Silence

I have been contemplating Silence. Me, a lover of words, the lover of my own voice, discovering inner volumes that are preserved only when I do not speak of them. I have grown up in a culture that values ‘talking it out,’ and ‘speaking your piece’. I have spent years using the spoken and written word to process much of what I experience, and certainly the vast majority of my spiritual growth has seen the light of day through conversation. And now I am learning the value of allowing those experiences to settle internally, on their own, in silence. This, it turns out, is big.  

I recently read ‘Of Water and the Spirit’ by Malidoma Somé, who writes of his initiation into the Dagara people of West Africa. The traditional indigenous life of the Dagara is quickly disappearing and he writes to preserve it. Their culture is chock full of everyday magic and yet their language has no word for the supernatural. “The closest we come to this concept is Yielbongura – the thing that knowledge can’t eat. This word suggests that the life and power of certain things depend on their resistance to the kind of categorizing knowledge that human beings apply to everything.” This struck me very deeply. So did the Dagara shaman’s custom of keeping his medicine private. He does not speak of it to anyone except when teaching his son.  To teach it otherwise would be to diminish it’s power.  So when I speak of my experiences – particularly the deep spiritual awakenings I have encountered over the past 5 years, I take them out of the realm they actually exist in and try to understand them through the vastly limited world of human language, which is ultimately a construct of the mind. I force the infinite into the finite and try to make sense of it there. I am learning to simply leave it be, where it is, in silence. And so, intact, it integrates into the silent part of me, the subtle body, where the breath presides, where words have no place.  

In Jewish tradition, the Divine/God really has no name, for it is that which is beyond naming. On another level, the Divine has a name but it cannot be spoken – this is YHVH or Yud Hey Vav Hey. There are no vowels so Rabbis throughout the ages have struggled with how it would be pronounced. The letters themselves are simply a rush of air, the sound of the breath - the place where man connects to the Divine – where words have no place. 

Malidoma Somé says, “Human words cannot encode meaning because human language has access only to the shadow of meaning.”  I am approaching a deep understanding of this. What I am learning now of myself, of the nature of reality, of the nature of the Divine can no longer be brought into casual or even purposeful conversation. It is too big; it doesn’t fit. So I expose myself to it, I feel into it, I know it…and then I put it down and walk away. Or I go to sleep, which seems to be my body’s preferred method of integration these days. In the realm of Spirit, I have given up the ideas of categorization and conclusion – tidy notions that allow me to work comfortably within the grid of pattern and safety. There is no growth for me there; after 48 years in this body, my external conversation around it has grown stale. It no longer serves. And where the words fall short, I enter a place of internal stillness, a vast cathedral of space where everything and nothing exist simultaneously, wordlessly. 

I find my new-found silence a great relief.  I experience myself as more calm and peaceful. Somé says it perfectly. “Peace is letting go – returning to the silence that cannot enter the realm of words because it is too pure to be contained in words. That is why the tree, the stone, the river, the mountain are silent.”