A Huge Silence Hiding

Anonymous

When we hear a place called a "wilderness", we generally think of a place lacking any signs of human development. The 1964 Wilderness Act defines wilderness as a place "untrammeled by man". In the past few years, however, everyone from scientists to poets seem to be rediscovering the fact that a wilderness is far more than a place with something "absent" (i.e., civilization), but is rather an entirely different sort of civilization - a civilization whose nature and complexity is so vast, delicate and magnificently interrelated as to make our modern industrial civilization appear to be a crude sandbox kingdom built by stumbling children.

Wilderness uses immense amounts of energy, but uses its energy in a totally sustainable and remarkably efficient fashion. It produces (not just products, but life itself) at a rate and scale beyond the wildest dreams of modern factory owners, but its production processes do not generate a single bit of waste that cannot be fully reintegrated into itself. The more intelligent members of our species are beginning to look into wilderness with the attitude of the pupil instead of that of the dominator, and this shift in attitude is all it takes to throw open a hidden door to glistening treasures.One of those treasures is Silence.

To say that silence is nothing but the "lack of sound" is roughly similar to saying that wilderness is nothing but the "lack of buildings". Both are true, but are really only the first, introductory pages of immense books, and those who read no further remain oblivious to the full depth of experience therein. I still remember the first time I stumbled across the Huge Hidden Silence that weaves the fabric in which all sounds are dressed. It was in the middle of a Montana winter, and being young and remarkably stupid I had hiked alone into the Bitterroot mountains. It was a crystal clear night with a 1/4 moon and enough stars to choke a moose. My fire had burnt to embers and Iwas looking out over a large expanse of snowy pine forest. As I walked to the edge of the mountain upon which I was camping and looked down the long valley I had traversed that day, I began to become aware of something like an odd presence. It was rolling quietly towards the center of my thoughts, as early morning mist winds its way into valleys. As the sensation grew it finally seized my full attention, and in an instant the thought finally struck me - I am immersed in Silence.

Now on the surface this may not sound very earth-shattering, but you must understand this was an absolute Silence. Not a breath of wind, not a rustle, not a whisper. It was the sort of silence that is only possible in the dead of winter, in the depths of a wilderness. "So what", you may say (as, indeed, a friend of mine did when I mentioned this to her), "silence is all over the damn place, you just have to plug your ears".

Ah, the illusions of the uninitiated, the small and noisy world of the aurally unsophisticated. Simply because we don't have as many words for Silence as the Eskimos do for snow doesn't mean Silence itself is as limited as our vocabulary for it is. The word doesn't so much describe a single sensation as an enormous group of sensations. Silence can be golden, oppressive, pregnant, ominous, peaceful, or before the storm, as well as thousands of other things words cannot even hint at.

The particular Silence that lives in wilderness (or more precisely, whose door is only found in wilderness) is huge. In wilderness one touches the Mother Of All Silences, the Big Kahuna, the downright Galactic Silence in which the sun, moon and earth themselves float as leaves in an ocean. It is the Silence that makes all other silences appear to be lesser things, pathetic imitations, pretenders to the throne. All of the silences one finds in a city are but apprentice silences; some of them (when in optimistic moods) aspire, perhaps, to be much grander, but would still never be arrogant enough to compare themselves the Great One.

This is the Silence that stretches between galaxies; the Silence to which the big bang itself was nothing more than a noisy pebble dropped in a still pond. Excuse the inadvertent hoverings on the edge of the mystical, but even thinking about the Huge Silence does that. There is a good reason why the most brilliant prophets and wise ones have gone alone into wilderness on their truth hunts. Forty days in suburban Rome wouldn't have unleashed Jesus like forty days in the desert did. Buddha achieved enlightenment under a Bo tree, not a streetlamp. There is no such thing as an "Urban Shaman".

Few really bother to speculate as to why the most profound thinkers our race has known through its history seem to have all had a profound connection to wilderness in common, but I think I know why: Its the Huge Silence. Once you learn to hear it, it will tell you all you wish to know about virtually anything. It has witnessed unimaginable things, and graciously offers the totality of its wisdom to anyone who bothers to listen. And no, its not the same thing as plugging one's ears. Put your fingers in your ears and you immediately notice that awareness contracts - you become aware only of yourself and nothing else. This is radically different than having awareness thrown as utterly open as it can possibly be and still experiencing total silence. The silence becomes an invitation and not only is awareness not contracted, it is expanded beyond all the barriers of the individual self and merges with the entirety of the creation of which that self is really but a minuscule part. It is in this immense state of expansion where thoughts become large enough to be worthy of discourse with the eternals of the classical philosophers. There, in the Huge Silence, one finds Wisdom. There exists Truth with a capital T and Beauty with a capital B. There lives Love and Peace and an overwhelming sense of connection. Its substance is an unnamable essence that the religious would call God, an essence that can only be glimpsed when the continual noisy chatterings of our inner thoughts and outer civilization has been penetrated fully by the Huge Silence.

Our current civilization has banished such Silence. Certainly we cannot in any way harm it, but we can effectively close off all points of entrance into it - and we are now shockingly close to doing just that. There are very, very few places left, even in wilderness, where the experience is possible. Even deeper than that, though, is the fact that people have become afraid of it. The continual stimulation of media - TV, radio, conversation - seems too often sought out of hidden desperation rather than genuine desire. Silence simply knows too much, and its first small gift - for those willing to enter it - is self-knowledge. At first sometimes a terrible gift. But a gift nonetheless.

I remember a fellow I met in Montana years ago - a "Medicine Man" I think he would be called. I was bugging him to teach me things. He told me I didn't have the foggiest clue how to learn. I thought he was insulting and arrogant. He told me, almost as an offhand challenge, that if I thought I was ready, I should spend a single day - an entire day - simply sitting under a tree in the mountains. Nothing else, just that. I couldn't eat, couldn't sleep, just had to stay awake, and sit there. Sounded like the simplest thing in the world. It may be one of the single hardest days I've ever spent. Anyone, I think, that desires to face themselves, that desires a quest for knowledge, needn't fool with meditations, techniques, nor the hundred and one conveniently distracting ways of pursuing "growth". Nope. Just sit for a whole day in Silence. You will not need to seek self-knowledge, rather, you will not be able to escape it.

The Huge silence, however, holds something much greater than self-knowledge ... in fact, if one goes into it often enough, self-knowledge comes to be seen (in retrospect) as little more than an initial impediment to the juiciest prize: Creation Knowledge; or rather, not knowledge, but Entrance. At first that Silence draws one's unresolved dross to the surface. Then over time, it burns it away, and the Self behind the self stands revealed. But beyond that, in the face of continued forays into that Silence - even the true self evaporates into a mist. Even its whispers - so quiet they take years to hear - become little more than a noisy irritant, and final thing to be dispensed with. An impediment to total Silence. And THAT is the moment of "Entrance" ... when one can place one’s self in a wilderness, a soundless place that has nothing striking the eardrums from the world, and exist there in a state in which all interior whispers have also ceased (however temporarily) ... THAT state, where the immensity of the inner silence directly touches the immensity of the galactic Silence, is where the essential nature of human existence finally becomes clear. We are Portals ... out of which immensity is continually passing, and through which it is continually returning to itself. The Noise we live in - of our outer urban worlds, our personality, voices, conflicts, and desires ... and even too often our "spiritual quests" effectively mute all awareness of the continual flow of immensity through our beings. We become as men and women, standing on small rocks, looking frantically around for water, looking everywhere, clutching after little drops of rain, and dew falling from trees, all the while oblivious to the fact that those rocks we are standing on are smack dab in the center of a raging river.

A persevering relationship with Silence is the way to the Entrance to the World. To get beyond the first plateau - the terror of being faced with a self with much unresolved - and even further, to get beyond the much more difficult second plateau - the exquisite enticement of a Self with most things resolved - is to become no longer a person, but rather to become - simply and profoundly - a place. To convey this notion in human words can't help but to imply that this is some sort of negation of the self. It is not. When a human consciousness reaches the state in which it can fully become just a place ... the place it becomes is the place where everything in all of creation happens.