The Way of Silence

by David Steindl-rast

  Remember what we said earlier about our peak moments, our glimpses of meaning, and our spontaneous exclamation, “This is it!” The Christian perspective betrays itself by emphasizing the first word of this little sentence: This is it! Enthusiasm for the discovery that “God speaks,” that everything is Word of God, makes us exclaim again and again, “This is it!” and “This is it,” whenever we are struck by another Word that reveals meaning. Not so Buddhism. Buddhism in turn is struck by the one Silence that comes to Word in so great a multitude and variety of words. “This is it,” Buddhism exclaims; and this and this and this, every one of all these words, is always it, is always the one Silence. We need Hinduism to remind us that what really matters is that this is it—that Word is Silence and Silence is Word—therein lies true Understanding. The perspectives complement one another.

  By appreciating other perspectives we learn to broaden our own, without losing it. In fact, our understanding of our own tradition is likely to deepen through contact with others. Christians, for instance, may see the mystery of the triune God reflected in the pattern of Word, Silence, and Understanding. God, whom Jesus calls “Father,” can also be understood as that motherly womb of Silence from which the eternal Word is born, before all time, as by God’s self-understanding the Silence comes to Word. The Word, the Son, in turn, obediently carries out the Father’s will and in doing so returns to God through that Understanding which is perfect love, the Holy Spirit.

  Remember the metaphor of St. Gregory of Nyssa for the relationality of the Trinity. In fact, from all of the Cappadocian Fathers, the great theologians of the fourth century, down to the Shakers in the nineteenth century, Christian tradition has conceived these inner-trinitarian relationships as a great Circle Dance. Christ, the great leader of the cosmic dance, leapt from the heavenly throne, “when all things were in deep silence,” and, dancing, leads all creation in the power of the Holy Spirit back to God.

  1. Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (New York: Image, 2009), 153.

  2. See Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim: Early Masters (New York: Schocken, 1961), 236.

  Chapter Three: The Mystic in All of Us

  When religious traditions speak of the divine life within us, they refer, implicitly at least, to our high points of wakeful awareness, to our mystical experiences. Yes, let us not shy away from that thought. We are all mystics.

  —From Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer

  The monk in us is very closely related to the child in us or, if you want, to the mystic in us—and we are all meant to be mystics. We do a great disservice to mystics by putting them up on a pedestal and thinking of them as a special kind of human being. The truth is that every human being is a special kind of mystic, and that creates a tremendous challenge for each one of us to become precisely that mystic we are meant to be. Here, I’m taking mysticism in the strictest sense as the experience of communion with Ultimate Reality. All of us are certainly called to experience this communion. And there’s no one and never will be anyone and never has been anyone who can experience Ultimate Reality in the same way in which you can experience it. Therefore, you are called to be that special kind of mystic that only you can be.

  Now when I say that this has something to do with the child in us, I mean that there is in the child a longing to find a meaning, an openness to meaning which tends to be lost or at least overshadowed by our preoccupation with purposefulness. I should say right at the outset that when I use these two terms, purpose and meaning, I’m by no means playing off purpose against meaning or meaning against purpose. However, in our time and in our culture we are so preoccupied with purpose that one really has to bend backward and overemphasize the dimension of meaning; otherwise we will be lopsided. So if you find an extraordinary amount of emphasis on meaning, it is only to redress the balance.

  In the child there is certainly a tremendous curiosity about how things work and a tremendous thrust toward purposefulness, and that is the only thrust that we tend to develop. The typical circumstance of a child when seen in public these days is one of being dragged along by a long arm, while whoever is dragging the child is saying, “Come on, let’s go! We don’t have any time. We have to get home (or somewhere else). Don’t just stand there. Do something.” That’s the gist of it. But other cultures—many Native American tribes, for example—had an entirely different ideal for education: “A well-educated child ought to be able to sit and look when there is nothing to be seen,” and “A well-educated child ought to be able to sit and listen when there is nothing to be heard.” Now that’s very different from our attitude, but it is very congenial to children. That’s exactly what they want to do—just stand and look and be totally absorbed in whatever it is that they are looking at or listening to or licking or sucking or playing with in one way or another. And of course we destroy this capacity for openness toward meaning at a very young age; by making them do things and take things in hand, we direct them very exclusively toward the purpose level.

  Maybe I should say just a word more about purpose and meaning and the way in which I use these two terms, but I don’t want to impose my definitions on you. I’d rather invite you to think about a situation in which you have to carry out a particular purpose and see what the inner dynamics are and then compare this with a situation in which something becomes meaningful to you. When you have to accomplish a particular purpose, the main thing is that you have to take things in hand. If you don’t know what it’s all about, somebody has to show you the ropes, as we say, so you know how to handle the thing. You have to take things in hand, to handle the matter, to come to grips with the situation, to keep things under control—otherwise you are never quite sure that you are going to accomplish your purpose. All this is very important for dealing with the situation in which a particular purpose has to be accomplished.

  Now think of a situation in which something becomes meaningful to you. What is there to grasp? What is there to keep under control? That is not the idea. You will find yourself using expressions in which you are perfectly passive or at least more passive. “Responsive” is really the word, but you are more passive than in a situation in which you are accomplishing a purpose. You will say, “This really did something to me.” Now you are not the one that keeps things under control and handles them and manipulates them; instead the experience does something to you. “It really touched me,” or if it is very strong, “It hit me over the head!” or, “It swept me off my feet!”—something like that. That’s when something becomes meaningful to you. So what really happens is that you give yourself to it, and in that moment, it, whatever it may be, reveals its meaning to you. Again let me stress, this is not an either/or proposition. The two have to go together, but certainly in order to find meaning in our purposeful activities we have to learn to open ourselves, to give ourselves to what we are doing. And that is typically the attitude that the child takes.

  Now let me go on in greater depth to what Abraham Maslow called “peak experiences,” those moments in which meaning reveals itself to us—and we know it. In order to say more about this, it is again necessary that I don’t talk about something that’s unrelated to your own experience, particularly since the peak experience in its matter, in its content, is so very evasive. In order to be able to speak about it at all, we’d either have to have a poetry session or a music session or something like that.

  The term “peak experience” is a well-chosen term suggesting, for one thing, that it is somewhat elevated above your normal experience. It is a moment in which you are somehow high, or at any rate higher than at other moments. It is a moment, although it may last quite some time; even then that long time, say an hour or so, appears as a moment. It is always experienced as a point in time, just as the peak of a mountain is always a point. Now this may be a high peak or a low peak; the decisive thing is that it comes to a peak.

  So you look over your day or over your life or over any period of time, you see these peaks sticking out, and
they are points of an elevated experience, points of an experience of vision, of insight if you want. That is also important to the notion of a peak. When you are up on top of a peak you have a better vision. You can look all around. While you are still going up, part of the vision, part of the horizon, is hidden by the peak you are ascending. But once on the peak, you get an insight into meaning; there’s a moment in which meaning really touches you. That is the kind of insight that we are speaking about now. It’s not finding a solution to a concrete package of problems; it is simply a moment of limitless insight. You are not setting any limits to your insight.

  Try to think now of a moment of this kind and make it very concrete, very specific. No generalities will help us here. It doesn’t have to be a gigantic peak—they are very rare in one’s life. But an anthill is also a peak, so anything that comes to a peak will do for our purposes. So just try and remember very concretely an experience in which something deeply touched you, an experience in which you were somehow elevated above a normal level. I will make a little pause so that I myself can also think of one, and then we will look a little bit into the structure of these experiences. And, if these experiences are, as it appears to me they are, the epitome of the mystical experience, then even in our little anthill-type peak experiences there will have to be found the typical structure of monastic life, as I will go on to demonstrate. So please try now and focus on that one peak experience.

  I said that the content of these experiences is very evasive. You might even have to say, “Gee, nothing really happened.” Well, that is a profound insight, because if you allow nothing really to happen, that’s the greatest mystical experience. But as you talk about it you will find yourself inclined to use expressions such as, “Oh, I just lost myself. I lost myself when I heard this passage of the music,” or, “I just lost myself looking at that little sandpiper running after the waves; as soon as the waves come the sandpiper runs back and then the sandpiper runs after the waves.” You lose yourself in such an experience, and after you lose yourself for a little while, you are never quite sure again whether the waves are chasing the sandpiper or whether the sandpiper is chasing the waves or whether anybody is chasing anybody. But something has happened there and you really lost yourself in it.

  Paradoxes in Any Mystical Experience

  1. I’m carried away and I’m present where I am. I lost myself and I found myself, truly myself.

  And then, strangely and paradoxically—and this is exactly what we are aiming at; we are trying to find the paradoxes that must necessarily be in any mystical experience—you find that you would also say that during this experience in which you lost yourself you were for once truly yourself. “That was a moment when I was really myself, more so than at other times. I was just carried away.” It’s a poetic expression. There are certain things in life that cannot be expressed in any way except poetic expressions, so these expressions also enter into our everyday language. But then you find again the paradox, because about the very same experience of which you say, “I was carried away,”…you may also think, “I was more truly in the present than I am at any other time.” Like most of us, most of the time I would have to say that I am not really fully present where I am. Instead, I’m 49 percent ahead of myself, just stretching out to what’s going to come, and forty-nine per cent behind myself, hanging on to what has already passed. There’s hardly any of me left to be really present. Then something comes along that’s practically nothing, that little sandpiper or the rain on the roof, that sweeps me off my feet, and for one split second I’m really present where I am. I’m carried away and I’m present where I am. I lost myself and I found myself, truly myself.

  2. When I am most truly alone I’m one with all.

  I go on to another paradox. I suppose that many of you will have chosen an experience in which you were alone—a moment alone in your room or walking on the beach or out in the woods or maybe on a mountaintop. In one of those experiences you find that even though you were alone—and, paradoxically, not so much in spite of being alone, but because of being so truly alone at that moment—you were united with everything and everybody. If there were no other people around with whom you could feel united, you felt united with the trees, if there were any, or with the rock or with the clouds or with the water or with the stars or with the wind or whatever it was. It felt as if your heart were expanding, as if your being were expanding to embrace everything, as if the barriers were in some way broken down or dissolved and you were one with all. You may check this out by finding in retrospect that you didn’t miss any of your friends at the peak of your peak experience. A moment later you may have said, “Gee, I wish that so-and-so could be here and experience this beautiful sunset or could see this or could hear this music.” But at the peak of your peak experience, you weren’t missing anybody, and the reason is not that you had forgotten them, but that they were there or that you were where they were. Because you were united with all, there was no point in missing anybody. You had reached that center, if you want, of which religious tradition sometimes speaks in which everybody and everything converges.

  All right, there is a paradox that when I am most truly alone I’m one with all. You can also turn this around. Some of you may have been thinking of an experience in which part of the peak experience was precisely that you felt one with all in an enormous group of people. Maybe it was a liturgical celebration, maybe a peace march or demonstration, a concert, or a play—some gathering where part of your tremendous enjoyment was that you felt that everybody there was just one heart and one soul and that everybody there was experiencing this same thing. Incidentally, this may not at all be objectively true. You may have been the only one who was really turned on like that, but you experienced it as if everyone were turned on in the same way. But even in this situation we turn the paradox around. When you are the most one with all, you are really alone. You are singled out as if that particular word of the speaker (if it’s some lecture that turns you on) were addressed to you personally, and you almost blush. You think to yourself, “Why is he talking about me? Why is he singling me out?” or, “This particular passage of this particular symphony was written for me and it was composed for me and it was performed for me; such a tremendous, lavish performance, and it is all for me, right here.” You are singled out; you are perfectly alone. And we come to see that this is no contradiction. When you are really alone you are one with all—even the word alone in some way alludes to that. It may just be a mnemonic device to remember this, but there may be more behind it—all one, one with all, truly alone.

  3. To find the answer, you have to drop the question.

  I’d like to draw out a third paradox, which in some respects is the most important one, and see again if it checks out with your own experience. When the peak experience hits you or lifts you up or whatever it does to you, in a flash of insight everything makes sense. Now this is a very different thing from laboriously finding the answer to some problem, which is the usual way we think that finally everything could possibly make sense. We think we’ll get the answer to this problem, but the moment we have the answer to this problem, several others arise. So we think, okay, we’ll follow this other problem up to its end; we believe that we can hand ourselves along from question to answer, new questions arising to the next answer, and to the next answer, and then finally we might arrive at the final answer. But what finally happens is that this chain is a circle and we go around and around and around; the last answer raises the first question and so it goes on.

  In your peak experience, somehow intuitively you become aware of the fact that to find the answer, you have to drop the question. Something knocks you over and for a split second you drop the question, and the moment you drop the question the answer is there. You get the impression that maybe the answer was always trying to get through to you, and the only reason it couldn’t get through is that you were so busy asking questions.

  Why should this be? Why should this happen in our
peak experience? There seems a grotesque disproportion between cause and effect. I was doing nothing but looking at a sandpiper running after the waves and running away from the waves; I was doing nothing but lying awake and listening to the rain drumming on the roof; why should suddenly everything make sense?

  There’s another way of trying to approach this. You might say, if you really try and check out the experience, that something teases you into saying yes. You see the sandpiper and something in you says a wholehearted yes, or you hear the rain and your whole being says yes to it. It’s a special kind of yes; it’s an unconditional yes. And the moment you have said an unconditional yes to any part of reality, you have implicitly said yes to everything; not yes to each specific thing, but yes to everything that otherwise you departmentalize into good and bad and black and white and up and down. You are not distinguishing. You just say yes, and all of a sudden this whole thing falls into a pattern, and you have said yes to the whole pattern.

  The third paradox lies at the root of what we call obedience. The first thing that we think of is that you do what somebody else tells you to do. That’s a time-honored and very helpful ascetic means toward the end, but to get stuck in this would be totally wrong and totally fruitless. If it is just a matter of replacing my self-will with somebody else’s self-will, I would rather have my own self-will; it is much closer to home. The whole idea is to get beyond self-will altogether, because self-will is the one thing that gets between us and listening. All our questioning, all our frantic looking for solutions, is just an expression of our little self-will over and against the totality. The moment I drop that, give it up, the whole comes through to me and gives itself to me. I’m not so intent on grasping it and grabbing it and holding it when I give myself to it.