The Lost Art

Plants and animals are really good at it. But somewhere along the way we forgot how to practice the lost art of stillness.

            All life-forms require periods of rest to reset and restore their natural processes. In winter plants pull energy back into their cores and wait for the cold to pass. Animals balance periods of intense exertion with periods of retreat and repose. Human beings, on the other hand, never stop engaging in a dangerous and debilitating experiment – living without rest.

            Sure we sleep at night. But not long enough. Most Americans are sleep-deprived. The results are devastating. When you are sleep-deprived you crave more fattening and sugar-laden food, hence gaining weight. Your risk for diabetes spikes. Then your sex drive plummets. Wounds and injuries take longer to heal, which is bad timing because you are far more likely to be hurt or injured. You look older. You feel older. You have trouble thinking and concentrating. Your mood plummets leaving you prone to anxiety, paranoia, and depression. Your memory falters. Your immune system weakens. And to make matters worse, all of this occurs simultaneously compounding your misery. Who knew pillow time was so life-saving. Literally.

            And this: 20% of the 35,000 Americans who die every year in auto accidents are killed by sleep-deprived drivers. That’s 20 people slaughtered every day because someone didn’t get enough sleep.

            But it goes beyond that. At heart, sleep-deprivation is a symptom, not a cause. It is a symptom of a delusion – the delusion that my self-worth is tied to my work-output; the idea that my value as a human being is measured by how busy I am. This lie drives us like a lash into feverish and often futile activity – activity for activity’s sake. I’m not sure what we’re running from, or toward for that matter. But I do know this: we have forgotten the virtues of idleness.

            To give ourselves over to idleness seems a sin. At least that’s the message we’ve received from the dominant culture. Let’s consider the alternative. What would happen if we embraced periods of absolutely unstructured, free-form idleness? Two hundred years ago the British Romantic poet William Wordsworth wondered the same thing. He explored the idea in this beautiful paean to idleness called “To My Sister.”

It is the first mild day of March:
Each minute sweeter than before
The redbreast sings from the tall larch
That stands beside our door.

There is a blessing in the air,
Which seems a sense of joy to yield
To the bare trees, and mountains bare,
And grass in the green field.

My sister! ('tis a wish of mine)
Now that our morning meal is done,
Make haste, your morning task resign;
Come forth and feel the sun.

Edward will come with you;--and, pray,
Put on with speed your woodland dress;
And bring no book: for this one day
We'll give to idleness.

No joyless forms shall regulate
Our living calendar:
We from to-day, my Friend, will date
The opening of the year.

Love, now a universal birth,
From heart to heart is stealing,
From earth to man, from man to earth:
--It is the hour of feeling.

One moment now may give us more
Than years of toiling reason:
Our minds shall drink at every pore
The spirit of the season.

Some silent laws our hearts will make,
Which they shall long obey:
We for the year to come may take
Our temper from to-day.

And from the blessed power that rolls
About, below, above,
We'll frame the measure of our souls:
They shall be tuned to love.

Then come, my Sister! come, I pray,
With speed put on your woodland dress;
And bring no book: for this one day
We'll give to idleness.

            When you scratch beneath the surface of this poem you find the reason idleness matters: it is only in a state of idleness that our soul opens up to the Universal Soul. We are restored, fully, to our divine nature and reconnected to the divine source coursing through all things only when we stop this ceaseless activity and production. Sure, work and industry matter, obviously. This isn’t an either/or consideration. We’re talking about balance. Beautiful, sweet, restorative idleness sustains us every bit as much as our work does – one perishes without the other.

            My parents were born in the 1920s. They grew up in a world without television, commercial air travel, telephones, computers, or the internet. They were better at idleness than I am. When I was a boy growing up in Ventura, we would often drive up the Maricopa Highway and stop alongside the North Fork of Matilija Creek just outside Ojai to spend the day doing nothing. Just being. Letting the sound of the falling water wash away all of the busyness of the week. Opening. Releasing. Reorienting to the sacred rhythms of the natural order – our own natural order. Feeling the sun on our skin. Tracing the dappled shadows of sycamore and oak arching over the boulders, red-tailed hawks and condors spiraling in the cerulean blue above. The quiet thrum of wind through the grasses and the ghosts of Chumash keeping vigil in this chaparral cathedral under the warm dome of midday. You know, all of the important things you miss when you are busy.

            The ancient art of meditation is the intentional practice of idleness and stillness. In any moment, wherever we are, it is possible – in fact it is necessary – for us to shift into stillness and slip beneath the incessant waves of the thought stream to enter fully into this now moment, as it actually is, without judgment or conceptual clouding. It's what our cat spends most of his life doing. It's what trees do all the time. Stillness is the warp and woof of life. When we banish it from our lives, we are not yet fully, really alive. If we listen closely we are called, each of us, to our sacred source at the heart of every moment, revealed only in the lost art of stillness.

           

Sound and Silence

Like every other folk singer, I’ve played some unusual shows. Stuck in the corner of a restaurant’s empty back patio, playing for no one, while the crowd inside watched football. Set up alongside a marathon route, playing for an endless stream of somewhat preoccupied runners. Performing on a cruise ship’s main stage with a pick-up band as the elegant room tossed and lurched in a violent storm. But of all the countless shows I’ve played, this was the oddest – a concert at a week-long silent retreat at The Chopra Center.

            The Chopra Center for Wellbeing is one of the world’s premier mind-body healing and educational centers. Nestled on the grounds of the Omni La Costa Resort and Spa in Carlsbad, California, the Chopra Center offers a full menu of spiritual and physical healing programs, as well as off-site retreats at Asilomar, Sedona, Costa Rica, and beyond. Built over twenty years ago on the groundbreaking work of Drs. Deepak Chopra and David Simon, the Chopra Center has changed countless lives and cultivated a bevy of teachers and facilitators, and I am honored to call myself one of them. Since I’ve entered into partnership with the Center I’ve offered two events, with two more on the calendar for this summer and fall. Mostly they’re lectures, or all-day retreats. But the one I did last month was different.

            I arrived a few hours early on the afternoon of the concert. I set up and waited. I drank some herbal tea. A palpable quiet permeated the space. As the start time approached, in they came, alone, or in twos and threes. No one said a word. They were coming from massages, Ayurvedic treatments, or meditation sessions. Many were wearing robes. It was their first full day of silence. We greeted each other with eye contact, nods, and welcoming smiles. When everyone was seated, the retreat leader introduced me and I began.

            As Trappist monk Father Thomas Keating said, “Silence is the language of God. All else is a bad translation.” And as any musician knows, music is the art of deciding exactly how to ruin the silence. Still, I was bound to do my best to provide a worthwhile soundscape for these silent retreatants to enjoy. I thought long and hard about the set list. I plotted every tempo flow, key change, and lyric theme. I kept it simple. I kept it clean. I kept it quiet, and I leaned on songs that had a restful glow at the center – nothing too fancy or busy. I played my most soulful and reflective originals, and a lot of great covers with the same broad, expansive, contemplative vibe.

            After my first song they applauded. O.K. good, so they were allowed to clap. That helped – a welcome dose of reciprocity. Then by the third song, something began to open up, like a rose blooming, revealing a hidden beauty and blush. They were leaning into me and I into them. We were holding each other up. To some extent that happens at every show, well, the good ones anyway. But this was different. This was more urgent, hungrier, more penetrating. It’s as if with their power of speech gone, their sense of hearing expanded. I’ve never felt the presence of an audience more deeply. I’ve never felt more heard. They hung on every note, every word. Both of us, on either side of the guitar, were daring vulnerability, and with vulnerability comes intimacy.

            In some ways, this concert at the silent retreat was the natural culmination of the trajectory my musical career had taken for years. I’d played in loud rock and roll bands in college, my Les Paul like a lit fuse in my hands, the din of amps and drums ringing in my ears for days, (and robbing me of a good chunk of my hearing in middle age). Later, folk duos dominated, the tone of unadorned acoustic guitars proving richer and more enthralling than a rack of effects pedals through an amp on eleven. Eventually, I left all that behind to focus on solo performance. Something about emptying out the sound and leaving more space called to me. I’ve noticed that about my songwriting too – my songs keep getting shorter and simpler. Every time I remove an element, the impact increases. Less really is more.

            So when I entered into partnership with The Chopra Center, I jumped at the chance to bring my guitar and perform. It wasn’t even my idea. I pitched myself as a lecturer, a teacher of Asian philosophy, and a meditation facilitator. But I guess they checked out my website and found out about my other life. I was surprised when they asked. And of course I said yes. It made perfect sense.

            On each day of the silent retreat one of the five senses was featured. The first day was sound – that’s where I fit in. The next day was visual – they were painting. The day after that was touch – they were crafting personal altars. And so on. I thought it was brilliant. And I was thrilled to be a small part of it.

            The composer Claude Debussy said that “Music is the silence between the notes.” The best musicians understand that they are always doing two things: playing music, and playing silence. Without the gaps between the notes, music would just be one long, horrible wail. As jazz master Miles Davis put it, “It’s not the notes you play, it’s the notes you don’t play.” I’ve often noticed this as I’ve collaborated with countless musicians through the years, some truly great, and others still learning. One of the quickest tells of who has experience and who doesn’t is how silent they are. The player who’s always noodling during rehearsal, or who over-plays every song, filling every gap with noise, is the beginner who mistakenly believes that musicianship is synonymous with flash and flurry. The seasoned pro, on the other hand, is as silent as a mouse during rehearsal, and during the song, they disappear into the pocket so deeply that you don’t know where they end and the music begins. A poor musician plays their instrument. A great musician plays the song.

            The same rule applies in public speaking, whether you’re a politician, a preacher, or a professor – all various forms of story teller. And as master storyteller Ira Glass, host of Public Radio’s “This American Life” puts it, “In radio you have two tools. Sound and silence.” The best speakers understand this. If you never stop and take a beat, and instead pummel your audience with a never ending slurry of words, numbness sets in. Your speech, no matter how eloquent, loses its power. If you take a pause, on the other hand, and fill the room with sudden silence, the gravitational field shifts. Everyone in the room looks up and locks eyes with you. What you say next is offered up on a silver platter and savored.

In the right measure, silence and sound work beautifully together. Sound conveys from without while silence draws up from within the treasures of our own insights and awareness that otherwise lay dormant, submerged, and hidden. Sound gives us the gifts of others. Silence gives us the gift of ourselves.

The Power of Silence

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 13^th 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.