reading

First published in Great Britain in 2014 by
Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd
1 Spencer Court
140 – 142 Wandsworth High Street
London SW18 4JJ

First published in the USA in 2013 by
Cascade Books, an imprint of Wipf and Stock
199 W 8th Avenue, Suite 3, Eugene, OR 93001

This book is dedicated to
John Barton
Oriel and laing Professor
of the interpretation of Holy Scripture
University of Oxford

TRYING TO WRITE ABOUT contemplative practice is to attempt something very risky and difficult; but the difficulty is not about someone trying to express in words an “experience that transcends speech,” or phrases to that effect. Maggie Ross is clear that this kind of rhetoric is misleading, indeed potentially self-deluding. The difficulty (as writers like Gregory of nazianzus observed in the fourth Christian century) is not that we have a rich and wonderful experience of God that is hard to put into words, but that we face the risk of real self-deception and fantasy as to the nature of the encounter or contact between finite subject and infinite act.

The risk is a risk to our honesty; the difficulty is the difficulty of not creating idols (of self or God). There is a sentimentality around so much of the current vocabulary for contemplative practice which can lure us into thinking that we are undertaking a set of tactics that will deliver commodities called spiritual experience or spiritual awareness (isn’t one of our most pressing problems at the moment the commodification of “spiritual experience” in a commodity-obsessed culture?). The beginning of wisdom, so this book insists, is to recognize that what we are invited to in contemplative practice is ultimately the sheer presence of finite subject to, with, in infinite act; and that this entails a relentless scrutiny of whatever words and pictures and habits we deploy, to do what we can to prevent them taking on the contours of some kind of description of infinite act or some kind of tactic to chart and locate it.

And this means of course that we shall always be asking how what we say and do moves us towards silence: real silence, not a sense of vague devotional warmth. As Maggie Ross has written elsewhere, all serious speech about faith—or should we say, speech in faith?—is going to resolve itself into silence. It is a test before which most liturgical language these days, let alone a lot of our (my) preaching or theologizing, sounds glib and shallow. We shall go on failing, no doubt; but it matters desperately, for the sanity of religious communities, that we keep such a test before us. Without awareness of this, we become, more than ever, “poor little talkative Christianity,” in E. M. Forster’s stinging phrase. It is not that we are under orders simply to shut up, but that we need to learn new ways of listening to ourselves speaking in or of faith, asking whether our register, our tone, our performance, is or isn’t a way of framing silence.

So it is important not to think that all this is some strategy for avoiding doctrine, liturgy, avoiding committing ourselves in words. We are not being told that we could or should be taking refuge in comfortable agnosticism. Quite the opposite: if the complex, sometimes strained, words and models that we draw from Scripture and creed really mean what they say, the new life of Christ happens in us when we have learned to listen with an openness that demands everything; and the gift of Christ’s Spirit is the inexhaustible energy that makes possible and sustains such openness, an openness that we cannot create for ourselves by trying hard and being good. Genuine silence is gift, in the deepest sense imaginable.

This book is the work of one of the most independent and ruthlessly realistic religious writers of our time. It is a distillation of many years of labor and reflection, drawing on enormous resources of close scholarly reading, consistently penetrating and demanding, yet opening a door of vital understanding. At a time when easy and rather cosy “spiritualities” abound, this is a quiet, firm recall—quite simply—to truth and life, the truth and life that is “christ in you, the hope of glory.”

THIS BOOK REPRESENTS A lifetime of work, and it is impossible to mention by name all the people who have supported me through the long years of its making. You know who you are, and I am profoundly grateful. But there are a number of people whose immediate influence is reflected in these pages whom I must thank. First, to Rowan Williams, not only for writing the foreword but also for nearly four decades of friendship and support. Thank you too, Rowan, for continuing to be the custodian of my vows. Next, to John Barton, to whom the book is dedicated. Thank you John, for your solid friendship of more than thirty years, and for your support and belief in my work even when I was tempted to give up. Vincent Gillespie: thank you, Vincent, for the many years we spent working on Julian of Norwich, for your ongoing friendship, and for your request for the paper “Behold Mot the Cloud of Experience,” which enabled this book finally to gel. Thank you, Kevin Johnson, for the hundreds of emails and voicemails that contributed to this book as we dialogued about many subjects. Thank you for your belief in the paradigm, and for taking the risk to use it in your doctoral thesis. Thank you, too, to Mark Williams, for many fruitful conversations about Greek philosophy, gardening, and other shared interests. Your ongoing friendship is beyond price. Thank you to other dialogue partners, especially Frazer Crocker, Pauline Matarasso, Andrew Shanks, Graham Ward, and the late Abbott Conway. And thank you to those individuals who have supported me in various ways: Hugh Becker and Deborah Bartlett Pitt; David Burgdorf; Matthew Carlisle; Liz Carmichael; Gypsy da Silva; Beth and Graham Edwards and Andrew Shanks for reading the manuscript and offering suggestions; Ted Fletcher; Richard Ganz; Roger Greene; Pat Hobson; Herb and Cindy Holeman; Hank Levy; Diarmaid MacCulloch; Daniel McCann; the late Sally Mitchell; Rachael Kerr and John Mitchinson; Tom Moore; David Smith; Valerie Stark; George Swanson and Pixie Thayer; John and Margie Thelen; Deborah Wilde; Laura Anne Wood; and last but certainly not least, my editor at Wipf and Stock, Robin Parry, whose enthusiasm for my work has never flagged, and all the dedicated people at the press.

There is also one group of people whom I also wish to thank: the dedicated readers of my blog: ravenwilderness.blogspot.com. Your interest, comments, and support has meant more than I can possibly express.

Grateful acknowledgement is given for permission to print from the following sources:

For the cover illustration from the Rothschild Canticles: The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

To Sam Hamill for permission to quote “Questions Answered” as an epigraph, from Crossing the Yellow River: Three Hundred Poems from the Chinese, translated by Sam Hamill. Rochester, NY: Tiger’s Bark Press, 2013.

To James Danaher for permission to quote from The Second Truth. St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 2014.

The Sayings of the Desert Fathers © Sister Benedicta. A Cistercian Publication title (CS 59). Collegeville, MN: Liturgical, 1975. Used by permission.

To Boydell and Brewer, for permission to reuse a long section of the paper “Behold Not the Cloud of Experience,” first published in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England VIII, edited by E. A. Jones. Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2013.

IT IS ALWAYS PARADOXICAL to write or speak about silence, but, as this book hopes to show, paradox is essential to understanding the work of silence in the human person, and the workings of the human mind with silence. Silence is opposite to speech, in that language is linear and selfreflexive, while silence in its truest sense means that self-consciousness is elided or suspended. Silence, then, requires that we approach it in a way that is not linear; otherwise the method would be at war with the content. In consequence, this book might best be regarded as an extended thought experiment that approaches silence in a more or less holographic way, and as an introduction to a very complex set of problems.

There have been other books on silence: there are books that describe looking for an “experience” of silence; books that seem to discuss silence but are really about being alone; books that try to understand the presence of silence historically at work for good or ill in various cultures; books that discuss the “music” of silence, that are in fact not about silence at all but about language. But as far as I know, no one has written a book such as this one, which not only addresses the human relationship with silence directly, but also explores the ways silence or the lack of it affects the ordinary round of our daily lives; and the ways that we can cooperate with silence to lead lives that are simple, truthful, and incoercible, which will give us more joy than we could ask or imagine.

Both the insights and the processes of silence are open to everyone because the fundamental workings of the human mind are universal and have not changed in recorded history. Social status and education are irrelevant: the work of silence can be undertaken by the literate or the illiterate, king or peasant. The work of silence is neutral: it is not necessary to believe anything, but only to observe one’s mind at work with the silence, to discover its permutations, its portals, and its gifts; and to realize the trans-figuring effects that deepest silence can work in us. It is only when people attempt to verbalize these processes that religious metaphor can arise.

The basic message of those who have done the work of silence consists in this: if self-consciousness makes us human, then its elision opens the door to what was once called divinity. To put this statement in modern terms, if we can get beyond our manipulative thinking to focus on not focusing, we open ourselves to insight and change; we access a vast, spacious, generous, silent, thinking mind that seems to have knowledge we have never self-consciously learned; that makes unexpected connections; that has its own ethics; and that not only gives us insights but can tell us when an insight is correct.

The mind’s layers as they pertain to silence can be stated very simply: there is a level of noise, there are ways to get beyond the noise, there is the level of silence where the observing I/eye is present, and the deepest one where it is not. Movement through this process is ruled by a paradox called “the paradox of intention,” for our self-consciousness is useless if we wish to hush the noise and find clarity. We cannot self-consciously suspend self-consciousness until we find ways for self-consciousness to subvert itself. There are many ways “in” to silence, though it can happen spontaneously. A common technique is to concentrate on a single point—a single word, or counting exhalations—which allows self-consciousness gradually to fall away for a time.

Or, more simply, at any time during waking hours, some people, when they become conscious of being assaulted by interior noise, seek—metaphorically speaking—to turn away and “reach into the dark” where silence dwells. Or, as Guillaume de Guilleville puts it, to “raise the face of the mind” in beholding.¹ In the beginning they may self-consciously make this shift many times a day. When this intention has become a ground note of their living, then they are increasingly open to the gifts silence has to offer. However, contrary to popular belief, no form of medi- tation—and there are many—can be done in isolation, but rather must be part of a program that involves the refocusing of the entire person. Lacking that focus, the meditator opens him or her self to the hidden parts of their psyches that have potential to do harm. But if seekers persevere in working with silence, they come to discover that the most fruitful parts of the human mind are in its depths, which are out of sight and beyond control, but which are influenced by intention.

While the paradoxical key to insight has been the subject of recent scientific studies, the rule of paradox is no news at all for many authors of the great texts that come down to us from the ancient and medieval worlds. The problem is that because we have lost sight and understanding of the work of silence, we no longer know how to receive paradox or to interpret these texts.

From time out of mind, those who reflect on the roles of self-consciousness and deep mind have been aware of both their gifts and their liabilities. Often people who reflect in this way have often been persecuted by people who fear such interior examinations, who wish ambiguous or unanswerable questions to be forced into the templates of rules, rites, and hierarchies, where they can be controlled. Worse, the latter often have co-opted the insights of the former and twisted them to their own ends.

The tension between silence and speech persists throughout the human historical record, particularly in the West, and it is important to remember that none of the religions of the Book have ever been uniform or monolithic at any time, in spite of what may be claimed by the myths of their making. Whether one accepts or rejects religion, we in the West are heirs to the language, mythology, allusions, and cultural assumptions of these traditions, and religion’s history of opposition to the work of silence is instructive.

Some of the early Christian traditions suggest that, however else the New Testament is interpreted, the inheritance of the life and death of Jesus points to a silence tradition, which we might call the en-Christing process. Many of the sayings of Jesus and key passages of Paul’s epistles can be read as commentaries on traversing the structures of the mind as one opens to the deepest silence to receive its life-renewing gifts. Silence traditions are rarely heard of or cited today, yet such a tradition was handed down unbroken until the high Middle Ages in the West, when it was quenched by the mainstream religious institution of the age.

The work of silence is still ignored by scholars today who do not want to be thought religious. They do not seem to realize that the processes of silence are themselves neutral. In consequence, their attempts to translate and interpret the texts and artifacts that make up the silence tradition—which comprise much of the Western Canon—are often very wide of the mark. It is not an exaggeration to say that when the silence tradition as part of the mainstream teaching authority was finally quenched in the mid-fifteenth century, Western institutional Christianity, always struggling to justify itself, began its death-throes.

In the early days of its formation, the victors—those who would create hierarchy and institution—determined the contents of what we now think of as the New Testament. They conveniently ignored the inherent contradictions in the institution they were developing, which reflected the very structures and practices in Jewish religion and the Hebrew Scriptures that the teacher, Jesus, had called into question and spent his entire ministry trying to undermine. Opposed to these developing structures, and very much in the disorganized minority, were those who took Jesus’s message to refer to the work of silence, and the en-Christing process, the transfiguration that occurs in the depths of the human heart.

The work of Karen King and elaine Pagels in Reading Judas sheds grim light on this conflict, as those intent on institution and hierarchy urged second-century Christians toward martyrdom. At the same time, many of those groups now labeled “heretic” were repelled by what they perceived as human sacrifice in the service of creating and sustaining a self-certifying and self-serving hierarchy, a hierarchy that preached a bloodthirsty god that demanded death as payment, a god whom the advocates of Jesus’s message as a silence tradition could not stomach.

This conflict among early Christians is far more than a difference of political opinion, and it is important to the study of the work of silence because the position one takes is absolutely fundamental to the notion of what it means to be fully human. In terms of human growth and maturation this conflict contrasts the lesser, often stunted effort of “imitation,” with the open-ended task of “putting on the mind of Christ” (the work of silence), which is entirely opposite.

In psychological terms, to put on the mind of Christ means relinquishing imaginative stereotypes and projections into the silence, and receiving back a transfigured (in the literary as well as the psychological and theological senses) perspective, so that we are freed from the trap of our own circular thinking; while “imitation” means pursuing a life based on our own imaginative stereotypes and projections, impressions that are easily formed and controlled by a hierarchy.

In other words, imitation does not allow us to break out of the circular squirrel cage of our own constructs and prejudices. However piously and devoutly meant, imitation becomes a kind of religious performance art, regressively reductive with the passage of time. Imitation breeds dependence and fear. By contrast, the mind of Christ results in a healthy autonomy and an inviolable integrity for the sake of the community. This is not to say that these two points of view are mutually exclusive: it is possible for the failure of imitation to point the way to the work of silence. The implications of these observations for today’s celebrity and consumer “spirituality” are only too obvious.

In spite of persecutions and anathemas, the early advocates of the work of silence were not entirely stamped out. When Christianity was legalized by constantine, some of the adherents of silence decamped for the desert, to the great embarrassment of the institution. The institution spun this as “white martyrdom” but the desert hermits were very clear: “Flee bishops” they said. They wanted no part of hierarchy, and they would not presume to think of what they did as “sacrifice” They came from all classes of people. Anthony the Great, who had an agricultural background, was inspired to solitude simply by hearing the Gospel read in church. Arsenius had lived in the court of the Emperor in Constantinople. Moses had been a slave, a thief, perhaps even a murderer, and suffered from the prejudice attached to his race: he was black. John was a dwarf. There were women, Theodora, Syncletica, and Sarah among them.

The message of these desert dwellers was simple and compassionate: life and truth are to be found in the work of silence. Even if their ways seem austere to us today, their wisdom is just as valid as it was in the fourth century: sit in your cell (the cell of your heart, if not an actual hermitage) and your cell will teach you everything. In their day, the corollary to this first saying was: consult the elders and reveal what troubles you. In ours it might be, “Behold, and everything will be added unto you” But for those in the twenty-first century who are trying to revive the tradition, the statement about the elders has become problematic: nearly five centuries have passed since the death of Nicholas of Cusa in 1464, the marker date for the disappearance of the silence tradition at the official level. This means there are few, if any, elders. What Abba Macarius said to the weeping Abba Poemen is applicable to us. Poeman asked for a saving Word, but Macarius replied, “What you are looking for has now disappeared from among us”²

The simmering conflict between hierarchy and silence erupted once again in 451 at the Council of Chalcedon. Institutional and imperial advocates sought to nail down definitions so that everyone would believe in the same way. They were opposed by those who understood the provisionality of language, who sought to restrain the temptation to define, categorize, and politicize the indefinable, which they regarded as blasphemous. They lost, of course. Language shouts down silence, and its advocates were labeled heretic, monophysite.

But the desert witness to silence and interiority was too powerful to be entirely negated, at least for a time. Cassian, Benedict, and his hagiog- rapher, Gregory the Great transmitted some of its wisdom. The monastic terms lectio, ruminatio, meditatio, contemplatio are metaphors describing the work of silence, one of the passages to its depths. Monks who sought the vision of God were, until the twelfth century, said to be doing the work of philosophy. Educators taught silence in school; it was considered as important as the abc, for the organization of the mind determines how we think, perceive, interpret, and behave. In the east, writers such as Isaac of Nineveh in the seventh century analyzed the insights of the desert with an acute sense of human psychology. The only demons are those that arise in the human heart, Isaac remarks, commenting on a popular metaphor that too often became literalized and used as an excuse. True prayer, he says, begins only when we are no longer aware of praying. The mind is snatched.

But the conflict between the work of silence and imitation would not go away. From the ninth to the eleventh century it came to crisis. The influences that created this crisis are many and complex, and only a few of them can be mentioned here. Early on, the hierarchy created a shift in emphasis in the eucharistic rite from a gathering of the people giving thanks, to a religious drama of sacrifice performed by the ordained. Clerics sought ever wider control over behavior and thinking. There was a growing fascination with the celtic emphasis on penitential rites—extremes in religious practice seem always to be more interesting than the humble work of silence. Gregory VII’s (1015/1028-85) reforms in the eleventh century sought to centralize Christianity in Rome and to extend the political power of the papacy, which, coupled with the innovations that had begun in the seventh century with Columbanus, made Hildebrand’s (as Gregory VII was also known) programs almost inevitable.

This crisis may be symbolized by events coinciding in the years 1084-85, marker dates for the foundation of the Carthusians and the translation of Aristotle, respectively. Over the next three centuries, tensions rose to the breaking point between a political camp that used words as weapons for oppression under the guise of dialectic, and a “spiritual” camp that insisted that familiarity with the silence from which the words sprang and to which they referred, and into which they elided, must not be lost, that dialectic is to be used in service of silence. Aquinas and Bo- naventure, who both died in 1274, signal the end of scholarship seeking this balance between silence and speech.

The efflorescence of contemplatives at the end of the thirteenth and throughout the fourteenth centuries may be understood in part as a protest against the confinement of words and definitions. In response, the hierarchy became increasingly threatened by any speech about silence that did not fit accepted formulas, that threatened the stories it told about itself to justify and sustain its self-inflation.

The institution’s renewed emphasis on rigorous observance and rules, and its suspicion of individual interpretation, vitiated religious expression, and made writing or speaking about the work of silence almost impossible; it was too dangerous. The institution, especially in the wake of the Council of Constance (1414-18) judged sanctity by the degree of adherence to imposed rules, which inevitably marginalized conversion of the heart. The institution was the will of God, and its members were required to conform to that will. Conformity was bought at the expense of insight; and the vision of God, always fragile in transmission, was easily overwhelmed by noise in the form of rules, devotions, and activities.

And so the sorry story lurches through the centuries until today, when silence is so alien from most of the population that the very mention of it instills fear into the majority of Western human hearts.

There is a fundamental disconnect between a mind that drinks from the well of silence, and one that relies almost exclusively on language. A healthy and mature mind functions organically and focuses away from itself, while understanding that language can only ever be provisional, dualistic, and self-referential. Religious language—or any language—thus becomes distorted when silence is no longer the ground from which it emerges and to which it returns. This relationship between silence, language, and behavior is the same for atheist scientists as religious nonscientists: science is a series of metaphors about what we can measure; religion is a series of metaphors about what we can’t. Both can be useful; both can inflict horrors on the world.

This book seeks to restore the basic common understanding of the essential role of silence in our minds, how it works and benefits our lives, how we can cultivate it and find an unshakable peace and stability. A second purpose of this book is to establish some neutral ground from which reasonable conversation can emerge, a space protected from ideology, especially religious fanaticism and fundamentalism, and the ideology of scientism and rationalism, disproved long ago by mathematician Kurt Gödel, among others. This book has no religious or scientific agenda, though there are stories involving religion because of Christianity’s role in the formation of Western culture, and there is some discussion of the ethics that arise from the work of silence. Rather than trying to “prove” a particular point of view, however, a project that would be merely linguistic, and therefore futile, these pages invite readers to look at their own minds, to reflect on what is happening there, and to understand the essential role of silence for being human, and for living our own truth with one another.

Chapter Two describes a model of the mind, and the process I am calling the work of silence.

Chapter Three examines some of the most commonly-used and mis-used vocabulary relating to silence and the interior life.

Chapter Four looks at the way texts and translations have been negatively affected by the absence of understanding of the work of silence from scholars’ repertoires of interpretation.

Chapter Five talks about the relationship between silence, ways of knowing, and integration (or not) into the ecology, and suggests ways in which urbanization fractures the mind.

Chapter Six discusses the work of silence as it appears in the centuries up to the Edict of Milan (313).

Chapter Seven follows the trajectory of the decline of the work of silence from the desert fathers and mothers to the present day.

Chapter Eight, the conclusion, sketches what a life lived from the wellspring of silence might look like.

To make this work affordable, we have split it into two volumes. Volume 2 will contain the following chapters:

Chapter One will discuss reading texts in general with an eye to the work of silence, and will contain a rather unorthodox reading of the Pseudo-Dionysius.

Chapter Two will suggest ways of reading the Old Testament for its silences so that the subversive Old Testament God may be revealed.

Chapter Three will show how the work of silence appears in the New Testament, particularly in the sayings of Jesus and some of the letters of Paul.

Chapter Four will discuss ways that silence could and should be restored to liturgy, and why.

Chapter Five will be an ecomium on the world behold, which sums up everything that is said in these two volumes and infinitely more.

The human race is sleepwalking into extinction. If we are not to destroy our beautiful planet and our selves with it, then we must learn to live more simply, more carefully, more joyfully. If religion is to be a viable catalyst for this way of living, then it must recover the work of silence. It is my hope and prayer that this book may contribute in some small way to accomplishing these very large goals.

If any man cannot grasp this matter,
let him be idle and the matter will grasp him.

We can live with such clamor, it is true, in spite of what assails
nervous systems attuned to the past, but we pay a price, and do so
at our peril. I think the loss of quiet in our lives is one of the great
tragedies of civilization, and to have known even for a moment the
silence of the wilderness is one of our most precious memories.

The mark of the Divine in things is preserved
by their connection with the world of silence.

THE DRIVER STOPPED HIS battered car in front of the ornate nineteenth-century stone building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Before I could drag my bags out of the vestibule into the icy north wind, he was there, gently lifting them across the dirty snow. He held the car door for me as if his aging sedan were a long black limousine, and I, a Park Avenue grande dame.

We seated ourselves. He asked me if I would like to have the radio on. I declined, but encouraged him to use it if it facilitated our drive to Newark. “It is so hard to find silence in this city,” he replied, and we drove in peace under an intense blue winter sky across the George Washington Bridge into the squalor of New Jersey. To share silence with this unknown, courteous man seemed almost subversive.

We traversed a concrete overpass, whose pylons were sunk into the mud of a ruined estuary, and continued along the desolate turnpike, then veered off at the exit that led to the bleak concrete expanse of airport. The protected space we had made for our selves inside the car was continually assaulted by the wrecked landscape passing by its windows, the ugliness that is visual noise, the destructiveness that is the consequence of noise and the heedlessness of noise that had irreversibly paved and poisoned the environment, that blighted the lives of people who were forced to live and work in it, an apocalypse far beyond the reach of any semblance of restoration.⁵ I might have despaired but for the depth of the unexpected and welcoming silence I encountered that day with that thoughtful stranger.

The choice for silence or noise, for carefulness or carelessness, is ours in every moment. To choose silence as the mind’s default in an accelerating consumer culture—a culture that sustains itself by dehumanizing people through the unrelenting pressure of clamor, confusion, and commodification—is indeed a subversive act.

For the reality is that our lives do hang in the balance: between speech and silence, action and reflection, distraction and attention, extinction and survival. We bear responsibility for maintaining this balance, just as our choices for or against silence can affect the choices of everyone around us, choices that have both material and psycho-spiritual consequences. We seem to have forgotten this responsibility, for in the present time we are disconnected from the wellspring of silence and stillness that is necessary for human beings to thrive. These living waters no longer animate the speech and activity of our minds and bodies, lost as we are in a wasteland of our own making. If there is to be a viable ecology, if we are to remain human, if our lives are to have any meaning, if we are to continue as a viable species, it is essential that we restore the flow that enables our everyday lives to be informed by the riches found in silence.

This thought may provoke profound insecurity, yet the first step toward restoring the circulation between silence and speech is to make our selves at home within the liminal spaciousness of our own minds, in the equipoise of attentive receptivity that opens the flow between these two aspects of knowing, that frees us from the strictures of time and the persecution of our own thoughts. To inhabit this balance, to have the wellspring of silence inhabit us, is the source of true happiness;⁶ there is security only in the apparent insecurity of this spacious silence. This descriptor paradox is but one of many associated with silence, for it is often through entering the gates of paradox that hidden passages to the deep mind become unblocked, enabling us to wait receptively, without striving, without expectation for this or that—the first step in restoring the natural flow between the direct knowledge of our core silence, and our always-interpreting self-conscious rationality.⁷

The world is out of joint not only because, from a cultural point of view, our bodies have been cut off from our minds—just one of many consequences of our having lost our relationship with the natural world—but also because our minds, overloaded with extraneous information, and stressed by the frenetic speed required merely to stay alive in our artificial world, have lost their relationship with the original silence from which, and within which, we evolved; silence that is essential to language, insight, poetry, and music. This loss of communion has gradually eroded our humanity, for what makes us human is not language, tool use, artifice, or self-consciousness—current research is showing us that many animals have these gifts as well—but rather the ability of the human mind to come full circle and forget itself in silence.

For millennia our survival in the natural world depended on the flow between deep silence and our developing self-consciousness.⁸ In our technological age, this flow has been choked off, and in consequence our survival is under threat. Few of us who live in the industrialized societies of the West today have contact with anything that is not a product of our own making. Inner city children, taken to the country, are frightened of chickens, cows, and grass. We harbor within our selves a secret homesickness, yet we seem unable to follow our longing except by creating yet more artifice, which only drives us farther away with its projections of nostalgia and romanticism, of sentimentality and violence, of the glorification of the ugly. Artifice is designed to disguise the reality, the horror of what we have done to our earth and to our selves. Deprivation of nature psychosis is not confined to the theoretical, but is the ugly, insidious, and stultifying fact of our everyday lives.

Yet beneath the crackling static and numbness generated by the phantasms of the age, the greater, hidden part of our mind, the source of authentic life, is still intact—at least for now. Our fascination with wildlife films provides but one example: we are riveted by the beauty and strangeness of animals interacting with their environment and with one another. Their survival depends on intra- and inter-species communication to be sure, but even more on their attentiveness to the silence, listening with every fiber of their being. We are enthralled not only by their uniqueness and their beauty but also by the realization at some deep level that we are beholding our own lost nature. “Watching animals fills some larger, less purposeful appetite in much the way that reading poetry does, or listening to music.”⁹ “When we enter the silence, we return from the exile that is our ordinary, virtual, manufactured state of mind. To become receptive to the natural world is to come home.”¹⁰ Silence is our natural habitat, and the work of silence is, as it were, a process of returning to the wild.¹¹

If we are to recover our balance—and our humanity—we need to unblock the flow of communication between the limited world of our self-consciousness that is linear, finite, two-dimensional, static, and dead,¹² and our core silence—our deep mind—that is global, infinite, dynamic, and multi-dimensional. It is a mistake to say that the former is “rational” and the latter “irrational.” Too often the word rational is used when linear is meant. Both are rational ways of knowing, both are necessary; but the world of self-consciousness is rational only in the artifice of two dimensions, it can only reify; while the rationality of the deep mind is global, holistic, holographic, alive, and perceives directly.

If we are to be human, we need to seek and sustain a flow between these two aspects of knowing,¹³ between deep, multidimensional, interior silence, and the superficial linearity with which we negotiate what appears to be the exterior world, so that the two ways of knowing inform each other.

We need to acknowledge that it is not our discriminating and reflexive self-consciousness that makes us human, but rather the ability to move beyond this self-consciousness to engagement and beholding, the irruption of our core silence into everyday life. Robert Bringhurst notes, “If you divide the world into them and us, and history into ours and theirs, or if you think of history as something only you and your affiliates can possess, then no matter what you know, no matter how noble your intentions, you have taken one step toward the destruction of the world.”¹⁴

Life really does hang in the balance in every moment. It hovers horizontally between the past, which cannot be changed, and the future, which is refulgent with potential but fraught with our projections. It is poised vertically between self-conscious rationality, which is the source of these projections, and deep silence, where we touch reality directly. We need to recover the ability to live at the intersection: in the present moment, energized by the upwelling from deep silence where, in Christian terms, our shared nature with God becomes manifest.

We should not be surprised that we are mired in the circularity of self-consciousness: contemporary Western culture programs us to confine ourselves to the limited capacity of the merely linear, the superficial. As the philosopher Karmen MacKendrick has noted, paraphrasing Wittgenstein with more than a little irony: “Many of us scoff at the ineffable, at the very possibility of ineffability, and assume that whereof one cannot speak, one is simply inadequately educated and articulate—or lying.”¹⁵ James P. Danaher agrees: “Both modes of thought are within our power and both have a logic, which governs their reasoning. To prefer one mode of thought to the exclusion of the other is to limit our rational capacity and leave us ‘half-witted.’”¹⁶

I believe that over time there has been a relentless growth of self-consciousness, leading to increasing difficulties in cooperation [between the hemispheres] . . .

Both hemispheres clearly play crucial roles in the experience of each human individual, and I believe both have contributed importantly to our culture. Each needs the other. Nonetheless, the relationship between the hemispheres does not appear to be symmetrical, in that the left hemisphere is ultimately dependent on, one might almost say parasitic on, the right, though it seems to have no awareness of this fact. Indeed it is filled with an alarming self-consciousness. The ensuing struggle is as uneven as the asymmetrical brain from which it takes its origin . . .

. . . it is as if the left hemisphere, which creates a sort of self-reflexive virtual world, has blocked off the available exits, the ways out of the hall of mirrors, into a reality which the right hemisphere could enable us to understand. In the past, this tendency was counterbalanced by forces from the outside the enclosed system of the self-conscious mind; apart from the history incarnated in our culture, and the natural world itself, from both of which we are increasingly alienated, these were principally the embodied nature of our existence, the arts and religion.¹⁷

In reality, as those who have observed their minds from ancient times have written, and as neuro-biological research has shown, the human mind has paradox and ineffability built into its operating system. It is those who deny that there is anything beyond linear rationality who are lying, for to promote the virtual over the actual is contrary to the very essence of empiricism.

Ancient, late antique, and medieval writers were obsessed with the mind; they described what they observed about the workings of their own minds under the guise of myth, philosophical language, and religious metaphor. If one knows how to decode these texts, there is a remarkable correspondence between their discoveries and those of contemporary neuro-psychologists.¹⁸ These authors tell us that if we choose to learn how to use silence, how to meet it on its own terms and engage it, we will discover that it provides us with the means to move from living less than half a life toward the possibility of living a whole life in freedom, even in the face of efforts by multinationals and false scientism to enslave us.

The ideology that confines thought to linear, self-conscious rationalism is fallacious, as the mathematician Kurt Gödel, echoing Socrates, demonstrated in the early twentieth century, when he published his famous proofs, showing that formal, closed systems, are both incomplete and inconsistent. Gödel noted that his proofs had implications for religion, but if he developed his thought in this direction, written evidence has not been preserved.¹⁹ Gödel lived in a time when religion had already lost most of its credibility; for more than four centuries it had been severed from its source in silence, thanks to pre-Reformation policies, such as those pursued by the Inquisition; and, in academia, the divorce of so-called historical theology from praxis in the seventeenth century. But instead of formal logical philosophical systems, Gödel might as well have been talking about the sterile closed systems that characterize much of contemporary institutional religion, as well as academic theology.

Contemporary neuro-psychology has parallels to Gödel’s findings, and the findings of earlier writers. McGilchrist continues:

In our time each of these [the embodied nature of our existence, the arts, and religion] has been subverted and the routes of escape from the virtual world have been closed off. An increasingly mechanistic, fragmented, decontextualised world, marked by unwarranted optimism mixed with paranoia and a feeling of emptiness, has come about, reflecting, I believe, the unopposed action of a dysfunctional left hemisphere.²⁰

Anselm (1033–1109) expresses the vacuity of such proofs in the Proslogion, after he has completed his own proof of the existence of God:

Have you found, o my soul, what you sought? . . . For, if you have not found your God, how can He be that which you have found and that which you have intellected Him to be with such certain truth and such true certainty? If you have found Him, why is it that you do not feel or experience [sentis] that which you have found? Why, Lord God, does my soul not feel or expereince you if it has found you?²¹

[My soul] looks about, and it does not see your beauty. It listens, and it does not year your harmony. It sniffs, and it does not perceive your odor. It tastes, and it does not know your savor. It reaches out to touch [palpat] and it does not feel or experience [sentit] your softness.²²

There is no vision in Anselm’s reason; and, when he tries to see “beyond reason” he encounters nothing but darkness (tenebras).²³

Anselm’s over-reliance on scholastic method means that he commits the “experience” fallacy; he is as locked into his self-consciousness and as split as any modern seeker after experience as commodity. See below.

The self-conscious mind, which corresponds to what McGilchrist says about the left hemisphere, is very limited in its capacity, and in the number of items it can hold in play in any moment; while, by contrast, the deep mind appears to have an almost infinite capacity. Yet most of us act, react, and rely on the distorted representations of the self-conscious mind when trying to evaluate the state of our relationships with people and the material world—and, if Anselm’s lament over lost experience is anything to go by, the invisible world as well.²⁴

If we cling to this delusion, we shut out the counterpoise of silence that is our true context, not only in the deep mind, but also as the loss of flow from deep mind affects our way of being in the world.²⁵ It is by working with this silence that communication and exchange between the deep mind and the self-conscious mind can be restored, opening us to direct perception, which in turn leads to more profound, contextualized, polyvalent interpretations. But the self-conscious mind wants to hide this fact from us: through its twisted ideology and strategies it tries to delude us that silence is to be avoided at any cost, even if that cost is the loss of our humanity; at some level it seems to be afraid that we might realize that the would-be emperor has no clothes on. To choose to live the fullness of our humanity is costly; but so is learning to swim or any new skill. In the cacophonous world we inhabit, the self-conscious mind would have us believe that it is much easier to yield to the noise and drown.

This temptation to surrender and drown, to yield to the “whatever” attitude, is the wrong sort of letting-go.²⁶ Instead of setting us free, it opens us to exploitation by a consumer culture. It demands that we disbelieve any information that cannot be proven in the laboratory, stated in linear terms (preferably in buzz words or slogans), or sliced and diced into bits and bytes. It preaches scientism, a utilitarian, mechanistic, materialistic gospel of repetition, which is a distortion of true empirical knowledge. It locates the center from which we draw energy in the hamster cage of self-consciousness, a closed system infiltrated and compromised by those who control the media: hype is might. We are urged to believe that frenetic activity (preferably shopping to the accompaniment of the canned caterwauling and thumping that passes for music, or participating in violent computer games, or being swamped in a cultural environment infused with orgiastic sexual images) leads to happiness. As Richard Grant has noted:

People today are greedy. They have a lot of food, and a lot of things, but it doesn’t satisfy them. They venerate nothing they have. They can never be satisfied . . . [;] the [Berber] nomads call themselves the Free People. They have no identity cards. They pay no taxes. They want no services. They think the rest of us have been tricked into giving up our freedom, that we have become lost from the most important things in life: nature, the open sky, the sun, the moon and the rain. They are Muslim, but they still pray to these things.²⁷

In order to sustain the inflated short-term high these activities may give us, we find ways to feed off our own adrenalin—we can become addicted to our own adrenalin—by yet more consumption; by immersing our selves in events that provoke mass hysteria; or by taking drugs. The self-conscious mind and the ambient culture want to make us fear silence, to disbelieve the doubts, intuitions, and warnings that sometimes break through from a deeper, global awareness that repeatedly attempts to awaken us to our peril. By contrast, the surrounding culture prefers to subject us to unrelenting noise so that we literally cannot hear ourselves think.

Under the guise of empiricism, a consumer culture creates the illusion that the skewed and limited perceptions and subjective interpretations of our self-consciousness that we call experience are the only reality. We search for ever more thrilling experiences. This search becomes the sole focus of our lives: experience becomes an idol, a god. If we buy into this illusion, the market can influence both what happens to us and how we interpret these events.²⁸ The exaltation and absolutizing of experience forces us to relate to everyone and everything as objects to be manipulated and exploited, distorting them to serve our prejudices and reinforce our consumer-oriented feedback loops.