Noble Silence
Resting from a mind on siege
PRIVATE TEACHING | CALENDAR | PODCAST | WRITING
I don’t know why others write, but I know I do to help myself remember. For example, periodically I need to remind myself that I’ve chosen a life with silence at its center, that it’s in the spaciousness that comes from a few quiet hours where, unhurried and unburdened from all my to-doing, I find true refuge. I have to remind myself because it’s easy to let that silence be overrun. At a distance, so many things appear pressing, necessary. But invariably, most of those things will reveal themselves as dispensable once I’ve checked them off my list. Invariably, I’ll regret getting caught in another busywork loop, forgetting I’m not a cog in a machine built to optimize and produce. If anything, I tell myself, I’m more like a root in a mycorrhizal network designed to nourish an entire woods (all of us are), and any work I do is less labor than nutriment.
Not coincidentally, it’s often early morning when I write, particularly when I’m writing for myself. Predawn is about the only time when writing doesn’t feel hard, doesn’t kick up in my overactive daylight brain a painfully familiar host of anxieties and distractions. In that liminal time, writing isn’t difficult at all but the most natural of activities, an obvious path to seeing clearly anything that happens or is, by tracing its contours with language. It’s too bad that time before dawn doesn’t last four hours. Or six. Then I’d be able to leisurely write and sit and run, all before my brain starts spitting out lists in a futile attempt to stay on top of things. Instead, I cultivate the alternative: letting go of being in control and finding ease that way. It’s just that a few more quiet hours would make the process easier.
I know silence isn’t healing for everyone, nor is it healing in every circumstance. But the quiet I’m thinking of is a reparative space—the “think tank of the soul,” as acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton calls silence. He also calls it an endangered species, and I think this dwindling silence is one of the main reasons we feel so anxious and beleaguered. Most of us have little space to rest, truly rest, from the relentless pressure to make something of ourselves, from the need to constantly prove or improve our sense of worthiness. So little of our time is left unmeasured, unplanned, that it’s getting harder and harder to just be—or we’ve tried it and found it frightening. The first time my brother visited me at the monastery, he couldn’t sleep the first couple of nights. When I asked him why, he said it was too quiet. I think he was equally disturbed by the meditation. After receiving instruction in zazen, he joined us in the zendo the first night, and the next morning at breakfast I asked him how it’d gone.
“Fine,” he said. “I simply sang a few songs in my head. I figured six would do the trick, but I forgot about the music.” He popped a strawberry into his mouth while I stared at him blankly. “They’re five minutes each with the music,” he explained, “so I just sang a couple more.” Madonna as a filler for all that silence.
By contrast I think of what the Buddha called “noble silence,” that meditative state in which “directed thought and evaluation”1 have stilled enough to lead to the type of quiet that lets the mind merge with an object. If it’s the breath we’re focusing on, we come close to it with our attention, neither measuring nor controlling, neither narrating nor judging, but just being with breath and then becoming it, until there’s a point where our awareness is filled solely with the breath breathing itself. A byproduct of this state of mind, unsurprisingly, is a kind of rapture—a feeling of bliss that’s the direct result of the hard work of concentration. I say “unsurprisingly” because I believe that the mind wants to be whole, unified, undistracted. I think it’s built to operate that way, and that’s why it feels so good—once we get past the initial fear or discomfort—to be quiet for a bit. We’re not meant to be constantly stimulated or entertained, constantly seizing up one another and our surroundings for threats or opportunities. One definition of beleaguered is to feel harassed or overwhelmed. Another is to be under siege. That’s what a noisy mind is: a mind perpetually under siege. No wonder we often feel so exhausted.
Silence is noble when it provides the rest we need for our weary bodies and brains, when it makes it possible for us to be both relaxed and attentive. It’s at this point—when we can pay close attention to something other than our internal dialogue—that we’re able to see things as they are. We see more clearly, in other words, and out of this clear seeing “internal assurance” is born—a calm confidence that comes from experience. We no longer have to be told that silence is healing, for one. We simply know it for ourselves. But the best part of this knowing is that it lets us finally rest our minds. It lets them be the opposite of beleaguered: both flourishing and serene.
If you benefit from my writing or teaching, please consider sponsoring this newsletter or offering a donation through my website. Please know that even small gifts make a huge difference (both to me and the ongoing cultivation of natural—not artificial—intelligence). Spreading the word also helps, so feel encouraged to do that if so moved. Thank you, always, for your presence, your practice, and support.
The sutras use the phrase “directed thought and evaluation” to refer to the thinking and planning that leads to speech—what we’d call “talking to ourselves.” That’s why their absence is called noble silence.
I usually spend most of my time in happy silence.
thank you