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.

 

A Silence So Deep We Can Fall into It: A Different Sort of Light

Yesterday afternoon, the temperature was in the high 20’s, with snow gently falling⎼ a perfect time for a walk. The snow turned the sky a deep gray, and almost everything else, even my own arms, white. And it concentrated what I could see of the world into an intimate, silent tunnel into emptiness.

 

When I stopped walking and my steps no longer echoed against the road, the loudest sounds in the world were my own thoughts. And in-between those thoughts, or when they fell from my mind like snow, the silence was so deep I could fall into it. The sound of a woodpecker searching for food, the little stream on the side of the road, the trees scratching their skins against other trees, a distant airplane⎼ all such sounds disappeared into silence.

 

There’s a book by D. E. Harding, an English mystic and philosophical writer, called On Having No Head: Zen and the Re-Discovery of the Obvious. It’s about the author’s experience, and attempt to understand it, when hiking in the Himalayas and he discovered he had no head.

 

For months beforehand, Harding had been absorbed in the question of “what am I?” And then on one very clear day, standing on a ridge of the highest mountain range in the world, he looked into the misty valley below. And he stopped thinking. He forgot his name, his past, his concerns for the future. Any reference to any other time or place, or desire for any other time or place other than this, here, now, was gone. And in this hole where his head should have been there was everything ⎼ grass, trees, the distant hills, clouds, and snowy mountain peaks. A vast emptiness was vastly filled. If other people had been with him, they too would have been included in, and as, his head.

 

Harding said it was like being born anew as a whole, integrated world instead of a lonely head. It was a revelation; not dreamlike at all, but a crystal-clear awakening of the obvious. So peaceful. So simple, really. It might seem that carrying a mountain between one’s shoulders would be a heavy weight. But it was so light, even weightless; a terrible burden dropped into the snow.

 

In my copy of Harding’s book, which I had bought used years ago, was a note written by a previous reader. It was a famous line from the 17th century English poet, Thomas Traherne: “You never enjoy the world aright, till the sea floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars.”

 

Such moments change lives. I wonder if the garden we humans may feel driven from was this state. This re-birth. Here love resides. And kindness, joy. Is the state described by Harding what underlies all joy? And does the tunnel of gray silence that appeared on the road I had walked yesterday lead to the headless Himalayas? Can all of us get there? Is this something only past humans could do but is nowadays impossible?…

 

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