Are There Different Silences?

I’ve been reading several books by Max Picard (1888-1965), the European author and philosopher. I’m currently reading Picard’s The World of Silence. I’ve spent time in silence as a father and grandfather, as a client in psychotherapy, as a therapist with a client, as a Zen practitioner, and as one who meditates and prays in the contemplative Christian tradition. Is there one thing called silence, or are there many silences? I once attended several Vipassana Buddhist retreats. On one 10-day silent retreat I sat quietly in the midst of a large room with about 100 other meditators. As instructed, I focused my attention on the breath—slowly and mindfully breaking in and breathing out from the belly. I had recently read the books of the teacher Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg, and Jack Kornfield, so in the silence I tried to let go of thinking about how they described silence, enlightenment, and equanimity. And every once in a while, I’d simply breath, following the continuous flow of body sensations with each in and out-breath. So far, so good.

But about three days into the retreat, I noticed that every time I opened my eyes, I’d be judging someone in the meditation hall: a woman for wearing hippy clothes, a man who kept nervously shifting his body to one side and back (you’re supposed to sit still!), or another person whose nose seemed crooked. I knew that I wasn’t supposed to be doing this. I wasn’t supposed to have my attention on others. And then I noticed that I was judging myself for judging others. I was caught in what seemed like an endlessly repeating cycle of judgement. By the end of day three I began to feel nauseous, and disgusted with myself. I thought, “Is this all that I am? Am I simply a biological machine continually spitting out judgements? Is there anything beneath my opinions?” By the end of day six I had widened the scope of my self-disgust. I noticed that I was continually thinking and ruminating about certain family, political, and religious opinions; and I noticed that these opinions didn’t change much, or at all. I felt as if I were in the middle of a merry-go-round watching the same horses circulate around me, over and over and over again. First, this thought arose: I’m bored with myself. But then, No, it’s worse than that. I’m a boring person, and everyone probably sees me this way. And yet, I couldn’t fully accept this judgment about myself. Intuitively searching my life for something more, I became uncomfortable in my body, something insisting to be known or felt. “Oh, this might be sadness. Yes, that’s it. I’m sad; and then the surface sadness sank deeper, into grief.

That’s it, I concluded. I’m a worthless, shallow person. I have a B.A. from Dartmouth and a doctorate in psychology from Harvard, and now, I’m just fooling myself, thinking that I’m sitting here experiencing authentic Buddhist meditation. Soon, I noticed my eyes were getting wet with tears, and I began to cry. Tears dropped my my meditation cushion, and I cried silently for about thirty minutes, feeling forlorn, worthless, and abandoned. Before the next temple bell rang to announce the end of this particular 40 minutes of silence, memories arose. I heard my parents screaming at each other in the dark hallway outside my bedroom door. It was 1 a.m., and they had come home drunk from the bar that they owned in northern Wisconsin. I felt afraid. Then the scene changed, and there was my German Lutheran grandmother who had taken me and my siblings in when my parents fought. It was grandma’s voice I heard, Ich bin klein, mein hertz is rein, niemand in vohnen als Jesus allein (I am small, my heart is pure, no-one lives in my heart but Jesus alone). When the final retreat bell rang a few days later, I felt humbled by the fearful and grateful memories that at arisen. I felt at peace, but confused about my identity. The memory of my parents’ conflicts and their eventual divorce still burned in my heart, but somewhere within that memory I had touched that childhood experience of Jesus—the One who would always bless me, and never leave me. I departed the retreat grateful for the silence that had challenged me to open the doors of my wounded heart. And grateful for the rude interruption I had experienced from the present that still lives in my past.

Silence is never the same. Each of the pathways to peace that I’ve followed—psychotherapy, Buddhist meditation, and Christian contemplative prayer, opens a fork in an invisible, silent highway. In this particular retreat, as my breathing and the silence between the breaths continued, I had encountered an old wound and a healing that came simultaneously from my mortal, linear time on earth and from a sense of eternal and beloved Presence. It was as if I had experienced Jesus again, as if nothing had changed. Some part of me as aging adult, I was still a child, still needing reassurance, safety, and love. Somehow this inner child was both me, and not me, a paradoxical union of the me and not-me that laid out a new path for me as an adult. Sitting silently in a Vipassana retreat had barred me from all my usual distractions, reminding me of Max Picard’s wisdom. He had been a Jew in Nazi Germany, one who was forced to live behind the barricades of Hitler’s armies. After he escaped he reflected on the many silent moments in which he could escape the shrill horrors of the Nazis. He wrote that we are often imprisoned by our past experiences but that we can be freed of the past if we can “place silence between the past and the new” (Picard p. 92). My silence experiences in Buddhist practices have invited me to use silence in this liberating way, and I’m grateful.

Silence in the present is never simply about the present. Silence in the present is an invisible bridge to past and future, a boundary-less path into the gradually re-forming unknown. Something eternal is always happening in linear time. As Max Picard wrote, “Before the creation of the word, silence had occupied everything. The earth belonged to silence—as though the earth were built on and over silence (The World of Silence, p. 68). I now experience silence as the full-spectrum atmosphere of the chronological moment, and simultaneously something eternal. Silence is never just what’s happening in one’s physical environment, body or brain in the moment. We are sojourners on an ocean of silence—invited to witness the whole of creation as it passes through us. Our ancestors and descendants are living there, reaching out to us, and touching our imagination and our hearts. Zen Buddhist teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, coined the phrase, “inter-being,” saying that we “inter-are” with others. In my Christian life, I treasure the Gospel of John, especially when he affirms Jesus’ awareness as a three-way dance of Creator, self, and others (John 14:20, John 17:21&23), where Jesus says to his friends, “I am in you, and you are in me”. Silence is an invitation to surrender to who we really are in our complexity and our majesty. Silence is a gift, a hidden doorway to all the others who have given us life, and to all who have loved, rejected, and healed us.