 Email
 Print |
"Because God whispers"
Being silent means more than just holding your tongue. It means listening for the softest, most subtle sound of all - the sound of the soul.
I’m not listening. “Hurry up, sir. You have just half an hour to reach the hotel. After that the whole island becomes silent.”
Sweating, the man grabs my bags and rushes to a throbbing taxi. I trudge after him, exhausted from the trip and the sultry heat that has enveloped me. When I boarded the plane in Amsterdam 20 hours earlier, it was snowing in the Netherlands.
I arrive at the hotel just before midnight, after a harrowing ride during which the driver does his best to evade the monsters. Literally. It’s March 6, 2008, the night the Balinese celebrate New Year’s Eve. Each village constructs its own monsters—some several metres high—which are ritually carried through the streets.
The next morning I awake to a deafening silence. Only the birds and crickets seem unaware that today is the day of silence. It’s “Nyepi,” the first day of the Hindu new year, when no one talks, travels or works. It’s a day of silence, prayer and reflection that enables the Balinese to start the New Year with spirits renewed.
From my balcony I see a lush green valley and the blue glitter of the Indian Ocean beyond. It’s my first day of silence for a couple of years and I’m excited.
My thoughts wander to my first silent retreat in the Tuscan hills. After a week of silence, I wanted to remain silent forever. I never wanted to open my mouth again to utter words that so rarely reflect reality. Never before had I felt such intense contact with everything around me—precisely because I hadn’t uttered a word. It was as if all my senses were wide open, as if I were tasting ice cream, watching a sunset or seeing someone smile for the first time.
Annemieke Rodenburg, from the Netherlands, is an apostle of silence. For seven years, this inspired fortysomething woman has been organizing silent retreats for those under the age of 28. She never fails to see the magic. “After five days of silence, young people often have the feeling they have developed a deeper friendship with the other silent participants than with friends they’ve known for 10 years.”
As odd as it sounds, Rodenburg says words often create distance in relationships. “If people no longer use words to shield them, they shed their masks. You get to the point that you’re no longer trying to get attention from those around you. You step out of your patterns and stories and make contact with a layer in which everything and everyone is connected.”
Young people clearly long for this, as evidenced by the avid interest in the silent retreats organized by the Own Way Foundation (in Dutch, Stichting Eigenwijze, eigenwijze.org), the organization Rodenburg founded in 2000. By January, summer retreats are already booked solid.
It’s difficult to get those who’ve tasted the beauty of silence to return to the world of noise and masks. The American eco-activist John Francis has witnessed this first-hand. Once he experienced the beauty of keeping his mouth shut, he didn’t open it again for 17 years—at least not to talk. Francis’ decision was prompted by an environmental disaster in San Francisco Bay. When two oil tankers collided there in 1971, Francis initially decided to stop using motorized transport and then stopped using words. Between 1973 and 1990, he made only one exception: to tell his parents how much he loved them.
During those 17 years, Francis discovered not only the beauty of silence, but its effectiveness. “Because I didn’t speak, everyone paid attention,” he says. Francis studied environmental science and even taught silence as a guest lecturer at the University of Montana. He also became a local celebrity who regularly toured for lengthy periods to “speak” with everyone and anyone about important issues, using meaningful looks, gestures and—in extreme cases—pen and paper.
The interesting thing about Francis is he led a relatively “normal” life and didn’t withdraw from his surroundings as most people do who choose to be silent for any length of time. In fact, Francis had girlfriends who, he says, thought it was “rather nice that I kept my mouth shut.”
The South African-born spiritual teacher Isaac Shapiro also experienced how inspiring it is to be around people who are silent. Shapiro is a student of the Indian Advaita (“non-duality”) teacher Ramesh Balsekar who, in turn, is a student of the late Indian spiritual teacher Ramana Maharshi. “According to Ramana Maharshi, silence is the only way to convey real knowledge,” says Shapiro. “Maharshi often sat in silence for days on end at this holy mountain in India, absorbed in bliss in the silence of his own being, not speaking to anyone. And when people came around him, their minds didn’t function. His silence was so profound that all their troubles would disappear, and I mean severe troubles like losing children, divorces, all kinds of problems that can happen in life.”
Francis once joked that the decision to hold his tongue was born out of compassion for his fellow humans. “I talked a lot,” he confesses. Like Francis, I also experienced how much people appreciate it when you hold your tongue. At the end of my silent retreat in the Tuscan hills, I received a letter from one of the participants: “Dear Tijn, it was nice meeting you and great not talking to you.”
When you’re silent, you give others the space to be silent too, and to be themselves. That may well be the greatest gift you can give. When you’re silent, you can truly be there for someone. In the book Planetwalker: How to Change Your World One Step at a Time, Francis writes he was never really there for others. He didn’t even hear them. “Most of my adult life I have not been listening fully. I only listened long enough to determine whether the speaker’s ideas matched my own. If they didn’t, I would stop listening, and my mind would race ahead to compose an argument against what I believed the speaker’s idea or position to be.”
1
2
3
4
NEXT >>
view as a single page
| Tools:
Discuss
| Email
| Print
| RSS
| Weekly Newsletter Save/Share: |
as the well known quote goes:
"silence is golden" ... little did we know.
be the change you want to see in the world ... today!
posted by clmareydt on 10/ 7/2008 5:19 pm