The Roar of Silence

“Abbot Pastor said: Any trial whatever that comes to you can be conquered by silence.”
—Wisdom of the Desert

Silence is not passivity. This may seem like an impossible statement in a world that so recklessly values noise, activity and motion, the louder and faster the better. Silence seems like anathema. In moments of inactivity, we grow restless and immediately start looking for something else to do or something else to fill our minds. Watch how uncomfortable people get when a conversation settles into a moment of silence.

Rather than retreat from these spaces in our speech or activity, we ought to reverse our expectations and see these moments as our original state of being. What if we began to see silence and stillness as our normal condition? We could then see our ideas, our words and our actions rising up out of that wide ocean of being, playing out a little while on the tiny, fragile stage of human existence, and then returning to the space from whence they came. We would see our activity in the perspective of that open, vast pool of silence. When a problem presented itself to us, we would be less likely to react immediately (which usually means reacting based on our surface emotions, or our habitual expectations and attitudes), and more likely to just quietly wait. From that stillness, wise answers to our problems will emerge effortlessly. Action will arise spontaneously, but rather than us doing the action, the action will simply do itself. And then all things will return to that ocean of silence.

In college I had a professor who had a profound sense of presence, and when you spoke to him, he listened like a mountain. When I was done speaking, a moment of silence emerged that seemed to go on forever to me, it was so vast and deep and I nearly trembled with anxiety because this space was so foreign to me. And then he would respond to what I had said, usually with great wisdom or compassion. Even when what he said was completely ordinary, I felt as if the whole universe had heard me and affirmed me. This man had learned to live in that ocean of stillness.

Meditation teacher Matthew Flickstein told me once that when someone asks him a question, he never knows what he is going to say in reply before he says it. Sometimes, if no answer arises, he just doesn’t say anything at all.