Silence as an Aspect of Sophia

The silence falls. I stop inside it, sensing its depth as it arrives and leaves around me. Sensing like that is a kind of listening, but it is a listening with the body, the body’s poise the sounding board in which the resonance of the particular qualities of a particular silence intone themselves --the silence of a particular field being a wholly different silence from another, or from the silence in an empty room. Silence then, is neither place nor absence. It is the presence of the listener in the presence of the flower, the water, the bird above the valley’s green. It is itself an active presence --the mantle in which our experiences come wrapped, if we care to sit quietly as they arrive.

Silence then, is world. But it is not the world of subject-object. It is not the world of dualism or difference. Silence is of world-as-a means-to-communion. And only one whose mind is toward communion may hearthe silence well. What is heard is of desire. But not the desire of the instinctual life as it attempts to takes us from where we are, rather it is the desire of the grass, or the marigold at the gate, to rise out of themselves and return to that presence which only we as human beings can hold for them as they unfold. Silence makes its impress on us by participating in complete and unambiguous objectivity in both the rose and the one who begins to know the rose. It lives inside both as a medium for their willingness to hold and to be held.

That this is a world in which it is hard to find silence, means that people are more capable than ever before of appreciating it when it is there. There is great sadness in this fact, a sadness worthy of silence. For so much has been lost of the origins of things that we encounter silence, which is perhaps the last primeval experience available to us today, as if it were alien to us, whereas its actual otherness is akin to that posited by Lacan—an otherness that is also part of us, an otherness that our entire being is wrapped around, since our acquaintance with it is developmentally bound to us. That is to say that we may become aware of silence as part and parcel of our bodily memory, so various silences play into our memories and associations as perhaps the most subtle imprint of any encounter we have. Such silences – unconscious silences—may themselves be impedances if not understood. And they can only be understood by understanding the phenomena they are bound to. That is to say that silence itself, when it is not encountered in its immediacy as a phenomenon happening now, may be subject to the same repressions, colorations, fear and trembling that any other phenomena may have for us. We may interrupt silence, or avoid it. . . because we cannot stand the memories it may carry from times when we were not fully prepared (developmentally) to encounter it with equanimity or with a spirit of participatory encounter.

Yet full waking consciousness of silence as presence—that is something else. Because silence, unlike memory, holds us. It envelops us. It persists, not as an internal necessity, but as a presence that is both internal and external at one and the same time. Even if one meditates in a noisy room, and has the good fortune to be able to enter into silence of an internal kind, the experience is likely to be one in which the silences that line the activities in the room around them are participated in in an amplified way… so that one forgets the noise and hears more and more of what that noise comes wrapped in —the silence beneath any and all human activity. . . or even the silence beneath, above and around mechanical activity.

Silence is the blood of the world then. It circulates unseen, unheard and yet it wraps every cell, every heartbeat and every activity. It holds our joys and our sorrows, and may be imprinted with the sun, and the rain, and the mist of a cloudy day without any loss to its intensity. And when some horror occurs in the world, ( and these come more and more often these days. . .) it is silence that acts in much the same way that the earth acts for the body at death. It holds the hurt inside it. It enfolds it and takes it in, and somehow, after a time, it may be possible to re-visit that event with a greater degree of equanimity. When we can come to it quietly, the silence may give back the afterimage of what happened in such a way that something new becomes possible for us, even if that were the farthest thing from what we imagined might come of those events.

This is not to diminish our human responsibility for such events. Neither is it to say that we need not actively work –as a race--to stop doing terrible things, or to blindly accept them because the silence of the world knows what to do with them. It is only to say that silence will faithfully do its part—and to note the comfort in that fact – a comfort that may verge on joy when it is allowed to be there in all its fullness.

As silence reflects back to us our own inner states, its own state at rest, without our interpretations or projections, is perhaps closest to that of reverence.The silence surrenders before whatever is carried inside it. It delivers us into its presence and back again, all the while allowing us the fullest freedom to be who and what we are. Silence does not interfere with anyone or anything. It leaves us to ourselves, disclosing itself only to those are ready, who listen.