of our control (but not beyond our influence) is a thinking mind. Dr. Freud has a lot to answer for. Yet a fourth problem is that the mechanical vocabulary often used to discuss this process and its effects is limited and uninspiring; one can talk about letting go, or focus, or breathing, or stillness, or thoughts only up to a point, until the listener or reader—or, most important of all, the writer—becomes distracted. There is a very specific reason for this distraction: speech and written language are functions of self-consciousness, which has a mechanistic outlook on the world; while, by contrast, the gifts from deep mind and the process of exchange are holistic and require a multivalent, resonant language—hence the need for metaphor, poetry, and mythology. The tendency of ancient, late antique, and medieval writers to resort to story, myth, and metaphor are designed to engage the imagination, to move readers into liminality, to open them to the resonance of the deep mind, to stimulate the desire to persevere—all of which enrich and deepen engagement with the deep mind and its context of silence and the capacity to receive its gifts. Meditation practice is but one very minor aspect of the work of silence: it is an entry-level, beginning step in an all-encompassing commitment. The language of meditation is not necessarily inclusive of the whole person (incarnational), whereas, by contrast, the work of silence engages all of the person. It is possible to practice meditation under the illusion that one is outside of any perceived value system, but this idea is deceptive and dangerous: meditation will intensify whatever values a 57.  In this book meditation refers to one-pointed meditation unless otherwise noted.

Lost Silence person holds, whether or not they are acknowledged—and every person has a value system, positive or negative, creative or destructive. Meditation can be abused as well as used: One can meditate in order to become a more efficient killer.58 Meditation needs to have a context and be subject to deliberate intent. It is for this reason that the contemporary division between religion and “spirituality” is perilous, as is the division between so-called spirituality and ordinary life.59 While it is not essential to believe the tenets of a particular sect, it is vital to be aware of one’s own beliefs, one’s own ethics, and the purpose for which one is meditating—that is, intent—and intent is supremely important in this process, for meditation accesses the deep mind, and the attention of the deep mind is influenced by intention.

 Meditation can introduce someone to silence, but it will not in itself root the person in silence, nor shift his or her center to the deep mind. Meditation can introduce a person to the possibilities that silence offers for trans-figuration, but these effects are merely incidental; they can be integrated and seated only as part of an holistic programme, which includes an engagement with what is entailed by what we think of as human cultural heritage in its ecological context, what medieval monks called competens silentium. The work of silence is not a separate compartment of life called “spirituality”: it is living the ordinary through trans-figured perception. The work of silence is essential to our survival and fulfillment as human beings, and it contains within itself as a condition of its ongoing presence, both a morality and an ethics. Many people who undertake the work of silence do not go beyond elementary meditation. One reason for this is that they perceive interior practice to be something exotic; they wish to make themselves something they are not (transformation), and when this does not prove to be the case, they become disillusioned and quit, instead of realizing that what they dismiss as “ordinary” contains in itself the goal that they seek. Another reason such people stall, and sometimes crash and burn as well, 58.  For example, see the article on Aaron Alexis, the Navy Yard shooter, by Boorstein and Tenety: www.washingtonpost.com/local/shooters-interest-in-buddhism-promptsdebate-about-stereotype-of-peaceful-faith/2013/09/18/f0ecd938–1fcf-11e3–94a2– 6c66b668ea55_story.html?tid=pm_pop. 59. To compartmentalize “spirituality” as something special and set apart from ordinary life renders practice self-defeating. As Meister Eckhart said, “If you are doing anything special you’re not seeking [God].” To set “spirituality” off as an academic subject apart from theology is absurd, as this book will demonstrate. Every theological statement has a psycho-spiritual consequence.

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Silence: A User’s Guide is that they are more interested in justifying who they think they are, or fantasizing who they might be, instead of becoming their own unique unfolding truth, which will always remain unknown to them for the simple reason that this unfolding truth manifests only when a person is self-forgetful; and such people want to watch themselves, instead of allowing “spirituality” to fall away in unknowing. Yet a third reason is that the process of gaining control only to relinquish it can be terrifying, a little too close to their fantasies about death. Many teachers limit themselves to various techniques of meditation—in effect making meditation in itself something of a panacea, a goal, even an idol, and therefore a dead-end. The primary reason for this limitation is that both teachers and students are unwilling to pay the price, which is not monetary. They are unwilling to let go of their ideas of themselves; unwilling to let go of a sense of belonging to a special in-group; unwilling to wait in the dark in complete openness; unwilling to turn away from noise and static in their minds whenever they notice it in order to reach into the dark; unwilling to seek solitude and silence; unwilling radically to simplify their lives in order to sustain the context in which the riches of deep mind may emerge. Willingness to change one’s life is not the condition of entry in to the silence; rather, once entered, the silence itself elicits such changes. It is the same with so-called asceticism: it is not the condition of entry, but rather the condition for sustaining the process; it arises organically. As Christian Wiman notes: There is a distinction to be made between the anxiety of daily existence, which we talk about endlessly, and the anxiety of existence, which we rarely mention at all. The former fritters us into dithering, distracted creatures. The latter attests to—and, if attended to, discloses—our souls. . . . To be truly alive is to feel one’s ultimate existence within one’s daily existence. All those trivial, frittering anxieties acquire, even if only briefly, a lightness, a rightness, a meaning. So long as anxiety is merely something to be alleviated, it is not life, or we are not alive enough to experience it as such.60

It is important to emphasize that purification is simply a refinement of intention, of the influence on the deep mind; that is, what you are opening to. If you are a maenad you open yourself to possession; if you 60. Wiman, My Bright Abyss, 92–93.

Lost Silence seek silence, then you must face your demons on the way in, and never lose trust in the working of love and goodness By contrast, there are students and teachers alike who want to “have it all,” who cling ferociously and competitively to whatever celebrity comes their way, thus short-circuiting the very process they claim they want to learn or to teach. Once they realize that sustaining the work of silence is costly, they often are not willing to risk the effects—those of being fundamentally trans-figured—by what they cannot limit and determine. In order to shore up their fantasies, many people sell their souls to celebrities for a mess of pottage, not realizing that as soon as such people become famous, they tend to stop growing, or to genuinely care about their students. Both those who seek instruction from celebrities and the celebrities themselves miss their inheritance: a life of unimaginable richness, animated by contemplation; living the ordinary through transfigured perception;61 what, in the New Testament, is called the kingdom of heaven.

61.  Ross, “Apophatic Prayer as a Theological Model,” 329.

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Some Ancient and Medieval Texts Concerning Contemplation: Two Epistemologies [En-Christing Process] Left Side: Self-Conscious Mind Finite, limited capacity, linear mind/creates two dimensional virtual world/simple speech/‘experience’/interpretation/discrimination/dualistic/horizontal/time-bound/law/noise/ feedback loop/one kind of attention/exclusive/grandiose /hierarchical/self-reflexive/ deceitful/ illusion of objectivity. Able to influence deep mind only indirectly through paradox, intention, resonance. God as absence. Liminality threshold/effects/phenomena imagined construct of self governed by paradox of intention

cannot directly access deep mind can influence deep mind by intention glass darkly (experience = interpretation) therefore provisional and experimental ‘experiment in love’ (Tixier) occasional beholding excessus mentis as normal part of integrating new information



or phrase as per Evagrius, Cloud, etc.)



and received back trans-figured

(e.g., icons, Rothschild Canticles, word knots)

Most people are trapped in the virtual and noisy world of self-consciousness (left side of diagram). For the mind to function optimally, it must be recentred in the deep mind (right side), restoring the circulation between the two epistemologies so that ordinary daily life draws on its wellspring of silence and trans-figuration. Then experience is understood as provisional and is continually submitted to silence where it is trans-figured. After long practice of choosing silence, the centre of the person abides in it. Self-knowledge is even more about understanding this dynamic than it is a moral inventory, so that all of life may be yielded to and trans-figured by the Spirit. By analogy there is possibly a family resemblance to the simplicity/complexity equation z z2+c.

Right Side: Deep Mind Infinite large capacity/holographic rational faculty/ethical/inclusive/lateral connections/core silence/beholding/no self-consciousness/processes complex language but does not speak/no ‘experience’ or interpretation/polyvalent and polysemous/not time-bound/work of Spirit/deep silence/’apophatic consciousness’/’secret silence’ (Ps-Denys)/’darkness’=not directly accessible/ several forms of global attention/open and outflowing/God as presence–absence.

unfolding truth of self/shared nature with God spiritual faculties implicitly paradoxical, e.g., cling to dispossession, know by unknowing, see through blindness, touch nothing, etc. Processes layered meanings, metaphors, etc.