If We Can’t Be Silent, How Then Can We Hear Deeply? Expecting God to Send a Text

How often do we look up to the sky, or sit at our desk or in our bed, and we ask a question, or want to, of a God or the universe?

 

We want the universe to be like AI, or social media. Or we want God to speak at the other end of a text but never get Her, Him, It, or Them. Or we want a voice in a cloud to speak to us, in English or whatever language we prefer. Or maybe we engage in one of those conversations with ourselves that so occupy our time, and we divide ourselves in two, into a questioner and a responder, but all we get in response is a repeat of something old and familiar. The universe then feels silent to us, even empty. Oh, or something happens to us, and we think the universe is sending us the event as a message.

 

As I was thinking about this, one of my cats, then another, went to the glass outer door in my den and intently stared out the window. One, our girl, looked slowly from side to side, as if following something, while the other stared straight ahead. I don’t know if it was her eyes that were tracking something, or her hearing, but whatever it was, it was invisible to me. They were both seeing with more than their eyes. There was no distraction for them from looking, just attention.

 

Maybe the problem is in where we look, or how we ask. In Exodus 3:1-6 God says to Moses, from a burning bush, “Moses, Moses! Here I am.” Or in the 1950s classic religious movie, The Ten Commandments, Charlton Heston stands over the Red Sea, parts his arms, and speaks “Behold His mighty hands.” And God answers by parting the sea. Maybe we’d like such a clear and dramatic response, but it’s a bit much to ask. I’ve never personally seen seas parted by command or heard God’s voice in a bush.

 

Maybe we expect the answer to come in a certain way, and the expectation blinds us to the answer. We might look, for example, outside ourselves, or to some authority or a defined being not ourselves. Or to the thoughts and images in our minds, not the feelings and sensations in our bodies.

 

Maybe we’re hearing the speech of the Burning Bush wrong. Maybe, as some scholars say, we could hear God’s “Here I am,” as “Look Here;” see all this, see this right here.

 

Describing Buddhist practice in his book, You Have to Say Something: Manifesting Zen Insight, Dainin Katagiri, a central figure in the early transmission of Buddhism to the US, says that to truly see a teacher, or see anybody, you cannot maintain an expectation of a certain response. If you have a preconceived idea of a meeting, there’s no meeting.

 

We often create such noise in ourselves. We know this. We know people who can’t stand silence and constantly play the tv or listen to their earbuds or search social media and suffer from FOMO. The world right now is bad enough, so terribly frightening. So, silence, if we can hear it, can be so healing. We need to give ourselves a break, a pause, a bit of kindness. If we can’t be silent, how can we listen deeply?

 

Maybe we’d hear more if we asked ourselves a question and then just listened, listened not just to words, but to the entirety of the moment when we heard the question in ourselves? We ask and then feel the asking. Maybe then we’d hear our own mind more clearly….

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

 

Reflections on The Drive to Know: Reality is More than Words and People are Not Just Concepts

The urge to know, to have an answer, to understand, to explain— this is such a powerful drive in our lives. So many writers, philosophers, fellow human beings have thought and written about this. And we feel it all the time. We don’t hear from a friend or loved one and we send a text, and worry-wait for a reply. We get in the car in a snowstorm yet want to know if we’re being stupid driving anywhere. And when we listen to the news lately, we might wonder what will succeed in making things better? What else might be taken from us, or what will be revealed that will assure democracy and our humanity will prevail over autocracy and cruelty? There can be such pain and discomfort in not-knowing.

 

Many of us can recall a time we felt some new pain and wondered what the cause was. A pain without an explanation is a pain doubled. Sometimes, not-knowing can be fun and add openness, excitement, and anticipation to our lives. But often, it’s just another source of worry.

 

We have this sense of ourselves, of what it’s like to reflect on our feelings or experiences. I think I know what it feels like to be me.

 

But there are times that I’m not so sure. For example, when I realize my attitude, energy level, or what I enjoy doing has changed. Or when so much is going on inside my mind it seems like foreign territory, and I have no idea where it all came from or where it’s leading me. Our inner world can feel so vast and elusive. Or sometimes someone says something about me that shocks me. And as I get older, this rate of change intensifies. I never know from day to day how I’ll be or, of course, what will happen. This is another dimension of not-knowing. We might feel we don’t even know ourselves. How can we control what we don’t know?

 

And then there’s the negativity bias, where we imagine the worst so we’re ready to take action to prevent it. And we develop a theory about ourselves that’s just too awful to face and we cease to care about the reality; we catastrophise and paralyze ourselves. In this case, friends can help us perceive and face what we need to face but haven’t.

 

The same is true if a neighbor, friend, or loved one is in pain. If we don’t know the cause, we worry twice as much about them. We want to help. This is part of our natural compassion. If we have an explanation, a reason, even a mere theory of a cause, we worry less. We have a way to help. Even if the reality is bad, there’s often a sense of comfort in knowing.

 

But sometimes the suggestions we offer others can be hurtful. We can unknowingly imply we’re superior in some way, or that the person is ignorant, or doesn’t know what we think they should know. We can’t totally get into their mind with ours and maybe we don’t want to use our empathy and imagination to even try do so.

 

One issue here is feeling hurt and helpless in the face of another’s pain. We can feel a loss of control in being powerless to help. So, we reach for something to give us that control. But I wonder about control. What does it really mean?

 

We might also expect there to be reasons for things. Not just causes, but something like God delivering prizes and penalties. When something awful happens to a good person, and to ourselves, we might try to figure out “what did we do to deserve this?” But I think God is too big or the intelligence of the universe too inclusive to think in terms prizes and penalties. Maybe, the teaching about Karma is correct, and one thing, one action, one intention simply sets up the conditions for other actions and intentions.

 

And when I try so hard to find an explanation, I could simply be enjoying expanding my knowledge. I love reading and learning. But it can also be an attempt to turn reality into words and people into concepts. A word is so much smaller than the reality it purports to explain. And a concept of a person can describe at most a tiny particle of them. A little bit of humility about what we think we know can go a long way….

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

Life Is Our Question

Right now, we are inundated with so many questions. So much uncertainty, fear, and grief. So much awareness of how tenuous life is without an equal awareness of how to face the tenuous. The fragile. The uncertain.

 

We often want to return to at least a semblance of stability. Security. We want answers. Sometimes, like for many of us, right now life can be too much. And all too often, the answers we search for are delayed or too difficult to uncover. And living in a state of questioning is uncomfortable. It is also uncomfortable to go through our day or at night to sleep with our questions as our bedmate. But often, that is the only answer. To just sit, sleep, ache with our questions. Or be grateful for the fact that we can ask them.

 

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke said, in answering a letter from a young poet, to “be patient to all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves.” The point is to “live the questions” so at some point we can live our way to an answer.

 

He was mainly concerned with love relationships, creativity, and integrity. But I think this advice applies to all questions that could change the direction of our lives and heart.

 

One of my favorite contemporary philosophers, Jacob Needleman, developed this further and wrote: “Our culture has generally tended to [try to] solve its problems without experiencing its questions.” We want a solution quickly, even before we feel the full dimension of what we face. We too often want what’s easy and immediate.

 

But rushing for an answer forces us to leave out what could be most important, and to favor what’s “practical” over what’s compassionate, our bias over reality. It weakens us just when life is trying to teach us how to be strong.

 

I noticed when I was teaching secondary school that the students loved to grapple, in the classroom, with real, tough, open-ended questions. But with adult friends and relatives, not so much. Finding solutions was preferred over asking questions that might have no verbalizable answer. Needleman said that when we open any newspaper, or today, look at our phones, and we see every news item breathes philosophy. Breathes deep questions. Ethical. Existential. Metaphysical. Epistemological.

 

We read about Putin’s war against Ukraine and ask about the nature of evil, or human nature, or⎼ how do we stop a war? We read about the climate crisis and ask about reliable evidence, truth, or ⎼ how do we get people to realize this crisis is so real we must stop and change what we’re doing?

 

We read about racism, attacks on LGBTQ+ children, and so many other forms of hate, and ask⎼ How do we talk to a neighbor who hates so deeply they create violent walls around everyone they know? Or we read about the pandemic or attacks on women’s health and ask⎼ How do we turn the richest society in the world to one that actively cares for the health of its members?…

 

**To read the whole article, please click on this link to The Good Men Project.

A Question that Brings Us Right to the Ground We Stand On

How many times have we changed our viewpoint or come to like what before we disliked? We all have done this, but for many of us, it’s not easy. A feeling of like or dislike can seem so set and permanent. More part of a thing perceived and not an artifact of our own mind.

 

Yesterday, my wife and I needed to put the news aside for a moment and decided to look at woodblock prints by a contemporary Japanese artist named Shufu Miyamoto. We both found many of his prints distinctly beautiful, but one stood out in a peculiar way. It was called A Spring Dance. I noticed it before she did and liked it⎼ then I didn’t. Something seemed off to me.

 

It depicted a field being planted, with yellow flowers both in the foreground and towards the back, with a forested mountain behind the field and a pink-orange sky. And in the very middle, a magnificent tree, maybe a cherry tree, covered in white blossoms, with many of the blossoms blown about in an invisible wind. These features were what attracted me to the artwork.

 

But the field under the tree was plowed into rows only faintly outlined, in a dull brown or grey, and the farmer or gardener planting the field was so indistinct as to barely make his, her, or their presence known. They almost faded into the field. I thought it a mistake by the artist.

 

Then my wife joined me and immediately said she loved the piece. Loved not only the tree, which stood out for her, but the contrast between the bright flowers and the soil. And she admired the way the gardener faded into the field.

 

So, I looked again. I realized I generally like the quality of openness in a work of art. I like being taken inside the scene. With this work, the haziness of the field, the indistinctness, mystery, or moodiness at first made it hard to grasp what I was seeing. Or it asked something of me that I wasn’t yet ready to give.

 

What is indistinguishable can gnaw at us. Like a question. Questions can be hypnotic. Some questions can be so big we wrap our lives around them. “What drives my life? How can I feel the depths and joys of life more consistently? How can I stay informed yet clear-headed and sane? Can we create a less violent and more caring, just society? How do we face death?”

 

I remember taking a course in Ericksonian hypnosis and the teacher asked a question, then let us sit there and realize how captivated we were by what he had said. When I was teaching, I suggested to students that if they started an essay or a story with a good question, the reader would be hooked and continue reading until an answer was uncovered. Or if I started a class session with an engaging and open-ended question, the session itself would become an adventure, a communal treasure hunt for an answer….

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.