There is just so much noise.
We are limitless in our capacity
to fill the silence with so much clutter that even God can no longer hear
himself. If there is a God I mean. Why don’t we debate that again. That sounds fun.
Humans invented writing about
5,000 years ago. But we’ve been talking for far longer than that. No one knows
when humans first formed words with our mouths. 50,000 years ago? 100,000 years
ago? But one thing’s for sure – once we started, we never stopped. That’s a lot
of chit chat.
It cannot be denied that language
and its capacity to externalize thought has been a tremendously transformative
development in human evolution. The art of language has in many ways unlocked
the cage door and released us into wider and wider freedoms. Yet it is also
true that words trap us in limited and limiting definitions, squeezing the
uncarved whole of the experiential realm into lifeless categories and concepts.
Language promises freedom, then becomes another prison. Words obscure as much
as they reveal. The more we talk, the more we feel the essence of this
mysterious existence slipping away.
From Concepts to
Conflict
In many creation myths, primal
man is given the task of naming the world. In Genesis 2 Adam gives names to all
the animals. In the Mayan Popul Vuh,
God goes through several iterations of proto-humans before he arrives at the
final model, one that could finally remember and say his name. The ability to
allot a word to every little thing in creation seems primary to the formation
of human consciousness. But this great gift costs us something. By naming the
world we also ascribe hierarchy, setting all things in opposition to each
other. This is especially evident when we divide humanity into ethnicities,
races, and tribes. These are of course useful concepts, to a point. But they
too readily facilitate conflict. The words we call ourselves, and the words we
call each other, like flags, set us into unavoidable strife. When we identify
more with our tribe than with the whole of humanity, when we lose our capacity
to empathize and see our unity, we descend into ethnocentrism, racism, hatred,
genocide, and war.
Twentieth century teacher Jiddu
Krishnamurti put it this way: “When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or
a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see
why this is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of
mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it
breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong
to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he
is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.”
It is in this same spirit that
John Lennon sang, “Imagine there’s no countries, it isn’t hard to do, nothing
to kill or die for, and no religion too.” Language, concepts, and categories
kill.
The Illusion of
Self
Once we cut the whole of the
world into parts, we didn’t stop there – we turned the blade on ourselves. When
human consciousness became conditioned to hierarchical multiplicity rather than
unity, it’s only natural that self-awareness would calcify into ego, becoming
the ruling monolith of our lives. Words like I, me, and mine create a
fiction – a phantom of enormous power. As Spiderman reminds us, with great
power comes great responsibility. But the ego has yet to embody that wisdom.
Instead, the ego exerts most of its energy on self-preservation,
self-aggrandizement, and criticism of others. It takes responsibility for
nothing. If everybody else is wrong then I am, by default, right.
Everybody’s a critic. Emmet Fox
wrote that, “Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.” By pointing out
everything that’s wrong with everything and everyone around us, we construct
solidity. We know who we are by knowing what we are against.
And then there’s our meticulous
tallying of every perceived slight. In his book Grace and Grit philosopher Ken Wilber writes that, “The ego…is kept
in existence by a collection of emotional insults; it carries its personal
bruises as the fabric of its very existence. It actively collects hurts and
insults, even while resenting them, because without its bruises, it would be,
literally, nothing.” It’s important to
bring this process out of the shadows of unconsciousness and into the light.
Notice how we use our perceived woundedness and victim status as glue to hold
our fictional self together. What if we let go of our tired grievances? Who
would we be without our resentments and self-righteousness? For many people,
that question is simply too frightening to consider. But the answer is simple.
We would be free.
The Power of
Silence
There is an alternative to this
madness. And it is nearer to us than our jugular vein.
The first thing we need to do is
stop. Just stop.
Stop clothing every experience,
every passing impression, every iota of awareness in language. You don’t have
to name everything. You don’t have to reduce every dynamic and nuanced
experience to a concept. You don’t have to compare and judge everything on some
arbitrary and self-serving hierarchical scale. Let it be. Learn to be still.
There is a Zen Buddhist saying: “Don’t seek enlightenment. Just get rid of all
your opinions.”
Meditation is a good idea. By
practicing the art of silence and no-thinking, we learn to slip beneath the
waves of our incessant thought stream and descend into the depths of our own
stillness. Each of us carries an infinite boundlessness within us. It goes by
various names in the world’s many wisdom traditions – Atman,
Buddha-consciousness, the Kingdom of Heaven. But they all agree. It is not
somewhere out there. It is within us.
It is what we are.
We do not have to struggle to become
something different. We have only to let fall away the hindrances that inhibit
our awareness of our primal oneness. “God is not attained by a process of
addition to the soul,” wrote 13th century Christian mystic Meister
Eckhart, “but by a process of subtraction.” What we must subtract is the busy
mind and its addiction to language and concepts. What we do is so much more
important than what we think. Who we are is so much more important that what we
say. Instead of delivering a learned treatise on theology or arguing yet again with
the Pharisees and Sadducees, Jesus knelt and washed feet.
And didn’t say a word.
