The Poetry of Intentional Silence (part 4)

Intentional silence facilitates a moving into the more spacious unknowing of the deeper layers of mind and allows for our egoic self-consciousness to fall away into the background.  We progressively move into the vastness of consciousness and what the eco-psychiatrist Shoma Morita called ‘peripheral’ awareness or consciousness, leaving traces that will emerge in our experience. From silence one begins to wonder how misleading it is to think that one can see into the true nature of life by looking inside the self, instead of a mind that dwells in no one place.  Intentional silence hones intuition and the realization that our authentic nature is threaded in Nature.  Poetically framed, we become more silent and able to hear more. It is to understand intuitively the Christian-Hindu mystic Abhishiktananda, when he likened enlightenment or ‘satori’ to a realisation that ‘the centre is as truly everywhere as it is in myself’.  

The wind, one brilliant day, called
To my soul with an odor of Jasmine…

(Antonio Machado)

To make poetry of intentional silence, is to invite restoration and revitalization through Nature.  Bringing momentary self-awareness inside the poetic pulse of Nature is a very different psychological movement to the self-conscious mind taking a nature hike in order to ‘interact’ with nature. The gradual recalibration that occurs in intentional silence encourages the emergence of a poetic living somewhere between promoting and demoting self simultaneously.  In psychological terms, the steady practice of genuine silence serves a subtle shift in attention away from the usual self-referent stream of consciousness towards an awareness rooted more intimately in Nature. It approximates towards taitoku, the attainment of knowing through one’s body to grasp reality as it is.  We are remedying our innate favoring of cognition over poetic experience, empty moment by empty moment.  

Silence is where we hear something deeper than our chatter and where we speak something deeper than our words.  Contemplative traditions bear witness to a consciousness available in us that is not exhausted by historicity nor by time. We may call it mysticism, intuition, samadhi, but it is perhaps only that aspect of psycho-spiritual life to which the monk bears witness.  

As the late Zen teacher Toni Packer had it, “Ego, in its most general terms, is resistance to what is.”  The most important things in life are deeper than what we are able to express but are the soulful plains that the poet wanders and tries his/her best to describe.  There is a wise poetry of passivity to Zen that enables things to come about less by what is done than by what is not done.  If silence facilitates the poetry of life in its unbounded abundance to emerge it is, like Zen, truly the resting place of all that is essential.

‘Whoever you are:
tonight I want you
To take one step
Out of your house…

(Rainer Maria Rilke)

In this increasingly technological world we often think we have to live perpetually by our limited ingenuity rather than what is authentically true and natural in us.   Technology promises us everything except for the judicious use of it.  We are taken out of ourselves most of the time via distraction, demands to reach new levels of complexity or achievement and the crushing impact of cultural noise.  It’s wonderful to be able to know at the swipe of a screen what happened two seconds ago at the Olympics, or what the latest covid positivity rate is in Singapore today. But we can’t begin to make sense of the hypercomplexity of our failing world unless we have a larger, more spacious canvas on which to put it.  

I think all of us know we are happiest when we forget the time, or lose ourselves in a beautiful piece of music, a movie, or an intimate encounter with someone we cherish.  The ability to come full circle and forget ourselves is uniquely human and perhaps why we’re still drawn to the poet's hints of underlying hidden realities of life.  We behold that we’ve lost something of our innate natural intelligence in our striving for progress and the phenomenal world.  Especially in the West, we’ve somehow got caught up in this endless cycle of noise and information that we don’t know how to stop.  And we all intuitively know our outer expression is only as good as our inner silence.  Once, I attended a private interview with the famous Tibetan Buddhist teacher of a dear friend, on his rare and brief visit to the Uk from distant lands.  He sat patiently as in my unacknowledged excitement, anxiety and small mind projections, I babbled on for about ten unbroken minutes about my spiritual practices and psychotherapy work.  At a rare pause for breath, he finally interjected with a question; “Dan, what do you do to relax?”  I told him I felt most relaxed and ‘in gentle flow’ when surfing.  “Surf more”, he replied, before waving me out of the door.

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